Looking at the deceivingly youthful face of 23 year-old Mark Moran, you would never guess that he left a six-figure salary to come to Columbia's School of General Studies just one semester ago.
At the age of seventeen, while his friends were attending pep rallies and high school plays, Moran, a self-professed computer hacker with entrepreneurial ambitions, started his own game company with capital he gained from selling $10,000 worth of bonds to relatives. Every day after school he would put in a full day's work, up to 50 hours per week, developing a computer game prototype with the help of a high school friend and a couple of contract artists. Moran completed the game in 1993, and took his prototype to the annual Computer Game Developer's Conference and there cemented his future.
Moran was fresh out of high school and accepted by Columbia University, his dream school, when Jordan Mechner, the legendary game designer of the classics Karateka and Prince of Persia snapped him up to become employee number three of Smoking Car Productions in San Francisco. "I saw it as a chance to get a hands-on education and valuable real world experience, combining all my interests: programming, history, and the building of a company," reflected Moran. His mother, a teacher, and father, a lawyer, supported and encouraged Moran as he moved from his hometown of Los Angeles.
Moran became technical lead on the
MARK MORAN AND NIECE
production of The Last Express,a computer game on CD-ROM that resurrects the fabled intrigue, treachery, and romance of 1914 Orient Express during its last trip across Europe at the onset of the first world war. The Last Express was to be a new kind of computer game: historically accurate, with the highly stylized look of an art nouveau cartoon, realistic motion, and compelling, intelligent characters.
Without huge teams of artists to create character images, Moran helped to invent a computer rotoscoping program which automatically cartoonized video footage taken of live actors - a patented technique which has since attracted the attention of Disney. At the height of The Last Express's
production, Smoking Car's staff mushroomed to a fifty person crew, with Moran, the company's youngest, heading up a team of six programmers and eight technical artists. In 1997, four years and six million dollars later, the game was released. Eight international versions followed. Today it is considered to be a cult classic.
Now Mark is back in school as a student of the School of General Studies "GS has such an amazing student body. Every day I turn around to a new GS face - professional dancers, actors, musicians, computer programmers, child geniuses! What a place." Like many of his GS peers, Moran's impeccable grades reflect a certain motivation and appreciation for academics that stems from seasoning in the real world. As Dean of General Studies Peter Awn noted, "GS students are an enhancement to Columbia's intellectual discourse. Through their maturity and experience, they have much to offer Columbia."
Indeed, Moran has an appetite for learning. "I want to be a doctor, lawyer, architect, writer, and film producer, spending at least five years on each, ideally," he said with a grin. Realistically, graduate film studies will be the next step following graduation from GS with a bachelor's in literature and writing in 2002.
When asked if he feels he's on the right path, Moran reflects, "To me education 'Is the goal, not the means. And frankly, I'm just getting started."