Welcome to the site of Max Aubrey Wagner, 3D Game and Simulations Programmer
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/About Me

In brief:

Born in Eugene, Oregon, I have lived on a small farm in rural Oregon, in New York City, and in Paris, the latter two while completing a B.A. in English, French Literature, and Creative Writing from New York University.

I just added another Bachelor Degree, graduating this spring (2005) from DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Washington; this time it was a B.Sc. in Real Time Interactive Simulation and a minor in Mathematics.

I currently find myself in Seattle, working on making the most engrossing, entertaining, and fantastic virtual worlds the people of this world have ever seen. And yes, fortunately I'm getting paid to do this, working at Snowblind Studios.

These are a few of My Favorite Things (in no particular order):

Games:
Ms. Pac Man
Track and Field (yeah, that old NES powerpad game)
Super Mario Bros. 2 and 3 and 64
Legend of Zelda (all of them!!!)
Baldur's Gate I and II and Neverwinter Nights
The new Prince of Persias
Civilization (started playing on the first one, but 3 is pretty nice)
Whatever I'm currently working :) And of course the list could go on...

Books:
Underworld, White Noise, and so much else by Don DeLillo
100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Maltese Falcon and other crime and mystery novels by Dashiell Hammett
The Long Goodbye, The Big Sleep, and other crime and mystery novels by Raymond Chandler (he was mentored by Dashiell Hammett)
Dubliners by James Joyce
The Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
The Things They Carried and In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien
Stories by Don Barthelme, most notably Will You Tell Me?, aka Come Back, Dr. Caligari
Collections of stories by Raymond Carver, such as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, on which the movie Short Cuts was based.
Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Nothing like a little French existentialist literature like Camus' L'Etrangere (The Stranger) or Sartre's collection of stories entitled Le Mur (The Wall).
Of course, then there's The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett, and George R. R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice series for the more fantasy inclined.
A Scanner Darkly, Ubik, Valis, and of course Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (aka Bladerunner) by Philip K. Dick

Movies:
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and other Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns
Breathless, Alphaville, A Band Apart, Weekend, and other Jean-Luc Goddard
Yojimbo, Seven Samurai, Drunken Angel, by Akira Kurosawa
Down By Law, Ghost Dog, Night on Earth, Stranger than Paradise, by Jim Jarmusch
Short Cuts, Nashville, The Long Goodbye by Robert Altman
Naasica: Valley of the Wind, Spirited Away, by Hayao Miyazaki
In the Mood for Love, Happy Together, Chungking Express, by Wong Kar Wai
The 400 Blows, Francois Truffaut
Delicatessen, City of Lost Children by the dynamic duo Jeunet et Caro (yes, I like Amelie too, but Jeunet went solo on it, and I'm a little sad for that)
The Evil Dead trilogy by the illustrious Sam Raimi
Woody Allen (too many to name)
Alfred Hitchcock (again, too many to name)
Monty Python (favorite is probably Life of Brian, as well as some of the wacky TV shows)
Amores Perros by Alejandro Inarritu
City of God by Kati Lund and Fernando Meirelles
The Sci-Fi Classic Tron by Steven Lisberger
Blue Velvet and other David Lynch
Yes I like Quentin Tarantino, but I must admit I strongly prefer Pulp Fiction to the rest
Stanley Kubrick: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon
I Heart Huckabees by David O. Russell
Magnolia by P.T. Anderson
The Princess Bride, by Rob Reiner (have to mention This is Spinal Tap too I suppose)
Of the Coen Brothers, my favorites are: The Big Lebowski and Fargo, but I love most of them
Back to the Future trilogy
and so many more...

Music:
Wow, too much to list. Anything that's either really good or, in some cases, just really catchy. Recently, Franz Ferdinand, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, soundtrack to Garden State, the Shins. Also like the classics like Bach and Mozart, as well as some "modern classical" like Benjamin Britten or Paul Hindemeth. Now that I have a niece, I find myself forced to listen to Raffi from time to time.

Here are some of the Places I've Gone:

France: Biarritz, Sables D'Olonnes, Le Mans, Lyons, Annecy, Les Gets, Saint-Malo, Paris
Italy: Cortona, Arezzo
Spain: Barcelona, Grenada, San Sebastian
England: Manchester, London
Morocco: Tangiers, Fes, Chef Chaouen, Marrakech
Jamaica: Lucy, Negril, Montego Bay, Mandeville, Kingston, Ocho Rios
Canada: Vancouver, Montreal
US: Over 30 states!