Bernie Freidin

Bernie Freidin is a Software Design Engineer for Bungie. He started working for them 10 days before Bungie closed its Chicago office and moved to the Land of Microsoft.

For Halo CE Bernie Freidin was in charge of the Halo rasterizer, that is, the piece of code that executes all the shaders, effects, and graphics rendering. I was also responsible for various other aspects, such as decals, bitmap importing, animation compression, lens flares, and detail objects.

Bernie Freidin programing history in his own words:

''I've been obsessed with 3-D graphics programming since around the time that Ultima Underworlds came out. That was my first experience; my mouth hung open while I tapped the computer screen for about 20 minutes, mumbling, "Is this real?"''

''Unfortunately, I didn't know much of the math behind it, so I programmed pretty stupid stuff (in Pascal on the Macintosh) from around age 12 through most of high school. At that point, my brain suddenly developed, and I started writing software texture mappers and Doom engine clones. Let me just say that everything I know about computers is self-taught, either from books, the Internet, or my own research (mostly the latter).''

''Freidin: While I was in college, in 1996, I worked on an arcade game called Raider at Leaping Lizard. It never made it out the door. I also worked on Spec Ops at Zombie back in 1997, which I'm quite proud to say made it on the "Top 20 Worst Games of All Time" list in one of the computer game magazines ... I don't remember which one. So, I've gone from one of the worst games of all time to one of the best. What will I do to top that?!''

Gameography

 * Marathon gamma: 1994
 * Spec Ops: Rangers Lead the Way (1998), Ripcord Games
 * Halo: Combat Evolved (2001), Microsoft Game Studios
 * Halo 2 (2004), Microsoft Game Studios

Interviews

 * X-Box.com Halo The Makers