Written by obit
on August 13, 2012
PETERSON, Charles L. ‘Chuck’ Passed away on May 27, 2012 in San Francisco, CA. He was born April 30, 1965 in Sacramento, CA. Charles graduated from Del Campo High School in Fair Oaks, was an Eagle Scout and graduated UC Santa Cruz in 1987 in Computer Sciences. Charles is survived by his parents, Al and Mary Peterson; brothers, Bruce (Deanna), William, Jeff (Kathy); as well as nephews, Alex and Jeffrey and nieces, Samantha, Tiffany and Jacquie. He also leaves several aunts, uncles and many cousins. A memorial service will be held on Saturday, June 23 2012 at 1:00pm at Santa Cruz Memorial Gardens, 1927 Ocean Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95606.
Published in The Sacramento Bee on June 17, 2012
Very sorry to hear this. I’m sorry also that I came to the game after he’d begun to burn out on it, though I do have the honor of getting squashed one time by Arrow Thruster. His little corner of internet history is small, but important. I hope he’s somewhere out there, still chugging out lines of code.
I never knew him personally, but one of the few exchanges I had with him, and really sticks out in my memory, involved his bop named “clp” sitting shield-less next to romulus; presumably he was debugging or monitoring the server or something.. And I killed his bop. Like 3 times in a row.
Long story short, I got site-banned and then I pleaded with him that it wasn’t me, that it could have been any of the “many people” who connect from the “computer lab” at my “university”. Heh.. I was un-site-banned the next day. Good ol’ Chuck..
I imagine his life achievements far exceeded simply creating the most entertaining computer game ever.. If anyone reading this personally knew him or has any stories to share, I’d love to hear them. mtrek-related or otherwise.
-obit
I am saddened and shocked by this news.
I came across him on mtrek.com a few times in the nineties, I never fought him but asked him a few questions about how the server worked and got a couple of terse replies, he didn’t suffer fools gladly did he? 🙂
Chuck was a leading hacker in the UC Santa Cruz geek scene, there’s a some momentos and stories about the milieu that mtrek emerged from here: http://www.geek.org/ucsc-archive/
Happy hunting up there, clp, and thank you for the countless hours I’ve enjoyed wasting in the world you created.
http://news.ucsc.edu/2012/10/rev-fall-12-alumni-notes.html
[…] 30 years ago at the University of California Santa Cruz, Tim Wisseman approached Chuck L. Peterson with some early ideas for a text-based space combat simulator. Chuck (widely known only by his […]