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Former Software Creations and Cloud Imperium developer David Bone Gill has passed away from cancer, aged 51, his friends and family have announced.
Gill got his start in gaming as a tester at Software Creations, where he also built SNES DevKits and cartridges and ran the company's BBS, according to his LinkedIn. His first games were the cancelled 16-bit Barbie title, Barbie: Vacation Adventure, which is scheduled to receive its first commercial release later this year (something Gill seemed excited about when we covered the announcement back in June), and the 1994 Nintendo-published rail shooter Tin Star.
Chun Wah Kong, Gill's former "line manager" and friend of 30 years, wrote down some memories on Facebook, which he shared with Time Extension:
"One of my bestest mates of 30+ years died of cancer over the weekend. I remember his first day at Software Creations. Dan Curley was giving me the heads up [about his nickname], and I said, 'I can’t call him 'Bone'; that’s an insult!' I think I called him Dave/ David about 3 times before awkwardly starting to call him by his preferred name.
"Bone, Curley, Pablo and myself playtested Tin Star and Barbie together in the 4 Park Place dungeon for those few months in 94. The talent in that team was wasted in QA, and very soon we were promoted out of there, with Bone going to programming. My mind is fuzzy, but did Bone get moved onto Spiral Saga straight away? Poor guy!"
In 1997, after the development of Equinox's PlayStation follow-up Spiral Saga fizzled out, Gill left the company to become one of the founding members at ZedTwo. At ZedTwo, he programmed games like Taz Express, Wetrix, Aqua Aqua, and the unreleased E.T.-licensed game E.T.: Search for Dragora, and even stayed on after Warthog bought the company to help create the Gizmondo game Stickyballs.
In 2005, Gill left ZedTwo for Bizarre Creations, where he worked on some of the most successful games of his career, including Project Gotham Racing 3 & 4, The Club, Blur, and 007: Blood Stone. Following that, Gill worked at TT Fusion, Lucid Games, and most recently Cloud Imperium (where he was a UI engineer and tech director on Star Citizen).
Speaking about his friend and former colleague on Facebook, Dan Curley wrote, "I often think back to the days of Bone, Chun, me and Pablo working in Creation's testing department as some of the most fun days of my life (we just arsed around and had a laugh, occasionally logging bugs - the way a testing dept should be). I loved that he climbed out of that lowly (but fun) department to lead such a great career in video games, eventually becoming a director at Cloud Imperium on Star Citizen.
He continued, "I think I actually got to know Bone more in the last 15 months than the decades before it. For very different reasons, we both went sober, and we got closer because of that (regularly commenting to each other about the utter shit people talk when pissed, while we're supping our Guinness Zs). He often gave me a shoulder to cry on when I wasn't in a great place, despite his own much more serious problems; such was the strength and beauty of his character. He will be dearly, dearly missed. My heart goes out to his family."
On BlueSky, the ex-Software Creations programmer Kevin Edwards described Gill as "a friendly, fun, knowledgeable guy," while another of Gill's former colleagues Carleton Handley wrote that, "by the time we were at Zed Two, he was one of the finest coders I'd worked with."
The environment artist David O'Reilly, meanwhile, described Gill, who worked alongside him at Bizarre Creations, as a "well-liked and skilled developer", and said that he wished he'd known him better.
"We were both into our old arcade games before retro was a thing," Kong shared with us. "We shared similar sentiments on gaming history, the games we played and where we both started out. Recently, when “our” unreleased Barbie was announced for current consoles, it wasn’t enough for him to just buy one; he wanted a SNES version he could own and play.
"We’d been talking about going to Arcade Club for a while, but his chemo and immunodeficiency would hamper that idea. When I saw him last month, we were talking about long-nose Pac-Man (go on, Google it!), the character with his likeness in Star Citizen, my desire to make a Vectrex game, planning holidays where you have regular sit-down breaks, how we can better look after our mums, Plok and Wetrix being at the museum...
"I’m glad I existed on the same timeline as Bone and was able to call him a friend. I love you, man. I’m sure we’ll see each other again. Until then, I’ll fill in for you on Bubble Bobble and Pac Land even though I don’t like them anywhere near as much as you do."
Here at Time Extension, our thoughts are with Gill's friends and family.