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Carl Sanford Joslyn Petersen (born September 16, 1955) is a game designer.
Petersen was born in St. Louis, Missouri and attended University of California, Berkeley, majoring in zoology.
He is a well-known fan of H.P. Lovecraft, whose work he first encountered in a World War II Armed Services edition of The Dunwich Horror and other Weird Tales found in his father's library. In 1974 Dungeons & Dragons brought his interest to role-playing games. His interest for role-playing games and H.P. Lovecraft were fused when he became principal author of the game Call of Cthulhu, published 1981, and many scenarios and background pieces thereafter. While working for Chaosium he co-authored the third edition of RuneQuest, for which he also co-wrote the critically acclaimed Trollpack, and a number of other Gloranthan supplements.
He worked some time for Microprose, where he is credited for work between 1989 and 1992 on the games Darklands, Hyperspeed, Lightspeed, Sid Meier's Pirates! and Sword of the Samurai. He also made minor contributions for Civilization.
Primarily interested by the first-person shooter Wolfenstein 3D, Petersen joined id Software about 10 weeks before the December 1993 release of Doom and in that time created 19 levels for it (of which 8 were based to some extent on early drafts by Tom Hall). He later created 17 of the levels for Doom II, and 7 levels for Quake. His Lovecraftian influences also affected some of the monster design for these games.
He left id Software for Ensemble Studios in June 1997. He has there worked as a game designer on several of their Age of Empires titles, including Rise of Rome, Age of Kings, and The Conquerors.
He is a Mormon, a fact which has apparently never conflicted with his use of Satanic themes in many of his games.
References and further reading
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