Quake Programmer Brian Hook Jumps to Verant

Verant Interactive just landed some serious programming muscle. Brian Hook, until recently of id Software, has joined the EverQuest studio’s pool of programming talent, where he will work on technology for both current and future Verant projects.

Hook’s resume reads like a tour of 3D gaming’s engine rooms: programmer on Quake 2 and the upcoming Quake 3, a lead architect of Glide during his 3Dfx years, work on the OpenGL code base at Silicon Graphics, plus a stack of articles for Dr. Dobb’s Journal and Game Developer magazine. Hook says he is a fan of Verant’s games and is betting on the company’s massively multiplayer titles becoming the benchmark the rest of the field gets measured against.

When a Quake engine programmer walks away from id to build massively multiplayer games, that tells you where the smart money thinks online gaming is headed.