Ken Birdwell
Moby ID: 22341
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Ken Birdwell worked for Valve Corporation as a software engineer from the company's inception until October 2016.
Although he was recruited by Valve co-founder Gabe Newell as employee #1 before they had even picked out a name for the company, Ken considers his start date to be in October 1996 when Valve got their first drop of the Quake codebase and he could do his part towards pushing PC gaming in the direction Valve thought it should go. Ken was friends with T.K. Backman growing up, and introduced his brother Ted Backman to Valve when Newell asked Ken to find a concept artist for the company.
Before Valve, Ken contributed to a wide range of projects. These include in-circuit emulators (CodeTap), 3D surface reconstruction (Surfgen), 3D prosthetics design tools (Shapemaker), and satellite networking (Microsoft's Broadcast PC). He also wrote one of the first graphical shells for multiplayer online games for Compuserve's Sniper.
Ken has a BFA from Evergreen State University, where he studied painting, photography, and animation. Ken designed and implemented the skeletal animation system and many other engine components for Valve's debut game, Half-Life.
Credited on 22 games
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Shared Projects
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Frequent Collaborators
People- 21 games with Scott Lynch
- 21 games with Erik Johnson
- 21 games with David Riller
- 21 games with Doug Lombardi
- 21 games with Yahn Bernier
- 21 games with Dario Casali
- 21 games with Randy Lundeen
- 21 games with Gabe Newell
- 21 games with Jay Stelly
- 21 games with Robin Walker
Companies
- 21 games with Valve Corporation
- 11 games with Havok
- 9 games with Epic Games Tools LLC
- 6 games with Sierra Entertainment, Inc.
- 6 games with Activision Blizzard...
- 6 games with Vivendi Games (UK) Limited
- 5 games with Activision Blizzard France SAS
- 5 games with ESDigital Games Ltd.
- 5 games with Electronic Arts GmbH
- 5 games with Electronic Arts Czech...
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