Hi, I’m Dan Schmidt. I tend to use “dfan” as a handle where I can, ever since I fat-fingered “dan” back in college and realized that it helped disambiguate me from the zillions of other Dans.
For most of my career I programmed and designed videogames. I was an early hire at Looking Glass Studios, where I worked on such games as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Terra Nova. Then I was another early hire at Harmonix Music Systems, where I was the lead gameplay programmer on such games as Guitar Hero and Rock Band. After my game career I spent some time at Disney Research and Analog Devices doing research in computer science and artificial intelligence.
I am the main singer and songwriter for the band Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives.
I read a lot of books, listen to a lot of music, and play a lot of piano (mostly just sight-reading things off of IMSLP). I alternate being obsessed with chess (peak USCF rating 2029) and Go (peak AGA rank 2 kyu).