American computer game designer
Kelton Flinn is an American computer game designer who is a major pioneer in online games. He is a co-founder (with his University of Virginia classmate John Taylor) of the seminal online game company Kesmai, which they began in 1982. His best known title is the first graphical multi-player online game offered by a major service, "Air Warrior" (1987).
1970s university mainframe games.
Like Marc Blank, Will Crowther, Don Daglow and Gregory Yob, Flinn and Taylor were key innovators in the 1970s university gaming culture, where students played for free on college mainframe computers. Flinn took advantage of his pursuit of an advanced degree (a PhD in applied mathematics) to build a long series of games across his undergraduate and graduate school career. Most students lost all access to computers after graduation in the days before personal computers were invented, but Flinn's extended years of study gave him the chance to build a large body of major works.
Key games Flinn and Taylor created during this time include:
Founding of Kesmai.
In 1982 Flinn and Taylor founded the game developer Kesmai, and began working with CompuServe to offer multi-player games on a fee-per-hour basis. But once they began porting their code it turned out that the code that ran for free on the university's computer was hugely inefficient, and they burned $100,000 USD in computer time on CompuServe's system in three days before concluding they needed to rewrite their engine.
Kesmai's major titles include:
In the 1990s Kesmai was acquired by News Corp, which later sold it to Electronic Arts. The studio was disbanded, but EA continued to use the Kesmai name as a brand.
References.
 ;templatestyles src="Reflist/styles.css" / ;