Welcome

Welcome to Outerheaven. I'm Phillip Saltzman, a programmer by trade and your host for this site. It's been a dream of mine to make video games, and in that pursuit of that dream I enrolled in the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University where I worked on a lot of great projects. They also helped me find an internship at Electronic Arts and my current job at Microsoft. To date I have been credited on four titles: Sims 2 (XBox/PS2/GCN), Viva Pinata, Forza Motorsport 2, and Project Gotham Racing 4.

So who am I? Well as a programmer I can be described by a few stereotypes. I play a lot of video games, watch a lot of television, and will talk anyone's ear off about programming if they let me. But so that no one can accuse me of being stereotypical, here are some other things about me that don't often come up in conversation. I have won a blue ribbon from the California State Fair. I have been to the Indianapolis 500. For two years, my picture appeared with every menu and advertisement for Northwestern University's cafeteria service. I was a finalist to become a contestant on Wheel of Fortune. I have listened to NPR every morning since the third grade. And as evidenced by the design of this site, I love camping, sailing, and the beauty of nature.

Several people have asked me what Outerheaven is. It was originally a place from the game Metal Gear Solid. But the reason I use it is that it was the name randomly assigned to my school computer in a year that they were all named after locations in video games and it stuck. There's a lot here, so make yourself at home and enjoy.