|
Notes
|
Jas C. Brooke started out his career in the computer industry while still a teenager at school in the mid-1980s. From 1984-89 he worked as a commercial computer musician for many 8- and 16-bit platforms (Spectrum, C64, Amstrad, MSX, Atari 800, Atari ST, Amiga and PC) writing sound drivers and composing & writing music for many games.
Around 1989, Brooke decided he wanted to expand his horizons commercially and returned to his first love as a computer hobbyist, namely, games programming. He turned programmer and did relatively little music coding, moving into the realm of 3D games programming by working on F29 RETALIATOR (PC; code & music) and DARKER (PC). Following these games, Brooke joined Perfect Entertainment and wrote some sound & video compression code for the DISCWORLD games, but other than that completely moved away from music.
As the games industry developed, it became less creative and less technically challenging for Brooke. For him, by the 2000's, programmers had become 'coders' and were just making the computer do what somebody else said it should do. Just prior to the new millennium, Brooke had consequently jumped ship from the PC to the consoles. He started off working on the Nintendo Game Boy in 1998, but then ended up developing on the XBox/Playstation 2 in 2002, At that point, there was little left that interested him in the games industry. He had become a Christian in the 90s and his view on life had changed. He knew that one day 'soon' he would step away from the games industry, but it wasn't until 2003 that he acted upon it.
Personal circumstances, coupled with what he perceived as the unethical direction of the company at which he was working, resulted in Brooke turning his programming talents to the development of biblical software. He'd been studying biblical texts from a 'programmer' perspective, noting how they interrelated and also observing certain structures which are part of ancient writings and oration. Some of these structures, Brooke noted, were very much like the ones found in musical forms. He began to investigate this, effectively reverse-engineering the biblical texts and working out how they developed. One thing led to another, with new languages to deal with - Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic as opposed to Z80, 6502, 68000 etc.
The end result, Brooke hopes, will be a piece of software that enables people to explore scripture from a structural and developmental viewpoint rather than just linear words. For him, this project has been the one with the greatest potential in terms of its value and long-term impact for human beings.
|
