WHO IS "GRASH"?
My Bio, so far...
Grash is the catch-all nickname for Gregory Walek.
Gregory holds a Bachelor’s Degree with Individual Concentration in the field of “Animation, Game Design and Production” from University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass). While an undergraduate, he was associated with The Center for Knowledge Communication (CKC), a research group within the Department of Computer Science at UMass as a teaching instructor and lecturer on multi-media. He has worked and lead several multimedia projects ranging from interactive tutors to filming an entire course on character animation for the CKC. This work culminated with a presentation on “Developing a Reusable Software Base for Interactive Multimedia” at The Massachusetts 9th Annual Undergraduate Conference.
Gregory was the Technical Director and Lead Digital Editor on the award winning Jason Hopkins's Chushingura, short film created using digital cell based animation. Chushingura, an Anime stylize presentation of Japanese history of the 47 Samurai took best of show at the 2001 Five College Film Festival. Gregory has also worked on Ewe-F-O, a short film 3D-animation, and Elucid's Dream, a short film blending live action and and 3D-Animation.
After Umass, Greg moved to Texas where he attended The Guildhall at SMU. There he studied Digital game production with a specialization in level design. The curriculum at the Guildhall involved both single player and multi-player levels using Unreal, Quake3, Half-life and Valve Source technology. Outside of the Guildhall, Greg worked on four projects as a contractor for Klear Games including the Catwoman™ and the Batman Begins™ cellphone games. Gregory also collaborated with a artist from the Guildhall to create the web based puzzle game, Quintessence. Quintessence uses the same boilerplate technology developed while at the CKC. Quintessence was submitted to the IGF and Slamdance festivals in 2005. Grash's Senior project at the Guildhall was Eclipse, the critically acclaimed mod for Half-Life 2. Greg would later be interviewed by GameTrailers TV at the 2006 CPL Finals in Dallas for Eclipse. Eclipse was a finalist at the 2006 IGF festival for best HL2 Mod.
After the Guildhall, Greg was hired at Raven Software in Wisconsin. There he worked on the highly praised action superhero RPG "MARVEL: Ultimate Alliance". Grash was responsible for creating and scripting several levels in the game, including the encounter with Mysterio. IGN would later rank Mysterio as one of the top ten villains in MUA. Greg was ultimately responsible for the Niffleheim set of levels at the end of Act 3. He also aided with scripting for converstaions, town centers, and objectives. MUA was released on PS2, PSP, X-Box, X-Box 360, PC, and a release title on PS3 and Wii. MUA has sold over 600k units (as of Jan 2007), making the game one of Activision's top 3 games for 2006.
Grash left Raven in November 2006 and is currently working on his own independent projects. He is also learning Japanese to yell out at Fenway park in 2007. Go Sox!