Casey Muratori

Casey Muratori
Born1976 (age 48–49)[1]
OccupationProgrammer
OrganizationMolly Rocket
Known for

Casey Muratori (born 1976) is an American computer programmer and game developer. He is known for his work on Bink Video[2] and Granny 3D while working at RAD Game Tools, for popularizing the concept of immediate mode GUI (IMGUI) and coining the term, and for the Handmade Hero series of educational videos.

Early life

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Muratori was raised near Framingham, Massachusetts.[3]

Muratori began programming at the age of 7 in the BASIC programming language.[4] His father was a programmer at Digital Equipment Corporation and taught Muratori how to program. Muratori's father also got programming books for Muratori to learn from.[5][3][6]

When Muratori was in high school, a childhood friend's father invited Muratori to intern at Microsoft. Muratori interviewed and was accepted. At his internship, Muratori wrote a library to load and show ANI files for mouse cursors, as well as making 3D art using 3D Studio for a different project. During his internship he also met Chris Hecker and became friends with him. Hecker invited Muratori to work with him at his startup after high school, which Muratori did instead of attending university. (He did apply to Brown University and was accepted, but moved to Washington state instead to work with Hecker.)[6] At Hecker's startup, Muratori worked with Hecker, Jon Blossom, and Jon Ross on a game that did not ship. Muratori then worked at Gas Powered Games for a while before moving on to RAD Game Tools.[3]

Career

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Starting in 1999,[4] Muratori worked for about five years[7] at RAD Game Tools (now part of Epic Games, having been acquired in 2021), a company developing middleware for the video game industry. At RAD Game Tools, Muratori initially worked on Larrabee.[3] He then worked on Bink 2, a video compression program which video games use to render cutscenes.[2] Bink has been used in over 15,000 games as of 2012.[5] He also developed an internal debugging tool named Moustache[3] as well as a 3D character animation system called Granny.[5]

In 2005, he recorded a video lecture which coined the term immediate mode GUI (IMGUI) and popularized the concept. Immediate mode GUI is contrasted with the more mainstream object-oriented "retained mode" GUI frameworks such as Qt.[8][9] For a time, he hosted a forum to discuss the subject.[10] Besides immediate mode GUIs, he also developed the n-way linear quaternion blend and the first geometric optimizations for the Gilbert–Johnson–Keerthi (GJK) algorithm.[11]

After leaving RAD Game Tools, Muratori started his own game development studio, Molly Rocket, in 2004.[12][13] At Molly Rocket he spent 3.5 years as the sole developer of a video game, Sushi Bar Samurai, "a game about making sushi for ghosts caught between worlds". A demo of the game was playable at PAX 2008. Muratori decided not to release the game because "[i]t doesn't really communicate anything."[5]

Muratori published a novel, The Technician, in 2011. He planned to release another novel, Three Stars, in 2012, but the book was never published.[14]

From around 2012[15] to 2016,[16] Muratori worked on Jonathan Blow's video game The Witness, where he rewrote the movement system (in particular, working on collision detection systems)[4] and helped to extend the world editor.[17] He documented his development progress in a series called Witness Wednesdays.[18]

In 2014, Muratori began a video series entitled Handmade Hero, whose goal was to show the creation of an entire video game from scratch. The videos were live-streamed on Twitch and archives were uploaded to YouTube.[17] As of 2025, the series has over 660 episodes, each one 1–3 hours long.[19][4] The series spawned the Handmade Network and Handmade Cities, two communities of programmers and software projects that were inspired by Handmade Hero.[12] Muratori also held conferences called HandmadeCon.[12]

As of 2016, he was also working on 1935, a narrative-driven game set in 1930s New York about organized crime.[11]

In 2020, Muratori announced an upcoming programming course focused on "fundamentals that apply to all programs in all languages" called Star Code Galaxy. As of 2025, Star Code Galaxy has not been released.[20][4]

In 2023, Muratori began teaching an online course called Performance-Aware Programming.[21]

He has spoken at various conferences including a keynote talk, "Digital Due Process", at FUTO's Don't Be Evil Summit in 2024,[22] and the Better Software Conference 2025.[23]

Personal life

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As of 2025, Muratori resides in Seattle, Washington.[24][25]

From 2008 to 2020, Muratori co-hosted a podcast called the Jeff and Casey Show with RAD Game Tools founder Jeff Roberts.[26]

He composes music on the piano.[5][27]

Works

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Video games

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Year Title Role Ref.
2016 The Witness Programmer [28]
2024 Braid: Anniversary Edition Interviews [28]

