Silas Warner

Who was Silas Warner?

Silas S. Warner was a game programmer, author and musician. As a programmer, he was the first employee of Muse Software. Among other games, he created Castle Wolfenstein and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein.

Warner was educated at Deep Springs College and Indiana University. He was a talented programmer, but lacked some social skills. Former coworkers state that he was a prototypical "geek" in the best sense of that word: smart, inventive, and totally uninterested in conforming. He was a very large man, 6'9" and between 300 and 400 lbs.

Warner was a major contributor to the early PLATO system in not just the area of gaming but also as an educational content developer. RobotWar and its editor program RobotWrite originated on the PLATO system in the 1970s. This game allowed players to program their own robots in a simple language and then pit them against each other in an arena. Due to the nature of the PLATO system as an interactive educational tool, and the availability of RobotWar at many PLATO sites, this game became an item listed in the on-line computer science curriculum of many universities and colleges. Other PLATO games authored principally by Warner include Conquest, Orbit War and Airace. He was also a contributor to Empire.