About me - Matt Godbolt
Hi there, I’m Matt Godbolt — pleased to meet you. Please, come in, sit down, make yourself at home.
![[Piccie of me]](http://xania.org/media/MattGodbolt.jpg)
Let me tell you a bit about myself. I was born on August 16th 1976 to
Richard and Christine Godbolt.
My first computer came at age 8, a 48k Sinclair Spectrum,
you know the ones with rubber keys. I was captivated, and remember fondly one Christmas getting
my poor long-suffering mother to read out long program listings while I typed them in, hours of work
and then a fairly pitiful result like a Union Jack flag being drawn on the screen. She couldn’t understand
what I saw in it all — but for me it was just the beginning!
During my school years I met like-minded Richard Talbot-Watkins, and we started making little programs for our computers. By now I’d upgraded to a BBC Master computer (via a Spectrum +3), and Rich and I had a fairly lucrative (for 15 year olds!) side-job doing little snippets of code for UK magazine Acorn User. We even wrote a few games (you’ll need a good BBC emulator for this) — Frogman, and were in negotiations for a 4-part series in Acorn User on our game Onslaught when sadly the publication ceased covering the BBC computer.
At school I was always into science, in particular physics. During secondary school I used to write little applications to demonstrate things like fluids and gases, and gravitational attraction. By now I’d moved to the Acorn Archimedes computer, a 32-bit beast of a machine for the time, so I sadly completely missed out on all the 16-bit fun most of my associates have had. When it came to deciding on what to do after school, I plumped for a Physics degree at Exeter University. There I met the Internet!
The internet took up a lot of my time at Uni, but so did programming. I continued developing software for my Acorn, creating or co-creating IRC clients, Sega Master System emulators and even some games. The revenue from the shareware, particularly my IRC client !IRClient kept me in beer for the during of Uni — a big thanks to all those who actually paid up!
In addition I helped set up a (sadly now defunct) Multi-User Dungeon, Xania — which explains the domain name you’re visiting now — xania.org. That spawned my love of online games — later in life I would become rather addicted to them!
Out of Uni I started work at Argonaut Games. There I worked on several titles:
- Croc – Legend of the Gobbos — where I worked on the PC port of this PSX classic.
- Red Dog – Superior Firepower — I was responsible for making the tool chain and programming the graphics engine.
SWAT Global Strike Team — for which I co-developed a gaming framework which worked on
Xbox, PS2 and was successfully ported to GameCube too. The framework itself had a renderer with
some pretty fancy lighting effects too, though as usual in the games industry they ended up not
being used quite as well one might like! The framework was also used on an unreleased comic-book game, Orchid.- Urban Chaos: Riot Response (previously known as Roll Call) — which has now been taken on by RockSteady Studios for SCi.
Sadly, all good things come to an end, and Argonaut folded at the end of 2004. Many things have been said about its sad demise, and I shan’t add anything new to the debate, preferring instead to let it pass, and move on…which I did by setting up my own company. Me and an ex-colleague Nik Hemmings have had some cunning ideas on the back burner for some time, and Argonaut’s downfall was the kick up the bottom we both needed to actually take our pub idea into reality.
So, now I’m a co-founder and co-director of my own company, ProFactor Software — developing unique services products for C and C++ programmers. We’ve developed a source code reformatting package, StyleManager, a #include graph generator, IncludeManager, and we’re working on loads of other interesting things. Keep an eye on ProFactor’s website for more news on our products.
You can learn more about my working life at my LinkedIn profile.
On the 21st of October 2005 I married my long-term girlfriend, Ness. Through all the trials and tribulations of starting a business, she has been 100% behind me. Ness and I met through a mutual friend a few years back, and we got together shortly afterwards. In September 2004 I asked her to marry me while we were on holiday in Cyprus, and the rest as they say is history!
So that’s me, in a wordy nutshell (if that’s not an oxymoron) — I’ll try and keep this up-to-date with news and more embellishments — there’s so much I’ve missed out, but then there’s so much you won’t care about! Who reads these things anyway?
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Posted at 08:25:00 BST on 1st May 2006.
