Don Gilman

Don R. Gilman (born 1962) is a is licensed Professional Engineer in Software Engineering at Texas A&M’s Energy Systems Lab. He is also the founder and president of Advanced Gaming Systems, Inc., developer of the Harpoon computer game series, under license from best-selling author Larry Bond.

More importantly, Gilman took Harpoon to its next level, elevating it from a simulation for hobbiests to a training aid for military professionals. Harpoon 3 Pro is in use by the Australian Department of Defense and the United States Naval Institute, among other organizations, to train professionals to deal with potential naval crisis. Harpoon 3 Pro's editor lets trainers set up hypothetical situations for any potential naval conflict from full-scale warfare to drug interdiction.

Biography
Gilman was born in 1962 in Virginia. His father was in the offshore intervention industry and his mother a homemaker. He has one sister. He attended Westchester High School in Houston. in 1984, he received his B.S. degree in industrial engineering from Texas A&M.

Game developer
He started gaming with Avalon Hill’s France 1940 around 1975. His first publication credit included Avalon Hill’s FlatTop and The General Magazine. He started writing for The Journal of WWII (later 20th Century) Wargaming as a reviewer and tournament designer/judge. He has been playing the Harpoon system since 1978.

In 1984, he co-founded Applied Computing (later called Digital Illusions) with Gordon Walton.

His computer gaming contributions include: Orbiter, PT109, Sub Battle Simulator, and The Shard of Spring (all in the 80’s). Don created many of the original design elements of the original Harpoon in 1989, and again for the current Harpoon 3 Professional.

Commercial IT projects include work for the Dept of Energy, Exxon/Mobile, Environmental Protection Agency, the Texas Legislature, Aon Insurance, and many smaller firms in Texas. Technology areas include Geospatial Information Systems (GIS), data acquisiton, robotics, modeling, imaging, voice transcription, billing, and bio-informatics.

Professional activities include IEEE, Rotary Club of College Station, organizing the local Computer Reycling Day, serving on the Texas Board of Professional Engineers’ Software Engineering Task Force.

Gilman currently lives in College Station, Texas with his wife and two children.

In addition to his computer engineering and game development, Gilman brews beer, cooks, sails and cycles.

Selected projects
The following is a brief list of games which Gilman either managed, produced, or developed:
*Harpoon (1989), Three Sixty Pacific
*PT-109 (1987), Spectrum Holobyte, Inc.
* Sub Battle Simulator (1987), Epyx, Inc.
* Orbiter (1986), Spectrum Holobyte, Inc.
*Shard of Spring (1989) Stragic Simulations Inc (SSI)

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