Zachary Booth Simpson - Zack is Mine-Control's creator and principal artist. He was lured out of school in the eleventh grade to start a life of international computer hacking by a band of Chinese dissidents with a curiously strong desire to write really bad database software. After squandering his youth folding origami and writing compilers, he became the Director of Technology at the game company Origin / Electronic Arts where he helped create Ultima, Wing Commander, Ultima Online, and a host of other brand-name time-wasters. Later he started Titanic Entertainment with Jim and Ken where they created, according to C-Net, "The best game of all time that nobody bought." Both Origin and Titanic are now out of business, so what does that tell you? He currently splits his time between Mine-Control and as a Fellow of the Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology and the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology, University of Texas at Austin where he investigates his pet theories in molecular biology and helps build strange new life forms to amuse and horrify.

Thomas Blom - Thomas is undecided whether he's one of those slacker Austin musician's who poses as a game developer or if he's a slacker game developer posing as a musician.  Either way, the boy knows his real-time code and his four-four time measures.  He co-authored "Microbial Jazz."

Tony Bratton - Tony is a black-belt Akido swordsman in both real life and Second life so stay away from him in both.  Zack and Tony went to the same elementary school in College Station, Texas and were so socially scarred by this that they both became video game programmers at Origin in the early 90s. He's now the Director of Technology of Junction Point / Disney Interactive from whose web page I stole this picture, so no doubt Disney lawyers will be sending me a cease and desist letter as soon as their web-bots detect this egregious violation of their valuable copyright.

Adam Chapman - Adam makes the world safe for small, furry, self-important robots. Sometimes he hangs around NYU just to trash new media art students' dissertations; this brings him some joy, but sadly not as much as you'd assume. Unfortunately, Adam only visits us when there's a free ticket to Venezuela or he needs to write a hash table. He's from Hawaii, lives in Brooklyn, but is perpetually about to move to Austin.

Thomas Charveriat - Thomas' boundless enthusiasm for straight lines and right angles is surpassed only by his creativity as France's most productive anal-retentive stoner artist (and his wicked collection of hardware, dude). Thomas, his equipment, or, more often, his girlfriend (and better-half frankly) Jasmine, were the resolution to innumerable problems while we lived in Barcelona. (Thomas, sorry if we spelled your name wrong, that's what you get for being French!)

Doug Church - Game developer extraordinaire. Doug lives in a hotel room(s). He survives entirely on protein-bars packaged in cases of 144 meant for point-of-sale impulse buyers at REI.  He can juggle 6 balls at once and pick locks.  There's probably checks for thousands of dollars under his bed that he has forgotten to deposit.  He is an inspiration to us all.

John H. Davis - Master mathematician, electrical engineer, and cook, John has contributed numerous equations, formulas, algorithms, and carbohydrates to the project.  Sometimes he even gives us hugs.

Ken Demarest - Immaculately conceived as a computer game programmer, Ken now wastes his time making the world safe for corporate IT. When not replacing the structural elements of his house with cable ties, he occasionally finds the time to throw us a brilliant idea or two.  Ken wrote "Sand". He lives in an RV somewhere in North America.

Adam Frank - Adam wrote the screen saver Dogz, and is thus now doomed to spend the rest of his life explaining to outraged people that it's not the same thing as that annoying Microsoft Office Assistant Dog that looks at you all sad and needy when you just want to open a file. His virtual dogs, in contrast, merely ran all over your desktop looking sad and needy until you petted them; it was completely different. If he had his way, he'd probably live in a giant camera obscura and tell everyone that it wasn't him that was upside down, it was them. Adam co-conceived and did the animation for 'Shadow'. In real life, he's a toy designer and real estate tycoon in Brooklyn.

Jim Greer - Jim was born and bred to be a history professor at Dartmouth or an international banker specializing in off-shore accounts but was instead forced into a life of crime, hacking, and game programming by a blood-pact with Zack in 1982.  He used to support himself by unleashing poker-playing bots into unsuspecting online casinos but now he's running Kongregate.  Jim wrote "Fire".  He lives in San Francisco.

Julian Harris - Our favorite antipodean programmer and musician; Julian has finally spared the investors of Spanish sorry dotcoms the trouble of cutting him a paycheck and now kills time archiving every detail of his existence on DAT. Julian wrote "Shadow Harp".  He lives in London.

Carlos Padrissa & La Fura dels Baus - When Carlos isn't at the fertility clinics trying to artificially inseminate his wife (as of yet he hasn't been able to sit still long enough to give a decent sperm sample), he uses his life-long theatrical connections and faux-child-like innocence to distract the police during our pirate-video delinquencies. Carlos and the rest of La Fura wreak havoc in Catalunya.

Cynthia Verjovsky Marcotte - Cynthia is our polyglot topologist and bitching-cool nerd chick; give her a torus knot, a number two pencil, and ten micrograms of caffeine and she squeals like a little girl. She speaks four human languages (fluently), two computer languages (sort of), and the other three are either from Tolkein, Star Trek, or she's just making them up to look even nerdier. Her life's ambition is to read Pride and Prejudice some large, prime number of times and to prove Poincaré's Conjecture just to show up her dad. She'd like to live in Hilbert's Hotel but thinks it will be too noisy.

John Paul - After being un-shackled from the Barcelona police station for violations of Catalunya's fifteenth century hair-length statutes, JP created perverse animations for "Save the Baby?" and is our only art slave who has managed to escape! JP lives in Austin.

Frank Plant - We are truly indebted, as artists, citizens, and patriots for the use of Frank's ex-pat pad of steel and rabbit hutch while we were living in Barcelona. If it weren't for his 110 db falsetto renditions of his favorite hip-hop songs, we'd probably have been over there everyday building giant polyurethane pop-corn kernels, suitcase bombs, or whatnot. Frank is a steel sculptor and lives in Barcelona.

Brian Sharp - Brian is Mine-Control's latest robotic creation. Implemented with thirty-two P-IV 2.4GHz processors, Brian is housed in a 6 ft. 2 in. rosy-cheeked case. Bipedal and vegetarian, Brian is capable of converting non-animal proteins into source code at a sustained rate of 1.27e3 kilocalorie-bytes per hour (at standard atmosphere).  Brian wrote "Molecular Fluid" and now works at Maxis.

Nana Wallace - Nana's full time job is to level-up her child's Pokemon characters, but when her Metapod, Weedle, and Pikachu are sleeping, she's our executive producer.  She comes from 13 years of production at Electronic Arts slapping around programmers and thus it is second nature to her to slap Zack around until he stops working on his pet science projects.

(c) 2005 Mine-Control.