Books

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Year Title Role Ref.
2011 The Technician Author [5][29][30][31]
2020 Meow the Infinite Author and/or illustrator [32]
2022 Meow the Infinite: Book Two Author and/or illustrator [33]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Casey Muratori (May 2, 2024). "I wasn't born until 1976 and hadn't heard a lot of the music from the 1970s until the past few years. Most music prior to the mid-80s wasn't something I was familiar with growing up. This is not nostalgia, this is just my assessment of how much actually interesting stuff was being done in each time period". X.
  2. ^ a b Jeff Roberts. "Credits - Bink Video". RAD Game Tools. Retrieved June 2, 2025.
  3. ^ a b c d e "Intro to C on Windows - Day 5 Q&A". YouTube. November 16, 2014. Retrieved June 1, 2025.
  4. ^ a b c d e Adam Gordon Bell (March 1, 2021). "Video Game Programming From Scratch". CoRecursive Podcast. Retrieved June 2, 2025.
  5. ^ a b c d e f Todd, Hamish (July 20, 2012). "He worked on it for three years… and then threw it away". Destructoid. Retrieved June 1, 2025.
  6. ^ a b Lukasz Sciga. "Casey Muratori on his work experience". YouTube.
  7. ^ Brad Gallaway (September 16, 2008). "Interview with Casey Muratori on Sushi Bar Samurai". GameCritics. Retrieved June 2, 2025.
  8. ^ Casey Muratori. "Immediate Mode Graphical User Interfaces (IMGUI)". Molly Rocket Forum. Archived from the original on August 22, 2007.
  9. ^ Sean Barrett (September 2005). "Immediate Mode GUIs" (PDF). Game Developer Magazine.
  10. ^ "IMGUI". Archived from the original on May 15, 2006.
  11. ^ a b "Casey Muratori". PWLConf 2016. Retrieved June 1, 2025.
  12. ^ a b c Rowan Crawford (October 18, 2016). "The people trying to save programming from itself". Kill Screen. Retrieved June 1, 2025.
  13. ^ Jeriaska. "Interview: Auditory Memoirs of a Sushi Bar Samurai". Game Developer. Retrieved June 2, 2025.
  14. ^ Casey Muratori. "Three Stars: A most dignified comedy, coming 2012". Molly Rocket. Archived from the original on July 25, 2012.
  15. ^ Casey Muratori (December 12, 2012). "Walk Monster". Casey's Tech Stuff.
  16. ^ Casey Muratori (February 15, 2016). "The Witness - Boat Glitch Debugging". YouTube.
  17. ^ a b Phill Cameron (January 8, 2015). "Handmade Hero's new lessons about old-school game programming". Gamasutra. Archived from the original on January 9, 2015.
  18. ^ Jonathan Blow (May 23, 2014). "Casey's Witness Wednesday on Interpolation". The Witness. Retrieved June 2, 2025.
  19. ^ "Episode Guide". Retrieved June 1, 2025.
  20. ^ "Star Code Galaxy". Molly Rocket. Archived from the original on March 2, 2023.
  21. ^ David Cassel (April 16, 2023). "When 'Clean Code' Hampers Application Performance". The New Stack. Retrieved June 2, 2025.
  22. ^ "Casey Muratori (@MollyRocket) - Digital Due Process". YouTube. April 17, 2024. Retrieved June 1, 2025.
  23. ^ "BSC 2025". Retrieved June 1, 2025.
  24. ^ "cmuratori (Casey Muratori)". GitHub. Archived from the original on April 25, 2025. Retrieved June 2, 2025.
  25. ^ "Casey Muratori (@cmuratori) / X". X. Retrieved June 2, 2025.
  26. ^ "The Jeff and Casey Show". The Jeff and Casey Show. Retrieved June 2, 2025.
  27. ^ "Piano Practice". Molly Rocket. Archived from the original on March 20, 2012.
  28. ^ a b "Casey Muratori - Video Game Credits". MobyGames. Retrieved June 1, 2025.
  29. ^ "The Technician by Casey Muratori". Goodreads. Retrieved June 1, 2025.
  30. ^ Casey Muratori (December 12, 2011). "The Technician: A new novel about cats, dogs, and government hitmen". Molly Rocket. Archived from the original on July 28, 2012.
  31. ^ "The Technician by Casey Muratori". Barnes & Noble. Retrieved June 2, 2025.
  32. ^ "Meow the Infinite (Meow the Infinite, #1) by Anna Rettberg". Goodreads. Retrieved June 1, 2025.
  33. ^ "Meow the Infinite: Book Two (Meow the Infinite, #2) by Anna Rettberg". Goodreads. Retrieved June 1, 2025.
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