Buckland is a video games pioneer, having been in the industry since 1982.
Crystal Quest In 1985 Buckland developed one of the first Macintosh games, the shareware title
Crystal Raider. A year after the game's release, Buckland decided to work on a follow-up,
Crystal Quest, which would take the gameplay of its predecessor, and add new features. The game ended up ported to numerous other platforms, including the
Apple IIgs,
Amiga,
Game Boy,
Palm and much later,
PC and
Xbox 360.
Stainless Software In 1993, Along with Neil Barnden, Buckland started up Stainless Software "in order to concentrate on games". Among their first clients was
Argonaut Games, who contracted the team to work on 3D engine development. Two years later, in 1995, the company landed their first games contract, with British publisher SCi, after pitching a title called "3D Destruction Derby" in 1994. Originally, the game was intended by the publisher to be a licensed
Mad Max title, but SCi couldn't get their hands on the licence. Next, in anticipation of a sequel to the cult 1975 film
Death Race 2000, the game was titled Death Race 2020. The film sequel fell through, and it was decided to just do it without the license.
Carmageddon was released in mid 1997 – using
the BRender engine – and immediately topped the UK games charts, with other charts worldwide following suit soon after.
VIS entertainment In 1999 the company was absorbed into Scottish based developer
VIS Entertainment. Most notable among the many projects that Buckland worked on as part of VIS was 2001's
State of Emergency, which saw him attached to the game midway through development as executive director and design consultant. In 2001 a rally project at VIS for
Electronic Arts was cancelled, and VIS began restructuring itself. As part of this process, Patrick Buckland spun-off Stainless Games as an independent company again, which was financed by
Les Edgar, founder of
Bullfrog and ex-chairman of VIS.
Stainless Games Stainless Games remains independent to this day, and is based in Newport on the
Isle of Wight. The company has released a number of titles, including a port of
Crystal Quest, Happy Tree Friends: False Alarm, Warlords, Tempest, Battlezone, Asteroids, Missile Command, Centipede &
Millipede, Novadrome, RISK: Factions, Carmageddon: Max Damage and most notable
Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers. He was wholly or partly responsible for the production of
videogames such as
Crystal Quest,
Carmageddon,
Carmageddon II: Carpocalypse Now,
Carmageddon: Reincarnation and
Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers. He also produced a range of non-game software over the years, including AME, a security system used by (amongst others) the CIA and NASA, Crash Barrier, a crash recovery utility for the Macintosh, a Teletext authoring system, CAD software for the marine industry, retail packaging CAD systems, LeLisp for the French government, Structured BASIC or the Apple // and various other software packages. ==Games==