Christopher Gulliver

You are seeing a saved copy of this page. It may be a little out of date.

About

I have been building things professionally since 2004, when I co-founded a company before finishing my degree. My first proper job was stock boy at Victoria’s Secret, in 2001, which I mention because every career has a first rung and pretending otherwise is tiresome.

How it went

Nobis Technologies came first, co-founded in 2004, where I was VP. It sold physical product, so I spent as much time on order fulfilment and payment processing as on anything I’d have called engineering at the time. That was the most useful accident of my career: I learned early that the software isn’t the product — the business is, and the software is how the business runs.

Then games, for about eight years. An internship with Midway’s Advanced Technology Group, then n-Space, leading technical work on four Nintendo handheld titles in two years — including GoldenEye 007 and Toy Story 3 on a DS with a fraction of the memory those games wanted. A stint at id Software writing internal tools. Then Disney Interactive: release and gameplay engineer, later Lead Architect on Inside Out: Thought Bubbles, and in between architecting LaunchPad.

Since 2015 the titles have said management and the work has been organisational — Tap Slots, then Slickdeals, and now DraftKings. That story is told properly, with numbers, on the Impact page.

Alongside it all I have started companies: Nobis in 2004, Endless Train from 2012 to 2019, and Lonch in 2018. Endless Train was where Eō lived — the fitness game controlled by a treadmill — and its obituary is in the garden.

Education

How I work

The most valuable thing I did at Disney wasn’t a game. It was a framework nobody outside the studio ever saw, and it mattered because it changed how much every team could get done. That’s the shape of problem I look for: a cost that is real but distributed, so it never lands on one project’s ledger and nobody is ever assigned to fix it.

I would rather make a process boring than heroic. The metric I’m proudest of in twenty-two years is Slickdeals’ QA regression going from five days to half a day — not because it is impressive, but because predictability is worth more to everyone downstream of engineering than raw speed, and it is far harder to sell upward.

I also think a team should get to name itself. Mine at Slickdeals chose Brave Mountain, Breakpoint, Brisket and Lager, and Wallaby, and I would defend that as a real management practice rather than a bit of fun.

Outside work

3D printing. Since the Makerbot Cupcake, which is long enough to remember when a successful print was an event you told people about. The first time I used rapid manufacturing in anger was the eToll Clip at Nobis. These days it’s an ELEGOO Jupiter 6K resin printer.

VR. Rift, Rift S, Quest 2, Quest Pro, Quest 3, and briefly a Valve Index. I see the new year in inside VRChat most years. The Quest 3 is the one I actually use.

Games. Ultima Online, StarCraft, and Walkabout Mini Golf — the last of which I’d defend against anyone who thinks VR has no killer app. I play PC VR by preference, with the Xbox and Switch after that.

Distributed ledgers, for the boring reason rather than the exciting one. My first brush with deterministic ledgering was a deterministic game server around 2008, well before the vocabulary existed. What interests me is practical applications — Lonch uses it for real work — and not memecoins.

Reading. Heavily, and unfashionably: my shelf runs to Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels in publication order, among about a hundred others.

I also write children’s books, which is the hat people least expect and the one that has taught me most about explaining things.