Bill Williams (May 29, 1960 – May 28, 1998) was an American video game designer, programmer, composer, 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. 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. Late in his career he worked on a licensed title for the Nintendo Entertainment System and another for the Super NES, but became frustrated with the game business and left to attend the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and write two theological works. Williams died from cystic fibrosis in 1998, at the age of 37. Game design 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). 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 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): For almost all of these Atari 8-bit and Amiga titles, Williams did the design and programming, created the art and sound effects, and composed