Ralph Stock


Ralph Stock is a German game designer. He is best known for his video games Mad TV and Emergency.

Life and career

Early years (1977–1992)

Around 1977, Ralph Stock stumbled upon a Commodore PET at the home of a family friend and had his first chance to dabble in computer science. Hamurabi, a resource-management game, spurred his fascination with video games and their development. In the early ‘80s, at the age of twelve, Ralph Stock built his first computer, a Sinclair ZX81, from an assembly kit. He used this computer for his first experiments in programming. At the age of fifteen, Stock developed his first game for the Commodore 64 with a group of friends from school: an adventure game called Philosopher’s Stone. Stock was still at school when the game was published and commercially marketed by Kingsoft in 1984. While still finishing school, Stock worked on Bozuma: Mystery of the Mummy and East vs. West: Berlin 1948, finally graduating in 1988. Bozuma was published by Time Warp Software GmbH, a Rainbow Arts label. Stock continued to work with Softgold/Rushware, first as a freelancer, later in a permanent role as a programmer and producer at Rainbow Arts. He also developed his own project, Mad TV, at Rainbow Arts; laying the foundations for its indirect successors. After working as a producer and game designer at Rainbow Arts, Ralph Stock became the chief producer and head of development in 1990.
For Stock, like many other game developers in the post-Amiga era, Rainbow Arts was a place to test his ideas before founding his own company. By his own statement, developing the German-language versions of computer games by Lucasfilm Games, TSR, and SSI, and interacting with game designers from around the world, like Chris Roberts and Richard Garriott, was pivotal in Stock's career as a game designer and producer.

Promotion Software and Sixteen Tons Entertainment (1993–present)

In 1993, Ralph Stock founded the company Promotion Software GmbH in Tübingen, Germany. With his company he developed promotional games such as Victor Loomes, Tom Long: The Time Adventure and Jeff Jet: Adventure Infohighway. In 1994, he released his first political edutainment game: Der rasende Reporter. In cooperation with Ikarion, Stock developed other titles like Mad News and Caribbean Disaster in the style of the humoristic simulation game, Mad TV. Musician Chris Huelsbeck composed the soundtracks for these and other games by Ralph Stock.
Stock also worked with board game authors like Reiner Knizia, creating digital versions of board games like Keltis, Einfach Genial, and Heckmeck.
In 1997, inspired by Command & Conquer, Stock invented a rescue-simulation game, Emergency: Fighters for Life - a real-time strategy game “turned into something positive”, which was released in 1998. According to Gamesindustry.biz, the Emergency series remains ″one of the most important German game titles to this day″. Under the label Sixteen Tons Entertainment, Ralph Stock developed several other games in Tübingen like Gotcha!, The Show, and sequels in the Emergency game series. In 2009, he founded a subsidiary studio in the Media City Babelsberg. Games developed there were published under the name Quadriga Games up until 2012. Since 2017 the studio is based in Berlin.

Social commitment

Stock works on gamification, games for health and games for digital education through the division of Promotion Software GmbH specialized in applied games and shares his experience at trade fairs. In addition to his work as a game developer, he attended the International German Forum on Health and Innovation at the request of Angela Merkel, which was held at the German Chancellery. Stock also speaks at events like the Learntec conference, the Didacta trade fair for the education sector, the Bizplay trade conference, the Serious Games Conference, and German Dev Days.
Ralph Stock is also invited to judge competitions. In 2019 he was a judge at the Animated Games Award, a contest held by the Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Films.

Recognition

Ralph Stock is regarded as one of the leading developers of digital games for the health and education sectors.
His most famous game, Mad TV, is a whacky television station simulation game published by Rainbow Arts in 1991. The game received positive reviews from the trade press and inspired various official and unofficial sequels.
Stock's Emergency HQ, released in 2018 for iOS and Android, is the first game in the Emergency series to be designed as a purely free-to-play game. PocketPC magazine describes it as a successful implementation of the Emergency game principle: “In conclusion: a strong classic re-issued for the mobile gaming market”.
His game Emergency 2016 was presented as an application example at the 10th European Conference on Game Based Learning by the University of the West of Scotland.

Games

Awards