Christopher Weaver
Christopher S. Weaver is an American entrepreneur, software developer, scientist, author, and educator. He is known for founding Bethesda Softworks, where he was one of the creators of The Elder Scrolls role-playing series. Weaver and Bethesda are credited with developing the first real-time physics engine for sports simulation, used in Bethesda's Gridiron! video game. Weaver also developed game screen captioning for the deaf and made it available as open source software. Career At Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Weaver helped redesign the campus radio and television studios, and modified Link Trainers to better simulate situational spatial awareness. Because of this experience, he created AeroTechnology Enterprises, a company specializing in analog training simulators for aviation. Weaver moved to New York for post-graduate work at Columbia University and got a night job as an Assistant Director of News at NBC. He was then hired by the American Broadcasting Company, where he established the first office of Technology Forecasting for the network. He then became the Vice-President for Science and Technology at the National Cable Television Association (NCTA), followed by an appointment as Chief Engineer to the Congressional Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. Weaver later started Videomagic Laboratories, a company working in vehicular simulators for military and entertainment purposes. He temporarily moved to Los Angeles to work on the Universal Studios lot in Burbank, working on new camera technology with Panavision for interactive media. During this time, Weaver contributed to early work in graphical interfaces, optical storage, and computer-assisted editing, including encoding spatial information for tracking camera shots. In the 1980s, Weaver was introduced to video games when he was asked by one of his engineers to look at a football game idea he was developing. Weaver felt it "was boring" and sought to create a more realistic gameplay by incorporating physics. This meant that players would perform based on their masses and accelerations, adding a layer of reality-based strategy to the game. They decided to produce the game, resulting in the formation of Bethesda Softworks. The game was released as Gridiron! for the Atari ST and Commodore 64/128, in 1986. Bethesda later found widespread success as a game developer with its Elder Scrolls series of games. In 1999, Weaver cofounded ZeniMax Media with Robert A. Altman, as a new parent company for Bethesda. Weaver contributed his stake in Bethesda to ZeniMax, and served as CTO until 2002, then was pushed out. He filed a lawsuit against ZeniMax, claiming he was ousted by his new business partners and was owed severance when ZeniMax didn't renew his employment contract. The lawsuit was ongoing as of 2007, and at that time Weaver was still a 33% stockholder. Microsoft acquired Bethesda and its parent company, ZeniMax Media, in September 2020. The deal gave Microsoft new game titles as it prepared to launch the next generation of Xbox consoles. Current As of 2016, Weaver has been pursuing a career in academia, in which he teaches computational media in the College of Integrative Sciences at Wesleyan University. He