As a child, Vince Lee was first exposed to video games after joining the Cub Scouts. On a field trip to the Lawrence Hall of Science, an interactive museum in Berkeley, he had the opportunity to play Star Trek and Lunar Lander, both text-based games played on a teletype which printed to rolls of yellow paper. Despite the primitive games on offer, the experience sparked Lee's interest in games. A few years later, his father assembled a Heathkit H-89 personal computer from a kit, the family's first computer. With little software available, Lee learned to program in BASIC and assembly language and began making games for it. At fifteen years old, he sold his first game.
Lee later attended college at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied his Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering for four years, before staying on for a year and a half to earn a Master's degree in robotics and control systems. He spent much of his time programming, including work for a number of Amiga software developers, though he considered it a hobby.
Still as an undegraduated, at a User's Group meeting he met a LucasArts producer who left him his number. After leaving school, he was offered work at IBM and Exxon Production Research Houston, but turned both down to take a job as a programmer for Lucasfilm Games, which he started in Spring 1991.
Lee's early work involved developing tools on the personal computer and converting SCUMM adventure games to the Amiga and Sega CD. He started developing image-compression technology in January 1992. He and other LucasArts colleagues attended the Winter '92 CES at Chicago and were exposed by the ambitious "multimedia" CD-ROM titles.
It was while he was working on the Amiga version of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis when the LucasArts GM suggested to work as a programmer for the CD-ROM title; the intimate knowledge of multimedia technology, as well as his "good gaming sense", eventually brought him to Star Wars: Rebel Assault, what would be the company's first CD-ROM exclusive project.
Lee developed SMUSH, a custom tool that compressed the game data; eventually it was expanded to be a design and editing tool. This earned him the position of project leader and designer on Rebel Assault. He compiled the game missions and cutscenes as they were delivered from the artists, focusing also on game play elements, playability and smoothess, but he was getting involved in many directions simultaneously as well. Lee also was open to suggestions from Q/A, and had the final decision for their incorporation. Lead tester Brett Tosti commented that Lee's "programming genius" immediately detected a problem and could fix bugs when they were pointed out to him. Sometimes Lee was communicating with the support department of Microsoft, and after being told that something was not possible, in some minutes he could come up with a solution.
Lee also did most of the sound work of the game, choosing portions of the original Musical score for each part of the game; he recorded his choices with a boombox, before discussing his preferences with Michael Land and his sound team.
The whole process challenged Lee, who was busy with many things simultaneously and worked at nights and weekends, especially during the last months of post-production. Casey Donahue Ackley oversaw the last stages as Associate Producer, and facilitated communication with the art department. Lee and Ackley authored the game's manual and reference card.