WC News is reporting, as of yesterday, that former Origin Systems developer (and composer) Kirk Winterrowd passed away over the weekend.

Like many people who attended ‘Origin university’, Mr. Winterrowd started in quality assurance and quickly proved how capable he was in a range of roles including production manager, music composer and sound engineer. He started his game development career just out of college in 1991 as an Alpha Tester on Wing Commander’s second mission disk, Crusade. He went on to serve as Quality Assurance Project Leader on Wing Commander II and then Chris Roberts assigned him as one of the first ‘TDAs’ on Strike Commander, a role that would be called a junior designer today. In his seven years at Origin he would touch every major franchise and provide some critical pieces to the Wing Commander series that we continue to celebrate to this day. He seems to have been a major part of Origin’s famed company culture, appearing frequently in Point of Origin and even working at the Britannia Manor haunted house in 1992!

He was also the original Maniac! When Special Operations 2 brought back the character, he was tapped to perform the voice acting. Maniac’s crazed in-flight dialogue for the Morningstar missions remains firmly imprinted in the heads of Wing Commander fans, especially his post-credits Easter egg (“where the hell are you?!”). He went on to perform additional voices in the CD-ROM version of Wing Commander Privateer and several other Origin games including Bioforge, Ultima VIII Pagan and the famous ‘talkie’ FM Towns port of Ultima VI The False Prophet.

… and he produced, too. He was the project manager for the oft-forgotten (but also passionately loved) Origin FX screensaver for Windows 3. Origin FX was also his first audio credit. He would go on to work on audio on Wing Commander Armada and Wing Commander Prophecy as well as Strike Commander, Crusader, Bioforge, Longbow 2 and a host of Ultimas (Ultima VII, Serpent Isle, Silver Seed, Pagan, the Pagan SAP, The Black Gate SNES and Ultima Online). His audio work went well beyond just sounds, though: he made some great music! Mr. Winterrowd composed four very familiar tracks for Wing Commander Academy: the introduction, the mission builder theme and then the winning and losing gauntlet pieces. He went on to compose additional music for Ultima VII, Serpent Isle, Silver Seed, Crusader: No Remorse and Ultima Online.

In addition to the above, it should be noted that Winterrowd was also on the QA team for Martian Dreams. He provided the voice of Pyros in Ultima 8, and was the composer of the Sea Shanty and Seedy Tavern tracks in Ultima 7.

Our condolences to his family and friends.