David Mullich is an Americangame producer and designer best known for creating the cult classic 1980 adventure gameThe Prisoner, producing the 1995 adaptation I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, and developing many games in the Heroes of Might and Magic franchise. With a career spanning more than twenty-five years, Mullich worked not only for some of the first video game publishers, but went on to work for some of the biggest game companies of today.
Career
Mullich's work in video games began at the birth of the video game industry in 1978 when his COBOL professor at California State University, Northridge hired him to work as a clerk and programmer at Rainbow Computing, one of the first computer stores to open in the Los Angeles area. Sherwin Steffin, who was a frequent customer at the store, recruited Mullich to develop games for his new start-up game publishing company, Edu-Ware Services. Upon graduating in 1980 with a degree in computer science, Mullich joined Edu-Ware as a full-time employee, and as his first assignment created the ground-breaking adventure game The Prisoner. Mullich went on to design most the Edu-Ware's innovative line of adventure games and role-playing video games, and programmed the company's EWS3 graphics engine as well as many of its educational programs. As the company grew, he was promoted to Vice President of Software Development and managed other programmers coding both entertainment and educational products designed by him and other members of the design staff. After five years, Mullich and several other key Edu-Ware employees left to form their own company, Electric Transit, which specialized in first person 3D games and became Electronic Arts’ first affiliated label publisher. In 1987, Mullich joined Walt Disney Computer Software, where he produced video games based upon Disney characters, films, and television shows with external developers and licensees. Four years later he joined developer Interactive Support Group to create driving and action games for fifth generation console systemsCD-I and 3DO. Mullich next went on to become development director at game publisher Cyberdreams, where he produced award-winning games in collaboration with notables such as science fiction authorHarlan Ellison, fantasy artist H.R. Giger and horror director Wes Craven. While participating in a game design panel at the Computer Game Developer’s Conference, Mullich met Jon Van Caneghem, founder of veteran game developer New World Computing. Van Caneghem hired Mullich in 1997 to lead the thirty-person development team for Heroes of Might and Magic. Mullich ran the team behind the best-selling strategy game franchise for five years, including the development of Heroes of Might and Magic III, named by video gamer magazine in 2005 as the 25th best game of all time. With the financial demise of parent company The 3DO Company, Mullich left New World for software publishing giant Activision to produce Star Trek themed real-time strategy games and the ' role-playing game based upon the Half-Life 2 engine. When his contract with Activision concluded, Mullich was hired by fellow Cyberdreams alumni Jamie Ottilie to be the development director of his mobile game publishing start-up, Abandon Mobile. During the filming of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, Mullich was a well-known member of the J.R.R. Tolkien on-line fan community, being a news reporter and film messageboard moderator for the website and, under the pseudonym Ancalagon The Black, publisher of "The Complete List of Film Changes," documenting the differences between the films and the books. The hero Sir Mullich in ' is named after him.
