Bill Williams

Bill Williams (May 29, 1960 – May 28, 1998) was an American video game designer, programmer, composer, and author born with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder. According to a medical encyclopedia Williams consulted when he was 12, people with cystic fibrosis weren't expected to live past the age of 13. and write two theological works.

Williams died from cystic fibrosis in 1998, at the age of 37.

Game design Bill Williams's first published game was the vertically scrolling Salmon Run for the Atari 8-bit computers, published by the Atari Program Exchange in 1982. The player controls a salmon traveling upriver to mate while jumping waterfalls and avoiding bears and other obstacles.

He then wrote two games for Synapse Software: Necromancer (1982) and Alley Cat (1983). Alley Cat was begun by another programmer, John Harris, In 1984, Synapse published the stress reduction package Relax, combining a sensor headband and minigames providing biofeedback. The software was a collaboration between Williams and fellow Synapse game designer Kelly Jones (who wrote the 1983 Atari 8-bit game Drelbs).

Williams then moved to the Amiga, designing and programming Mind Walker. It was published by Commodore in 1986 as one of the earliest releases for the new computer. He followed that game with Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon (1987), and Pioneer Plague (1988). Pioneer Plague was the first Amiga game to make full use of the difficult to work with Hold-And-Modify mode for the in-game graphics. His final game for the platform was Knights of the Crystallion (1990): quote|Knights was the game I threw the most of my soul into, out of all the games I ever did. Knights was my attempt to draw the industry into a different direction. It was going to be my epic, it was going to be my masterpiece—we called it a cultural simulation—and I thought I could pull it off.

Near the end of his game development career he worked on Monopoly for the Nintendo Entertainment System and Bart's Nightmare for Super NES. Both games were for Sculptured Software in Salt Lake City, Utah, though Williams worked out of his home. Some Super Nintendo sound driver code written by Williams during this time was used in other games. It imagines himself as a disciple of Jesus with cystic fibrosis in the present day, trying to understand his struggles with CF and diabetes, and Jesus's message. A collection of poetry and short prose, Manna in the Wilderness: A Harvest of Hope, illustrated by his wife Martha Williams, was published posthumously in March 1999.

Death Bill had been born with the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis, which affected his lungs and impaired his ability to breathe. In 1992, he moved to Chicago to study at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, but the city's air pollution worsened his condition significantly, and he had to drop out after two years with only half of the program completed. He moved to Rockport, Texas, but his health continued to deteriorate until he died of complications from the disorder on May 28, 1998, one day before his 38th birthday.