About

Hi, I’m Ray Martone. Some highlights, long ago I worked in Smalltalk at Xerox on a machine called the Daybreak, back when Xerox was thinking hard about copiers while the future sat on its desks. I did a stretch at IBM on SGML and a pre-announcement OS/2 too. I even had email in the eighties, which felt less impressive than it sounds. I learned a lot.

Eventually I joined a startup nobody had heard of, at a pay cut, and finally got to do the whole job:the interface, the icons, the engine, and the support calls. Fifteen CD-ROM titles later, including the TIME Almanac, the engine turned out to be the part worth buying. After that,Freeloader, then distributed game systems at Zynga.

These days I’m building SpellBurst, a word puzzle game: engine, mechanics, art, and every word on every screen. I also built PlayLab, a player simulator, which plays a quarter-million games over lunch so I don’t have to.

The strange part is how little the question has changed. Long ago I wrote a paper about whether Markov chains could make Mozart, or at least something that felt like it. The same math now decides which letters land next to each other on a SpellBurst board. I did not plan this.

So that’s the subject here: how something rigorous and mechanical ends up producing something you actually feel.