Obituary: Game Programming Veteran Carl Wade

Acclaim veteran and CD Projekt RED senior tools programmer Carl Wade passed away last Monday, December 5. He was 40 years old. Wade, originally from Huddersfield, North England, was a self-taught programmer, and after scoring his first industry job in 1988 at Imagitec Design, spent much of his career as a programmer at Turok series developer Iguana Entertainment (later Acclaim Austin). Wade worked at Acclaim from 1992 to 2004, and has been credited in more than a dozen titles for his work at the studio, with notable games including Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, South Park: Chef's Luv Shack, the Aero the Acrobat series and games in the NBA Jam franchise. "Carl was the second programmer we hired at Iguana, I had the pleasure working with him on several projects. He was a great guy and truly will be missed," Iguana co-founder Jay Moon told Gamasutra. Following his tenure at Acclaim, Wade briefly worked at a number of other Austin-based companies, including The Guy Game's Topheavy Studios and Edge of Reality, a company co-founded by Iguana lead programmer Rob Cohen. In 2005, he moved to the UK to work at racing game developer Eutechnyx and future Kinectimals developer Frontier Developments. Before eventually landing at Witcher series developer CD Projekt RED, Wade worked for Chronicles of Riddick studio Starbreeze in Sweden. Outside of game development, Wade was well known on the popular internet community Fark.com, where he was known by his online handle, "Rabiddog." "He was one of the most gifted programmers I have ever had the chance to work with," said Steve Broumley, Wade's former Acclaim colleague and personal friend. "Carl was certainly master of his trade, but I’ll never forget his great sense of (British) humor too -- for some reason I still remember him adding a function to [Batman: The Arcade Machine] named 'TheWholeKitAndCaboodle' which referred to when the player had completed the game. Carl will truly be missed.”