The universe has been hungry the past couple of years, and now it’s threatening another member of the extended MMORPG developer community. This morning, we learned from a fellow dev that MMO developer Mike Sellers has been diagnosed with inoperable stage four glioblastoma – a particularly devastating brain cancer. His daughter has opened a GoFundMe to raise money to help him with the medical and travel bills currently accumulating as he’s undergoing “an aggressive course of chemotherapy and radiation treatments to slow and hopefully reverse the spread of the cancer.”
Sellers is best known to our audience for his lead design work on multiple pioneering MMOs, including Meridian 59, Ultima Online, and Realm of the Mad God. He consulted on even more MMOs before moving to academia; he’s been the director of the game design degree program at Indiana University in Bloomington for the last several years, and you may even have seen his work on Gamasutra, Twitter, and his own blog.
Our thoughts are with Sellers and his family; you can help them here.
