Tony Warriner

Tony Warriner (born 19 October 1968, Malton) is a British video game designer, programmer and co-founder of Revolution Software.

At a young age he started playing adventure games, when they were just text adventures.

He wrote his first game, Obsidian, while he was at school and sent it to Artic Computing for consideration.

Artic's director, Charles Cecil, loved the game and convinced him to license it to Artic, and then to join Artic as a programmer.

Warriner then came to work for Artic (1985).

The cassette tape game was released for the Amstrad CPC in 1986.

His next game, which he wrote together with Adam Waring, was Ultima Ratio, a vertical scrolling arcade shoot 'em up, set in space above the earth.

Like Obsidian it exhibits colorful rooms that were typical for his early designs.

At Artic he wrote, together with Adam Waring, Ultima Ratio which was published in 1987 by Firebird.

In the same year he got a job at Cecil's Paragon Programming, where games from US publishers were converted to European platforms.

When Cecil had left to work for U.S. Gold, Warriner started doing 8-bit programming for games.

Because Artic was already coming to an end, the game was finished for Telecomsoft and published in 1987 by Firebird.

In the same year he got a new job at Paragon Programming, started by Cecil, and at Paragon various games were converted to other platforms.

When Cecil went to work for U.S. Gold, Warriner drifted around for some time, doing 8-bit games programming here and there.

One of the games he created in this period was Death Stalker.

The arcade adventure is set in a mystical world of ghouls, spells and wizards, in which the player must find the lost key of darkness and descend to the deeper dungeons.

In 1988 he created Death Stalker, published by Codemasters.

In the same year he joined Cascade Games, where he worked on 19 Part One: Boot Camp, Arcade Trivia Quiz, and Arcade Trivia Quiz Question Creator.

Death Stalker, with music by David Whittaker, was published by Codemasters in 1988.

In 1988 Warriner joined Cascade Games, where he worked on 19 Part One: Boot Camp (1988).

In 1989 Warriner moved to Bytron Aviation Systems based in Kirmington, Lincolnshire, where he wrote software for the aviation industry, David Sykes was his fellow programmer.

In March 1990 Cecil, Sykes, Noirin Carmody and Warriner founded Revolution Software.

For their first game he wrote an innovative engine, called Virtual Theatre, which enabled the gameworld to be more active and dynamic than was previously possible.

The game's title became Lure of the Temptress and it was published in 1992.

It was followed by a string of other critically and commercially successful adventure games, including Beneath a Steel Sky, the Broken Sword series, In Cold Blood and Gold and Glory: The Road to El Dorado.

Beneath a Steel Sky and Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars are often both referred to as one of the best adventures of all time, appearing on numerous "top" adventure game lists and receiving several awards and nominations.

Warriner (with others) received a nomination for Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2004 and for Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars - The Director’s Cut at the British Academy Video Games Awards in 2010.

With Steve Ince he began to explore new ideas and in 2006 he founded 720games to publish their own gaming projects.

In the same year he presented his game Blocster, a single player puzzle game.

Besides his work on new editions of Beneath a Steel Sky and the first two Broken Sword Games (2009/2010), he worked on various games that weren't developed by Revolution, including A Christmas Carol and Sticky Blocks.

In 2023 Warriner published a memoir of his career in the games industry to the present time, entitled - Revolution: The Quest For Game Development Greatness.

His current project is an Action-adventure game game called, Wormhole Dungeon.

In his youth Tony Warriner started playing adventures when they were just text adventures.

Games like the original Unix Adventure, Zork and the Level 9 games were rich experiences for him and would inspire his future career.

Still at school, he learned how to program and he started to write a game in assembly code.

He succeeded to complete a game by himself, failed all his exams in the process, but he managed to get a job with the game.

That job was at Artic Computing, a company where Charles Cecil, upcoming co-founder of Revolution, had already been working for a couple of years during his studies.

Warriner lived close to where Artic was based (Brandesburton, near Hull) and, about seventeen years old, he had sent in his game for consideration.

In the game, Obsidian, the avatar moves around in a jet-pack to fix power terminals in a space station, while picking up items and avoiding the defenses of the station.

Cecil, who considered it to be brilliant, convinced him to have it published by Artic.