Bill Williams (game designer)

Bill Williams (May 29, 1960 – May 28, 1998) was an American video game designer, programmer, composer, and author born with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder. According to a medical encyclopedia Williams consulted when he was 12, people with cystic fibrosis weren't expected to live past the age of 13.^[1]

Williams created a string of computer games from 1982 through 1990 for the Atari 8-bit computers and then the Amiga which are admired for their imaginative design concepts, innovative sound and music, and skillful implementation. Necromancer is a three-stage game about a wizard growing and controlling an army of trees. Scenarios in Alley Cat include stealthily drinking from the bowls of sleeping dogs, avoiding a sweeping broom to jump inside a fish bowl, and collecting ferns atop a bookcase protected by spiders. Mind Walker, one of the first games released for the Amiga,^[2] puts the player inside the head of a physics professor gone mad.

Late in his career he worked on a licensed game for the Nintendo Entertainment System and another for the Super NES, but became frustrated with the game business and left to attend the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago^[3] and write two theological works.

Williams died from cystic fibrosis in 1998, at the age of 37.^[4]