Bios

WELCOME TO VALHALLA

TEAM BIOS

Cathi Court
(President/Executive Producer)

As the leader of the Septerra Core team, Cathi was instrumental in the founding of Valkyrie Studios. Her previous product, MTV's Beavis & Butt-head in Virtual Stupidity, sold over 150,000 units in the US market alone. (PC/Win95 only) Working very closely with MTV and show creator Mike Judge, the game was delivered in just 13 months - under budget, and within four days of a Gold Master date set well over a year in advance. Joining the game industry after over fifteen years in advertising/film production, her previous work experience includes the following:

Creative Director - VideOcart, Inc.(‘91-’93) - In-store, on-shopping-cart digital merchandising systems.
Clients/Retailers included: Ocean Spray, Hershey’s, Pepsi/WalMart, Toys R Us, Von’s, Dominick’s

Executive Producer - Grant/Jacoby, Inc. Advertising (‘87-’91)
Clients included: Ameritech Mobile, S.C. Johnson & Sons, Stokely USA and Culligan International

Production Business Manager - J. Walter Thompson USA (‘81-’86)
Clients included: Miller Brewing Co., Oscar Mayer & Co., Pepsi International, Kraft General Foods

Her strengths: Project and staff management and motivation (read: Care and Feeding of a Project and Development Team), and complete management of all production and business details.

Brian Babendererde
(VP of Game Development)

Mr. Babendererde is the visionary behind the creation of Septerra Core. As the lead game designer, his broad range of skills includes script writing, illustration, character design, as well as programming game logic. Known in the industry as B-Man, Brian entered the development business in 1990 as an artist at a small company known as ICOM Simulations. When Viacom acquired ICOM in 1993, Brian went on to become one of the company's most successful and published game designers. Among many other titles, he was Co-Designer/Lead Artist on MTV's Beavis & Butt-head in Virtual Stupidity, which won PC Gamer's Best Adventure Game of the Year award for 1995, and has been ranked twice among their top twenty-five Best Games Ever.

Other titles in various roles from Artist to Designer include: Nickelodeon's Rocko's Modern Life: Spunky's Dangerous Day, Road Runner's Death Valley Rally, Daffy Duck-The Marvin Missions (SNES), Phantom 2040 (SNES & Genesis), Yo Bro and Camp California (For TurboGrafx-16 & CD, respectively)

Alisa Kober
(VP of Art Production)

Art production coordinator by day, animator by night, Alisa brought her exceptional organizational and product management skills to Valkyrie, ensuring the quality and timeliness of all Septerra Core art milestone deliverables. As lead animator, she was also part of the team responsible for Viacom’s award winning MTV's Beavis & Butt-head in Virtual Stupidity. In addition to management and artistic contributions she is also an accomplished designer of development tools, enabling artists to work more efficiently and removing unnecessary steps typically needed to translate graphical data into programmer usable formats. Her proprietary animation tool (RAT), which was programmed by Jim Weisz, was used extensively in the creation of Septerra.

Other published titles include: Nickelodeon titles Rocko's Modern Life: Spunky's Dangerous Day and GUTS (SNES), MTV's Beavis & Butt-head: Little Thingies (Win 95)

Jim Weisz
(VP of Programming)

As a lead programmer on Septerra Core, Jim put his considerable experience to work not only to ensure the realization of the overall design but to expand the engine’s capabilities by adding features never before seen in a 2-D game engine. Many reviewers have been amazed that Septerra requires no 3D acceleration card, believing the game to be truly 3D due to the use of detailed depth masking, alpha translucency, a robust particle system, support for multiple colored light sources, and real-time shadow casting and deformation. An industry veteran of some 19 years, Jim Weisz came to Valkyrie from Midway Games, Inc., where he was Manager of the Consumer Porting group, the division responsible for conversion of hit arcade titles to PlayStation and N64 formats – including the 1998 N64 Sports Game of the Year, NFL Blitz. Prior to joining Midway, Jim had worked closely with several members of the team at Viacom on various projects, including Nickelodeon’s award winning Are You Afraid of the Dark? The Tale of Orpheo’s Curse.

Prior companies include: Viacom New Media (‘94-‘97), VideOcart, Inc. (‘91-‘93), Incredible Technologies, Inc. (‘88-’91), Digital Mechanics, Inc. (‘84-’88)

Previous titles include: MTV's Beavis & Butt-head in Virtual Stupidity, Nickelodeon's Are you Afraid of the Dark? (PC-CD-ROM), DuckTales and The Three Stooges (MS-DOS), Balance of Power and Balance of Power-The 1990 Edition (MS-Windows), Q*Bert (Arcade), Cross Clues (Apple II)

Additional Valkyrie Studios Staff

With a combined total of over thirty published titles, Valkyrie has assembled a staff of game designers, programmers, and artists familiar with real-time 3D, pre-rendered sprite based technology, and tool design, for both console and PC game production. Only one member of Valkyrie’s art team has less than five years of game development experience. It would be tough to find a more cohesive, talented, and dedicated group. Modelers, character animators, and illustrators have a wealth of high-end, professional tools available to them including Maya Complete by Alias/Wavefront, SoftImage, Photoshop, and a variety of proprietary and other software packages.

The Valkyrie team also employs the skills of two former Quality Assurance Testers, now fondly known as "TerraBuilders". On Septerra, they were directly involved in the assembly of backgrounds for the game, using their past testing experience to help assess potential technical and playability issues, even as the background art for the game was being created. Today they are making the move into other production positions such as assistant designer and 3D animator.