James Anhalt III

James Anhalt III

James Anhalt III

Chief Architect
Frost Giant Studios, Inc.

Experience

James Anhalt has seen technology and programming change dramatically throughout his career.  He first learned to program his own games in BASIC and 6502 assembly around the age of 10 when his parents purchased an Atari 800 computer in a vain attempt to stem the tide of quarters he put into arcade machines.  During UCLA freshman CS classes he met Allen Adham, the future founder of Blizzard Entertainment, who recruited him to program games during his summer breaks and join the studio full time upon graduation.  After two years with Blizzard, he left to form his own company, Redline Games, primarily focusing on finishing “difficult” projects for other developers.

James returned to Blizzard in 2001 to work on Battle.net, the company’s online games network used by millions around the world, and was the Lead Software Engineer for Game Systems and Engine development on Team 1, the team behind all of Blizzard’s real-time strategy games.  At the Game Developer’s Conference in 2011, he spoke in-depth about his path planning work on StarCraft II.  Looking for a new challenge, James was the first engineer on Blizzard’s first original game since Overwatch, then went on to promote sharing code in an internal open source model throughout the company as the Shared Code Lead on Blizzard’s shared Engine team.  At the end of 2020, James left for a completely new adventure and joined Frost Giant Studios as their Chief Architect to help bring the next evolution of RTS games to players.

James graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1992 and earned his MBA from the University of California, Irvine in 2008.