11th Dimension Entertainment

Matthew Engle and Daniel Berke have been collaborating on computer games for nearly a decade, since the dark days of junior high school. The idea first came to them while having lunch at Farmer's Market, on Third Street and Fairfax for those of you familiar with Los Angeles, and before long the two were off and running. They began by writing text adventure game parodies of the famous Zork series, and over the years honed their game design and programming expertise. The culmination of this phase occurred in 1989, when they won the Grand Prize at the Rockwell Computer Science Competition for their game Skyland's Star. In 1990, they released Skyland's Star into the shareware market.

By now the two had formed Eleventh Dimension Entertainment, but the market for text adventures was shrinking fast. Matt and Dan turned toward another source of inspiration, the Ultima series, and the seeds of Excelsior were born. Over the course of nearly three years, the two designed and wrote Excelsior Phase One. It was released through shareware, and much to their surprise turned out to be quite a success.

The two then turned their attention to the sequel. Excelsior Phase Two would be bigger, better and more advanced in every way, and it ended up consuming nearly five years of their lives. Who are these two dedicated gamers? Let's meet them, shall we?

Matthew Engle
Matt Engle holds a degree in Communications and a minor in Philosophy from Loyola Marymount University. For several years he worked as a production manager in the film and television industry. He also had a short stint as a development assistant at Republic Pictures.

Matt graduated at the serendipitous time that his two passions - film and computers - were merging into a newfangled buzzword known as "Multimedia." In early 1993 he dove into this brave new world by joining Disney Interactive, where he produced the Gameboy version of hit movie Toy Story. Currently he is a Senior Producer at Knowledge Adventure, the worldwide market leader in educational games, where he has produced countless titles.

Matt Engle is Co-Founder of Eleventh Dimension Entertainment. His focuses on game design, writing and the graphics portion of their products.

Daniel Berke
Dan Berke has a degree in Computer & Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. After graduating in 1993, he got sucked into the defense industry and moved to San Diego to work on satellite telemetry systems. However, his goal was always to get into professional game programming, and in 1995 he got his break. He was hired at what turned out to be a doomed start-up game company. Five months later, he quit and went to another start-up game development house.

Over the course of his two years at Screaming Pink, Inc., Dan was on the core team for the Sega Saturn version of Earthworm Jim 2 and was the lead programmer on the Sony Playstation version, which unfortunately was only released in Europe. After two years, Dan left Screaming Pink to move on to bigger and better things. As fate would have it, he wound up moving to Seattle to work for Electronic Arts. His most recent EA releases include Need For Speed III: Hot Pursuit and Need For Speed: High Stakes. Currently he works at Monolith Productions developing action games for the PlayStation 2.

Dan Berke is the other Co-Founder of Eleventh Dimension Entertainment. He is responsible for all programming, product management, and anything remotely technical.

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