who be you be?

About Simon Carless.

wha?
I'm Simon Carless - pleased to meet you. I'm a publisher, editor and writer, a former videogame designer, and a net.music.label boss on the side. I originally hail from South London, England, but am nowadays living and working in the Bay Area of California, alongside my wife Holly and our trusty badger-hunting dachshund Rollo.

editing/writing?
I'm currently a Group Publisher at Think Services, encompassing game products such as the Maggie award-winning Game Developer magazine and the double Webby award-winning Gamasutra website, the top information sources for professional video game developers - plus the GameSetWatch editor weblog. I also act as publisher for the Dr Dobb's series of products for programmers, including the Dr Dobb's Journal magazine and website. Finally, I function as Chairman of the yearly 'Sundance Festival for games', the Independent Games Festival, which holds its awards at Think Services' Game Developers Conference yearly.

Previously to that, I was an editor at techgeek site Slashdot from early 2003 to late 2004 under the moniker of, uhh, Simoniker, working on both the main page and especially the Slashdot Games section, which I edited solely. But I've also been writing for various paper-based magazines and websites since the early '90s, recently Wired magazine, PC Gamer UK, and Official Xbox Magazine, and not-so-recently 'Amiga Format' and 'PC Format' - I reviewed public domain software and contributed music tutorials for the latter two.

I also wrote/edited a book, Gaming Hacks, for leading technical publishers O'Reilly & Associates. The book, billed as '100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools' related to videogame hardware and software, includes input from a host of expert game-related contributors, was released in late 2004, and Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow commented of it: "I can't remember when I've had more engrossing fun with a technical book... the perfect mix of informative, enjoyable and fascinating."

It's been translated into French (as Jeux Video a 200%), and Finnish (as Pelaajan Niksikirja), and since then, I've also contributed to the Chris Kohler-edited Retro Gaming Hacks pseudo-sequel, and O'Reilly's Make Magazine.

digital archiving?
In late 2003, as a personal project, I set up the LegalTorrents website, to show that P2P (and specifically BitTorrent) can be used for positive, legal distribution as well as exploiting the inevitable piracy angle. The site features Creative Commons-licensed movies, music, books, and software, and currently transfers around multiple terabytes a month of data and around 500,000 pieces of media per year, including literally millions of songs. The site is featured prominently in the book BitTorrent For Dummies, as well as having been mentioned by Wired News, Slashdot, USA Today, and Reuters.

I've also been working with the non-profit Internet Archive in San Francisco, the gigantic digital archive, firstly as a technical advisor for their DMCA exemption requests regarding archiving classic software, but more recently as a curator for all user-uploaded audio and video collections, as an admin to help users with their problems, and as the founder of the Net Labels collection (almost 7,000 freely available music EPs/albums) and the Game Videos archive (over 3,000 in-game movies, press kits videos, machinima, and replay videos preserved for posterity).

videogame design?
My former career - up to early 2003, I spent most of my time as a full-time videogame designer, firstly in my native England, and more latterly out in Silicon Valley. I started out as one of the first designers hired at Kuju Entertainment, then called Simis, and worked on 'Terracide', a 'Descent'-style shooter for the PC that was one of the first 3D-accelerated games, and on 'Tank Racer' for the Playstation, a post-pub knockabout, uhh, tank racing title. After working on the early stages of 'Lotus Challenge' for the PS2/Xbox, I moved to San Jose and worked on two titles for Infogrames/Atari, including 'Superman' for Xbox, a sekrit PS2/Xbox prototype, and my favorite, 'Looney Tunes Racing' for the Playstation, a kart racing game with some fun gameplay mechanics that was pretty well-received.

net music/demoscene stuff?
Some of you who come to the site know me best from running the net.music.label Monotonik. After a few years in the Commodore Amiga-based 'demo-scene' as a musician, I set up Mono in 1996 to release the best open-source electronic .MOD tracks for free download, from great musicians I knew who weren't getting enough exposure. We now release .MP3s, and have put out more than 300 geektronica releases over the 7 years we've been online, with hundreds of thousands of our freely distributable tracks downloaded. We were invited to exhibit at Ars Electronica festival held in Austria in 2000, have been featured in 'Spin', 'Urb', and a host of other magazines, played on radio stations from Slovenia to Australia, and were part of the Webby-nominated Spamradio site in 2002. As mentioned above, I've also helped out the netlabel community in general by setting up the Internet Archive Netlabels collection as part of my work there.