Accolade’s motto was “Games with Personality”, a motto that was upheld by Deadlock. Deadlock’s personality was largely due to Deadlock’s writer: Mark Jensen, who I was lucky enough to meet over FaceTime in January of 2013. Mark Jensen now lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he works for Epicor Software as a technical writer. In recent years, Mark has also written several plays and books.

Mark Jensen grew up in Minnesota. During his childhood, he enjoyed science fiction literature, movies and television shows, including: Star Trek, Star Wars and Doctor Who. Mark studied playwriting at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, graduating in 1993. After graduating, Mark began working at Accolade, starting in tech support, where he worked for eighteen months.

In 1994, Mark was assigned to work on the Deadlock team, a team of which he speaks of very highly. Mark was brought on to the team because of his background as a playwright. On Deadlock, Mark served as a designer, writer and as a cinematic designer. Although Mark had a heavy workload while working on Deadlock, he says he had a lot of fun and sees it as a highpoint of his career. Mark chose the ChCh’t as his adopted race because he had to keep track of the “herd” of characters. Russell Shiffer liked the name ChCh’t because it sounded like a gun being loaded. Mark says he had a lot of fun working on Deadlock and sees it as a highpoint of his career. The company Mark chose to create Deadlock’s introduction sequence was chosen because they had previously done work for MTV. The team said the hardest part of the intro was not animating the characters or explosions, but the bead of sweat dripping off the Human Commander’s face. Mark also briefly worked with the team responsible for the Japanese version of Deadlock, who flew out to San Jose to discuss the translation.

After the release of Deadlock, Accolade contracted Cyberlore Studios to develop Deadlock II. Out of the original Deadlock design team, Mark Jensen was the most involved in Deadlock II, again serving as the writer. The plan was for Deadlock II to give extra life to Deadlock while the original design team worked on Deadlock III internally. The plan was to work on Deadlock III and continue to work on it depending on the success of Deadlock II. Unfortunately, Deadlock III was cancelled a mere four months after development began, before Deadlock II was even out. Deadlock III never had anything concrete put into place, only ideas were thrown about the sequel before its cancellation. Accolade never even announced that Deadlock III was in production. One idea put forward was to have Deadlock in space.

Mark went to work on a few more games at Accolade before departing in April 1998, including Matthew Ford’s Paradise, which was intended to be an online multiplayer game. Mark spent a good deal of time researching ancient mythology from around the world for Paradise. Unfortunately, Paradise along with two other games that Mark Jensen was working on were all cancelled. After the cancellation, Mark decided it was time to move on. Mark’s wife Jill had been offered a job in their home state of Minnesota, so they moved there. After being briefly employed at another company, Mark began working at Epicor Software, where he still works today.

In 2011, five of the main Deadlock team members: Ken Capelli, Dan Evans, Mark Jensen, Paul Kwinn and Gary Strawn, reunited at a German restaurant in San Francisco. Matthew Ford was unable to make it since he now lives in Australia and Russell Shiffer was in Hawaii on his honeymoon.

Mark Jensen’s personal website and blog is at http://www.markjensenwriter.com/. Thanks for including links to Gallius IV, Mark!