John W. Ratcliff

John W. Ratcliff (born 1961) is a game developer best known for creating 688 Attack Sub and SSN-21 Seawolf. [1][2]

For the episode of The Office, see A.A.R.M.

Biography

John Ratcliff began his career as a software developer writing educational software as well as computer programs supporting cardiovascular research at the St. Louis University Hospital. Together with John A. Obershelp in 1988 he developed the Ratcliff/Obershelp pattern-matching algorithm also known as Gestalt Pattern Matching to improve educational software.[3]

In conjunction with game publisher Electronic Arts in 1987, he helped create one of the first 256 color MCGA games, 688 Attack Sub. Several years later, he followed up with a sequel entitled SSN-21 Seawolf, and in 1997 released the game Scarab.

His most recent released title was as lead engine programmer for PlanetSide, published by Sony Online Entertainment. Ratcliff is also credited in Car & Driver (1992) and MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat (1995).

Ratcliff continues to be an active member of the game development community and has been a contributing author to such magazines as Dr. Dobb's Journal. In 2006, he worked for AGEIA, where his role was to provide open source tools and technology to facilitate the integration of physics into games. Ratcliff is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences, with a focus on computer technology and algorithms.

Ratcliff also founded the discussion forums, which he called Atheist Apologetics Research Ministry in parody of Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry (CARM) and which, despite its name, did not promote atheism or any particular philosophy, but rather sought to allow greater latitude in discussions than did CARM's forums. He turned the forum over to another user in December 2006.

Personal Life

He married Lori Mcghee and had 2 children: Johnny Ratcliff and Lauren Ratcliff. He adopted his son Doug Ratcliff while married to Lori. He then married Terry Ratcliff and had another daughter, Alex.

Works
gollark: I mean, they might be reading your crypto secrets out of RAM, and... do you just assume that *some* of them won't be evil and just rerun the computation if the result don't match, or something?
gollark: If you don't trust your compute nodes, you basically can't do anything.
gollark: > The Internet Computer is a decentralized cloud computing platform that will host secure software and a new breed of open internet services. It uses a strong cryptographic consensus protocol to safely replicate computations over a peer-to-peer network of (potentially untrusted) compute nodes, possibly overlayed with many virtual subnetworks (sometimes called shards). Wasm’s advantageous properties made it an obvious choice for representing programs running on this platform. We also liked the idea of not limiting developers to just one dedicated platform language, but making it potentially open to “all of ’em.”How is *that* meant to work?
gollark: ... "internet computer"? Oh bees.
gollark: https://git.osmarks.tk/mirrors/rpncalc-v4

References
  1. 1994 GameByte review
  2. 1998 "History of Sub Sims"
  3. Ratcliff/Obershelp pattern recognition
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