Dan Gorlin

Dan Gorlin is a video game programmer and designer best known for his 1982 Apple II game Choplifter, in which the player pilots a helicopter to rescue hostages. His next Apple II game, Airheart, took three years to complete. While technically advanced, it was not as well received as Choplifter. He wrote the sequel to Airheart for the Atari ST: Typhoon Thompson in Search for the Sea Child (1988). All three games were published by Broderbund.

Gorlin teaches and performs West African dance-drumming with Alokli West African Dance, an organization which he has directed since 1985.

Career Gorlin accidentally got into game development. While living in Los Angeles working for the RAND Corporation researching artificial intelligence, he borrowed an Apple II from his grandfather. While trying to sell his house and sitting at home for six months, out of sheer boredom, he started writing a game that drew on his affinity for helicopters. A local kid doing odd jobs for Gorlin suggested he should add men to pick up, like in Defender. What resulted from his changes became his seminal game Choplifter. Gorlin completed the game in six months.

Gorlin's next game, Airheart, also for the Apple II, took three years to complete. The following game, Typhoon Thompson, took about two years, but Gorlin admits that the development of these games overlapped somewhat. The development for these games took so long because Gorlin started other games in between—a black hole game and a seaplane game—which proved too ambitious and which he ended up abandoning. During this time, however, he built a lot of tools whose descendants he still uses today.

Once the Apple II became outdated, Gorlin says he could not figure out what its successor was going to be. He says that he was hoping the Macintosh or Amiga would emerge as the new dominant system, but was disappointed that neither did. He investigated MS-DOS, but was disgusted with the hardware limitations. He says he decided to "wait it out" and went back to teaching African music and culture, which he had been doing since 1972. This game was never released.

Gorlin was a consultant for Choplifter HD in 2011, and was exploring the idea of developing games for the Android platform.