Bill Williams

Knights was the game I threw the most of my soul into, out of all the games I ever did. Knights was my attempt to draw the industry into a different direction. It was going to be my epic, it was going to be my masterpiece—we called it a cultural simulation—and I thought I could pull it off.

Williams died from cystic fibrosis in 1998, at the age of 37.

Williams wrote the book, Naked Before God: The Return of a Broken Disciple, published by Morehouse Publishing in May, 1998 and in paperback in 2001. It imagines himself as a disciple of Jesus with cystic fibrosis in the present day, trying to understand his struggles with CF and diabetes, and Jesus's message. A collection of poetry and short prose, Manna in the Wilderness: A Harvest of Hope, illustrated by his wife Martha Williams, was published posthumously in March 1999.

Bill had been born with the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis, which affected his lungs and impaired his ability to breathe. In 1992, he moved to Chicago to study at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, but the city's air pollution worsened his condition significantly, and he had to drop out after two years with only half of the program completed. He moved to Rockport, Texas, but his health continued to deteriorate until he died of complications from the disorder on May 28, 1998, one day before his 38th birthday.

He then moved to the Amiga, designing and programming Mind Walker (1986), Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon (1987), and Pioneer Plague (1988). Pioneer Plague was notable as the first Amiga game to make full use of the difficult to work with Hold-And-Modify mode for the in-game graphics. His final game for the platform was Knights of the Crystallion (1990):

Williams created a string of computer games from 1982 through 1990 for the Atari 8-bit family and then the Amiga which are admired for their imaginative design concepts, innovative sound and music, and skillful implementation. Necromancer is a three-stage game about a wizard growing and controlling an army of trees. Scenarios in Alley Cat include stealthily drinking from the bowls of sleeping dogs, avoiding a sweeping broom to jump inside a fish bowl, and collecting ferns atop a bookcase protected by spiders. Mind Walker, one of the first games released for the Amiga, places the player inside the head of a physics professor gone mad.

Bill Williams's first published game was Salmon Run for the Atari 8-bit computers, published by the Atari Program Exchange in 1982. He then authored two titles for Synapse Software: Necromancer (1982) and Alley Cat (1983). Alley Cat was begun by another programmer, John Harris, who abandoned the project. Synapse ported Salmon Run to the VIC-20, publishing it in 1983 under the label Showcase Software. In 1984, Synapse published the stress reduction package Relax, combining a sensor headband and mini-games providing biofeedback. The software was a collaboration between Williams and fellow Synapse game designer Kelly Jones (who wrote the 1983 Atari 8-bit game Drelbs).

Bill Williams (May 29, 1960 – May 28, 1998) was an American game designer, programmer, and author born with cystic fibrosis, an incurable genetic disorder. According to a medical encyclopedia Williams consulted when he was 12, people with cystic fibrosis weren't expected to live past the age of 13.