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Alumnus Don Likeness and his company Treyarch created Spider-Man: The Movie, one of today's hottest video games.
Winter 2003
Don Likeness clearly remembers how his love affair with computers and videogames began. He first got interested at age 11, when a family friend gave him a print-out of a BASIC program he had written. "It was a simple adventure game," says Likeness, Class of 1990. "I had never seen a computer before, but I pored over this print-out and I could follow all the logic." It wasn't long before Likeness was programming games on his own computer.
Fast forward to 1986. At age 17, the Turkish-born Likeness enters UCSD as a computer science major, and he quickly distinguishes himself. "Don Likeness is one of the five best undergraduates I've come in contact with in my years of tenure," says Computer Science and Engineering chair Mohan Paturi, who hired the young programmer as his research assistant in 1989. "He's a natural when it comes to programming, but also had an interest in deeper mathematical concepts." For graduate school, that interest led Likeness to UCLA's prestigious math program. Says Likeness: "I went to UCLA with the vague intent of going into algebra, but instead ended up in 3-manifold topology."
Before he could finish his Ph.D. though, Likeness got an offer he couldn't refuse: a chance to start a computer game company from scratch. He wasn't a newcomer to the industry. As a junior and senior at UCSD, Likeness worked summers at a computer game publishing company in Los Angeles. Later, as he was working on his thesis, "my best friend from UCSD, Peter Akemann, showed me an interesting program he wrote," recalls Likeness. "It was a human-motion engine that allowed a stick figure on the screen to move its limbs realistically." The two spent six months developing a full-fledged prototype: "It was a big guy with a club versus a small guy with a sword. You could hack off each other's limbs and blood would spurt out. We showed the prototype to Interplay, a large software publisher in Irvine, and they signed us to develop it." With that, Likeness and Akemann created Treyarch in January 1995, and that rudimentary program became "Die By The Sword," which went on to become a cult classic.
When he studied at UCSD, Don Likeness says, "The only graphics course offered was a weird, fairly simple image processing class." No longer. CSE chair Mohan Paturi has made computer graphics and vision a top priority, most notably with the 2002 hiring of two professors who are stars in the field: David Kriegman from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Henrik Wann Jensen from Stanford. (Jensen's innovations in depicting skin realistically were used to create Gollum, a character in part two of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, that opened in theaters in December.) Together with CSE's Serge Belongie and the San Diego Supercomputer Center's Mike Bailey, they have now formed the UCSD Computer Vision and Graphics Group and are setting up a laboratory.
By 1999 Likeness had graduated from programming to running Santa Monica-based Treyarch, which went from a dozen to nearly 200 employees during his tenure as president, with sales doubling ever year. The company developed games for leading publishers including Interplay, Electronic Arts, Mattel, and Sega, and has developed some 20 games to date, including their most recent hit, Spider-Man: The Movie.
Likeness got a second offer he couldn't refuse, when one of the country's biggest game publishers-Activision-offered to buy Treyarch but keep it operating as a separate unit. "There are two types of studios: those that have a hit and those that are looking for one," says Likeness. "We had a huge studio, five teams, and I wanted them all to be working on hit games, nothing less; merging with a publisher was the easiest way to get there." In October 2001, Activision agreed to buy Treyarch in an all-stock deal.
In the wake of that deal, Likeness resumed his friendship with his former mentor, CSE chair Paturi. He observes: "I think what Mohan is doing with the department today is astonishing, because he is setting up a structure to keep the curriculum vibrant and relevant, hiring the best young talent, and building relationships with local industry."
Likeness says he is staying at Treyarch, but hasn't ruled out returning to academe at somepoint. "That was my ambition for a number of years and it never entirely disappeared," he admits. For now, he is planning a seminar at UCSD on what goes into a modern game project, especially from the programmer's point of view. And he says he's impressed with how far CSE has come in recent years. "I have no doubt Mohan is building the best department both for today and for the next 10 or 20 years," adds Likeness. "I'm very encouraged by that and would like to help in any way I can."
Story Adapted from Jacobs School Alumni Profile
Original story can be found at
http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/alumni/profiles/winter03_likeness.shtml
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