Personal life Gordon grew up just outside
Philadelphia and attended college in
Charlotte, North Carolina, where he resides. On January 3, 2010, he became engaged to Carrie and they were married later that year. On January 31, 2012, his wife gave birth to their first child, Olive Finch Gordon. He is also a founding member of the BareBones Theatre Group in Charlotte.
Loki Software In 1999
Loki Software ran a contest called "Loki Hack" at the
Atlanta Linux Showcase, with the goal of improving the Linux port of
Civilization: Call To Power. Gordon decided to give it a try, driving the four-hour trip from his home to
Atlanta. Loki was impressed with his work and decided to offer him a job. Gordon quickly rose to prominence at Loki, working as a developer on the game ports of
Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns,
Quake III Arena, and ''
Eric's Ultimate Solitaire, as well as being the lead developer for Descent 3 and Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K.². In 2000 he also wrote several articles for the online Linux news and information website Linux.com. Around this time he founded icculus.org'', made to provide hosting for various
free and open source projects, and would later be used to support and continue some of Loki's free software projects and tools. While at Loki Software, Gordon picked his
nickname icculus as a reference to the
fictional
character from Gamehendge in the song
"Icculus" by
Phish.
Independent contracts The upcoming closure of Loki forced him to seek outside employment. A friend offered him a job at his
cybercafe, and he was forced to move in with his parents. Desperate to escape working a
cash register, he found the
e-mail address of an artist working for the developer
Croteam. They had recently released
Serious Sam: The First Encounter, the first game in their
Serious Sam series, and Gordon asked if they would be interested in him building a Linux port. From there he gained other contracts such as being hired to port
Devastation and
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault for Linux and ''
America's Army for Linux and Mac OS X. He was also contracted by Epic Games to port their Unreal Tournament 2003 title to Linux and Mac OS X, with the port being included with the packaged Windows version. This business relationship continued with the release of Unreal Tournament 2004, and followed from the original Unreal Tournament'' which was ported to Linux internally by Epic but was published by Loki. Upon learning about the release of
Postal 2 in 2003, Gordon decided to contact the developer behind it wondering if they would be interested in him making a port of the game to Linux and Mac OS X. Loki had previously ported the original
Postal to Linux, and he was interested in keeping the franchise compatible.
Running with Scissors agreed, and the finished port was shipped on February 14, 2005, with Linux Game Publishing initially handling the publishing of the Linux version. Soon after he was contracted to make a Linux port for the
Wolfire Games title ''
Lugaru: The Rabbit's Foot, a business relationship that would later prove fruitful for Gordon. Around this time he was also contracted to build a Linux client for the online virtual world Second Life
. Google also utilized his services, with him being contracted to make a native Linux port of their Google Earth'' application, with Linux functionality finally becoming available starting with the release of the version 4 beta on June 12, 2006. In 2007 he was once again contracted by Epic Games to port their new
Unreal Tournament 3 title to both Linux and Mac OS X. The Linux game server was released on December 18, 2007, but work was eventually abandoned on the Linux and Mac OS X clients for reasons which remain undisclosed. In October 2008 he made the surprise announcement that he had been working on a Linux client for the
first-person shooter game
Prey, after previously porting the game's Linux server in 2006. Although there had been some speculation about a potential Linux release, it had been denied by the developer of the title in the past. The finished port was released on December 7, 2008.
FatELF, Humble Bundle, and Steam On October 23, 2009, he announced plans to make a
universal binary system similar to the one used on Mac OS X for Linux systems called
FatELF. The project generated considerable controversy, with several
Linux Kernel developers decrying the effort. Gordon announced that the project was on hold in early November 2009, later stating that he would be willing to work on it again if he receives help from an interested party. Around this time he also started to port the game
Aquaria to Linux for
Bit Blot. On May 11, 2010, he and Wolfire Games released the source code of his code branch of
Lugaru under the
GNU General Public License. He was also involved with the source code release of Aquaria, both of which were sold as part of the first
Humble Indie Bundle, which was also hosted by Wolfire. He was then contracted to port
Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41–45 to Mac OS X, stating that he could potentially port it to Linux if
Steam ever released a Linux client. Gordon also generated some controversy that summer for his talk at the 2010
SouthEast LinuxFest titled "Anatomy of a Failure", where he criticized some aspects of the Kernel development process. He then ported
Braid to both Linux and Mac OS X to allow it to be a part of
Humble Indie Bundle 2, as well as porting the games
Cogs and
Hammerfight for later bundles. As part of this he ported the
Haaf's Game Engine to Linux and Mac OS X, and released his port under a
free software license. He ported
Frozen Synapse to Linux to be included as the primary part of the Frozen Synapse Bundle, as well as
Super Meat Boy and
Shank for Humble Indie Bundle 4. During the rest of 2012 Gordon would work on several more ports for the Humble Bundles, including
Avadon: The Black Fortress,
Space Pirates and Zombies, and
Psychonauts. He would also be involved in updating old releases as well as porting several new titles to Linux to be included as part of
Valve's
Steam Linux launch, including creating Linux ports of the games
Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41–45 and
Killing Floor for Tripwire Interactive. As part of the
Humble Indie Bundle 7 promotion Gordon ported the title
Dungeon Defenders to Linux, making it the first Linux native title to utilize
Unreal Engine 3, the engine that debuted with the release of
Unreal Tournament 3 back in 2007 which Gordon had unsuccessfully tried to port to the platform. In 2013 he created an unfinished beta port of
Dear Esther to Linux to be included as part of
Humble Indie Bundle 8. Gordon was one of the speakers at the first ever
Steam Dev Days, where he outlined how to port a game to Linux and to
SteamOS. In 2014 he ported the games
Goat Simulator and
Sanctum 2 to Linux and Mac OS X for Coffee Stain Studios. On June 19, 2014, he released a new Linux port of
LIMBO, a game that had previously been released for Linux using a
CrossOver wrapper as part of
Humble Indie Bundle V, something that proved controversial at the time due to it not being a fully native release. In order to accomplish this Gordon also had to port
Wwise, the audio middleware that previously prevented a native port from being possible. == icculus.org ==