Michael Abrash is best known as a technical writer and one of the top

His prolific writings have made their way to numerous publications such as a Dr. Dobb s Journal column on graphics programming and code optimization, The Zen and Art of Code Optimization , and his Graphics Programming Black Book , all of which were influential during their time. His most famous series of articles for Dr. Dobb s Journal, circa 1991, described an undocumented graphics mode for the IBM PC which he called Mode X .

Before getting into technical writing Abrash was a game programmer, having written his first commercial game in 1982, Space Strike (1982 game) (unrelated to the massively multiplayer game of the same name) for the International Business Machines personal computer (under DOS). Other games he wrote were Cosmic Crusader (1982) and Big Top (1983) for the same system. He returned to the video game industry in the mid-1990s to work on Quake for id Software . Some of the technology behind Quake is documented in Abrash s Graphics Programming Black Book . He currently works for RAD Game Tools.

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