Jeffery L. Briggs
Born (1957-03-10) March 10, 1957
Florence, Alabama, U.S.
Occupation(s)Video game composer, designer
Known forCivilization series

Jeffery L. Briggs (born March 10, 1957) is the American founder and former President and CEO of Firaxis Games, a video game developer based in Hunt Valley, Maryland, United States. He was previously a game designer at MicroProse but left that company in 1996 along with Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds to form Firaxis Games.

Career

Briggs holds a Doctorate in Musical Composition and Theory from the University of Illinois. Briggs' composition teachers included Samuel Adler, Warren Benson, Joseph Schwantner, Donald Freund, and John Melby. His career began in New York City where he composed music for various events, including dance and theater groups. He took a job as game editor and designer at West End Games where he worked until 1987. He then joined MicroProse Software, where he served as designer, writer, composer and producer, becoming the company's Executive Producer and, finally, its Director of Product Development.

Briggs's music first appeared in a 1989 MicroProse release Sword of the Samurai. Following that, most MicroProse games featured his work. Before working in software entertainment, Briggs' music had already received performances by ensembles internationally in Paris' Pompidou Centre ("Ecliptic"), New York City's Avery Fisher Hall ("Comets"), and in the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Illinois ("Adjectives," "Firaxis", "Chimera," "Aurora," and others) as well as various smaller venues in New York and other cities throughout the United States. In 1996, he was awarded US Patent 5,496,962 for a "System for Real-Time Music Composition and Synthesis" used in a product called "CPU Bach".[1]

Briggs left MicroProse in 1996 to co-found Firaxis Games. In a 2004 interview he commented his decision: "Civ II had just come out and MicroProse had been purchased by Spectrum HoloByte. [...] Things had gotten pretty bad. By that time I was director of product development and they were asking me to do things and tell people things that I just didn't like. I decided that I could do a lot better job running the company than they could, so I left."[2] Briggs then led the design of Civilization III and oversaw the expansion of the company into a major developer of strategy computer games. He also co-designed Colonization and Civilization II, as well as composing much of the original music in Civilization IV. He negotiated the acquisition of Firaxis Games by Take Two Interactive in 2005, became its Chairman in spring of 2006, and left Firaxis in November of that year.[3]

In 2009, the Westfield Symphony Orchestra presented the world premiere of his composition "Celebration for Orchestra".[4]

Games

Name Year Credited with Publisher
Sword of the Samurai1989composer, writerMicroProse
Silent Service II1990composerMicroProse
Railroad Tycoon1990composerMicroProse
Covert Action1990composerMicroProse
Lightspeed1990composerMicroProse
Knights of the Sky1990designerMicroProse
Civilization1991composer, writerMicroProse
Hyperspeed1991composerMicroProse
Gunship 20001991composerMicroProse
F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter 2.01991designer, composerMicroProse
Task Force 19421992composerMicroProse
Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender1992composerMicroProse
F-15 Strike Eagle III1992composerMicroProse
Darklands1992composerMicroProse
Command HQ (Macintosh)1992composerMicroProse
The Ancient Art of War in the Skies1992composerMicroProse
Super Strike Eagle1993composerMicroProse
Railroad Tycoon Deluxe1993composerMicroProse
Pirates! Gold1993composerMicroProse
Colonization 1994designer, composerMicroProse
Civilization II1996producer, designer, composerMicroProse
Gettysburg!1997designer, programmerElectronic Arts
Alpha Centauri1999composer, executive producerElectronic Arts
Alien Crossfire1999composer, executive producerElectronic Arts
Antietam!1999designerFiraxis Games
Civilization III2001designerInfogrames
Civilization III: Conquests2003designerAtari SA
Pirates!2004designerAtari SA
Civilization IV2005composer2K Games
Civilization IV: Warlords2006composer2K Games

Awards

In 2003, Briggs was named software "Entrepreneur of the Year" by Ernst & Young, and in 2004 he was named "CEO of the Year" by Baltimore SmartCEO magazine.[5]

He was awarded the Bernard and Rose Sernoffsky and Louis Lane Prizes for Music Composition at the Eastman School of Music (1978, 1979), the Haimsohm Prize for Musical Composition at the University of Memphis (1980),the ASCAP Award for Young Composers (1984), and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship (1986).

References

  1. ↑ US A system for automatically generating musical compositions on demand one after another without duplication ... in a variety of genres and forms so that concerts based on generated compositions will have a varied mix of pieces incorporated therein. 5496962, Meier, Sidney K. & Briggs, Jeffery L., "System for Real-Time Music Composition and Synthesis", issued 5 March 1996
  2. ↑ Conditt, Jessica. "Joystiq". GameDaily. Retrieved 2012-01-28.
  3. ↑ Bozeman, Bobby (2014-11-16). "Developing Civilization". TimesDaily. Tennessee Valley Printing Co. Retrieved 2018-05-10.
  4. ↑ "Westfield Symphony Orchestra". Westfieldsymphony.org. Archived from the original on 2011-10-07. Retrieved 2012-01-28.
  5. ↑ Firaxis' Jeffery Briggs named CEO of the Year, by Gamespot Staff on October 11, 2004
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.