Phantom Software and Jeff Jacob

My name is Jeff Jacob and this is the one of the most basic web sites you will ever find. It was created over a series of years and is a storehouse of my many projects and of course my resume.

Phantom software was created back in 1992 (yes I've been doing this sense I was 12) and started as a shareware distribution company offering over 50 different shareware video games and software that was sold mostly to fellow students. Yes back before the internet and the BBS people would pay upwards of $10 for a free shareware demo on 5.25 inch floppy.

Around 1993 I got on my first BBS and although I'd been writing video games for years in Atari BASIC and QWBASIC this was a new world. I quickly got into an old game called "Legend of the Red Dragon" it was interesting because it supported add-ons. The first game published by Phantom Software was called "Harvester's store" and it was an add-on for LOTRD.

Unfortunately much like my first game engine that was written for a 286 in pure assembler and had 3d faked in much the same way Wolfenstein 3D did, it ran in amazing 320 by 200 with 256 colors.

Unfortunately with the invention and of SVGA and no clear assembler standard for addressing these cards it became very difficult to support higher quality graphics, or at least very difficult for a kid of age 14. So I got out of computer graphics and moved on to text games. Over the next 4 years I went about programming the various classic Atari games like Centipede, Breakout Frogger and of course PONG using ASCII and ANSI graphics in every language I could get my hands on. It was a great way to learn new languages and keep my skills up. In 1999 I started for on recreating the Classic BattleTech before it was even classic. Unfortunately as working more than one full time job can put a dent on your free time this project has always remained a dream of mine. A lot of design work has gone into it and I even managed to get a team of six programmers, artists and musicians together in 2005 to work on the game. It was going relatively well except for the fact that we all had full time jobs and school. By mid July with no funding this group too fell apart.

I've drafted many other idea's for games including "Horsemen the Apocalypse" and more recently "Dreamword" a full 3d puzzle game like MYST or Sam and Max. It's a spare time project I've never had time to finish as even if I finished the plans I'd need funding (or may more free time) to do the graphics. It was designed as a budget game but still bigger than my budget.

That pretty much brings me to where I am now. I've gone to school and received my Bachelor of Science majoring in Computer science with a minor in creative writing, a skill I've used to proof some story ideas for games. Mostly I was glad to take a graphics class in my last year as it gave me a chance to really dig into OpenGL for Mac, windows and LINUX. I wrote several graphics applications and even a game for cross platform and started work on a game engine. I've also tried to keep up to date with DirectX and am very excited to someday learn DirectX 10, but for now I'm busy working and planning my wedding.