David Pitzel

[David Pitzel]

My name is David Pitzel and I first started with Alamaze in the early/mid 1980's as a teenager. I hit it off with Phil McDowell right away, I understand he took serious ribbing from his brothers about our alliances, with the wizened gamer 'taking advantage' of the poor kid. I want to say that started in game #2, but that was a LONG time ago.

I was in the first game of the Second Cycle (#37 I believe) and had great fun with all of the kingdoms. For me, success hinged more on who was playing your neighbors and how diplomacy went than any inherent kingdom advantage - one of the greatest strengths of the Alamaze design.

In February of 2006, Phil asked if I could help out with bug fixes and enhancements in Alamaze. I had done some programming in older languages (Fortran IV & Pascal) before and during high school, so I figured I give it a shot.

Now I am helping Rick get Alamaze back up and running, starting with a reboot of the previous game engine/mechanics.

Should be fun.

[Kalrex]

Good luck David! I was a teenager as well when I played in the 80's.

[Cipher]

So long and thanks for all the ...

Fish? Not exactly.

As I've posted on another thread, my contributions to Alamaze have essentially run their course. I'll be playing out my remaining games and then taking an indeterminate hiatus.

The new platform has dramatic technical advantages that the players should greatly benefit from. Have fun!

David

[HeadHoncho]

Thanks for everything you've accomplished here, David, which is an enormous amount. And taking first via Rex in a 30-turn tournament of champions game is an incredible accomplishment, one that I'm not sure will be duplicated any time soon. All my best, and hope to see you around some time in the future.

[Feralkoala]

Thank you for the awesome work you did keeping Alamaze working. Hope to see you back playing in the near future!

[Airborne Ranger]

I remember you from way back Dave. I did not go by Airborne Ranger then.  zim

[Ry Vor]

We would never be enjoying Alamaze here in 2015 if not for everything Cipher / David did.  I would have never even restarted Alamaze if not for David finding the tool that let us move from plain .txt results to the PDF format we restarted with.  That, and probably 100 other changes.

For the record, Cipher also was a friend of Phil's and they visited and went to The Masters once, and Cipher shared Phil's determination to preserve Alamaze in its original form.

I plan to have David's private input on design changes going forward and I think we can look forward to more Thalion incursions into Alamaze worlds as we go forward.