Seumas McNally
Seumas McNally (pronounced Shem-Ess) (February 10, 1979 – March 21, 2000) was a Canadian video game programmer and designer. He is best known for indie games, notably "DX Ball" and "Tread Marks", which won the Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival (IGF). The award was posthumously renamed in his honour when he died at age 21 of Hodgkin's lymphoma, shortly after having received the award himself. Career. Seumas McNally released his first arcade game "DX Ball" in 1996. Helicopter shooter game "Tiger's Bane" was then released in 1998, a year after Seumas formed Longbow Digital  Arts, where he took on the role of lead programmer and worked together with his father Jim (game designer), mother Wendy (artist) and brother Philippe (3D artist). Seumas McNally proceeded to develop 3D Terrain tank game Tread Marks as lead game programmer and game designer, which was released in 2000. The game is notable for featuring in-game deformable terrain and won three Independent Games Festival Awards for "Best Game", "Best Design" and "Best Programming". Other products McNally programmed include Particle Fire, a screen saver with great graphical effects, Texturizer, for creating wrapping textures, and WebProcessor, for creating fast HTML  macros. DX-Ball. He along with Michael P. Welch developed a freeware computer game for the PC first released in 1996. The game, originally based on an earlier series of Amiga games known as "MegaBall", is patterned after classic ball-and-paddle arcade games such as "Breakout" and "Arkanoid". A level editor was also made available as well. DX-Ball has been succeeded by three direct follow-ups: "DX-Ball 2" (1998), "Rival Ball" (2001) and "Super DX-Ball" (2004). DX-Ball 2. DX-Ball 2 by Longbow Games (follow up to DX-Ball), also introduces the feature of board -set selection, allowing the player to select between different sets of boards to play. The free demo thereby comes packed with a total of 24 boards divided into 6 board-sets of 4 boards search. Additional board packs can then be installed for more boards, whereas Board Pack 1 will expand the demo board-sets to 25 boards each, for a total of 150 boards. While a total of five board packs were released for the game, DX-Ball 2 was eventually succeeded by Rival Ball in 2001. Illness and death. McNally suffered from Hodgkin's lymphoma, an aggressive form  of lung cancer, which he was diagnosed with in 1997 at the age of 18. McNally died on March 21, 2000, shortly after winning the grand prize for Tread Marks. Legacy. Seumas' father Jim continued to create a historical wargame, the basic design drafts of which Seumas had helped to formulate. This was released in 2010 as "" and became the first entry in a series of historical wargames. Longbow Digital Arts, the independent game development company founded by Seumas McNally, continues operations until today. In 2018 it has released a 20th Anniversary Edition of Seumas' cult classic computer game DX -Ball 2.