me

http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/phillip ... arged.html This was also the grand unveiling of Jagex's new name: "Jagex.com of the UK". It is twice as catchy and thrice as cool and to think otherwise would make you a fool.

The Jagex in Jagex LTD stands for Java Gaming Experts. However the origin of the name is revealed in these two pictures: and The logo was then adapted for Jagex Software: See this TIF thread for the relevant thread on that topic.

Those pictures are around ten years old - I've not posted any recent ones.

It was Biased Banning Raises Brows. The editorial made some pretty serious allegations which were apparently untrue, and is no longer on tip.it.

Indeed. Happy 34th Maria!

No as stated in the first line his Birthday is on the 3rd. I'm in the UK.

I'm glad some people have taken the time to read it. It started off as a short bio then kinda grew a bit.

I researched it for http://z11.invisionfree.com/Gower_Archive/index.php - my sources are: * Andrew Gower's old website (no longer online) called "Andrew's Amazing Homepage" * Old websites relating to Cambridge University (some are no longer around) * Andrew's posts on usenet (accessible through Google Groups) * Archived versions of old RuneScape.com and Jagex.com pages, and posts on tip.it and other forums * Statement from former schoolmate was made on Wikipedia (although I confirmed his identity) * Old IRC logs (mostly mine since I was on #RuneScape back in 2001) * Interviews and news articles * Etc

Today, the 3rd of December 2008, Andrew Christopher Gower is 30 years old, so I thought Id write a bit about him. Ill start off with some words from former schoolmate Nick Shanks: "Well he looks like a typical geek, skinny and nerdy, and he has long-ish (for a guy) brown hair. He was mostly into maths and playing around on the Arc's command line (that you get from pressing F12) and it's tokenised BASIC interpreter, since that's what our school had. Our physics teacher would give up his lunch break one day a week to supervise us in the computer lab, and when that was closed we would generally hang out by the computers in the library. We didn't work on the same programs, but I was always asking him for advice on programming matters (as he was in the year above me). Oh, and yes, he's a nice guy :-)". His stated interests include karate, sailing, computer programming, playing the keyboard, reading science fiction, sports (squash and table tennis), RPGs, playing board games (especially chess) and flying kites. He also thinks that penguins are cool, dedicating a page on his old website to them. He is a Catholic, and has had involvement with the Cambridge University Catholic Chaplaincy and folk choir. He is also a fan of the Xbox 360, the PSP, Civilization and Lego and one of his all time favourite Spectrum games is Chaos by Jullian Gollop. One of his early games had references in it to Discworld, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Babylon 5 and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Andrew has stated that he doesnt like software patents as he feels they give them out far too easily. When he was 7 he played Dungeons & Dragons with his father and brothers and started computer programming. At the age of 16 he had his first bit of work experience as a technician in the audio/visual department of Nottingham CTC. Around this time he was also creating games for the Atari ST with Paul and Ian Gower and friend Peter Oliver including a Worms clone and a Doom clone (published by Goodmans) under the name of Cunning & Devious Games (cunning and devious being his two favourite words he later re-used both on other projects). He then moved to the PC working on an Atari emulator, writing guides to C, getting into heavy assembler, and most importantly getting to grips with Java. He left his home of Nottingham to attend the University of Cambridge for a BA Hons in Computer Science. He programmed multiplayer Java games, did other programming tasks and wrote game reviews. He put many of his Java-based minigames on his website (which ended up being the basis for FunOrb) and created a Java Audio+Graphics EXtension, the basis for the JAGeX name which he then traded under before it became a proper company. He also posted on usegroups, creating the alt.comp.lang.java-games and posting threads about his own work as well as helping others with problems. He started working for GamesDomain as part of a 3 month summertime job in 1999, and as well as writing multiplayer games for them he also wrote game reviews and did other tasks. At University he was introduced to MUDs, and decided to make his own but in the end decided that there were far too many out there so he should make a graphical MUD to differentiate his game, so in mid-1998 he started working on the isometric DeviousMUD. In 1999 he scrapped and re-wrote it, but left the graphics in tact, and on the 28th of March 1999 he released a 1-week public beta. He then had a break from the project, not resuming work until October 1999 where he got Paul on board to do the graphics while he re-did the engine to be 3D with sprites. In January 2000 Andrew registered the RuneScape.com domain (the new name of the project), and by March 2000 he got people who played his other games to alpha test it. After leaving University in 2001 he launched RuneScape and operated it from a bedroom in his parents house. He was surprised by its success and excited by the number of players. Andrew spent much of his early time being the only coder on the project (although others such as Paul Gower and Rob Law did RuneScripting and helped out a lot), but considered the hours he spent trying to stop cheating sooooo boring. He was quite open and regularly chatted on IRC with RuneScape players, posted on the tip.it forum and had a publicly viewable webcam called the JagexCam so people could watch him work. By late 2001 the Internet bubble was bursting, meaning the ad clicks that he relied upon became insufficient to fund the game. This economic problem was compounded with technical difficulties relating to rollbacks, item duplication, and other abuses such as giving high level armour to low level secondary accounts. He had serious problems with his server, crashing and resorted to asking on news groups and the RuneScape website for support on how to solve them. The aforementioned problems led Paul Gower to state on the 8th of November 2001: Yes it is very possible - this game is likely to be shut down. Moderator is right. We did have a lot of fun with it but these last 2 months have been an absolute nightmare for us. We'll have to see where it goes from here, but don't be surprised if we shut runescape down in the near future because things are getting ridiculous. If we don't shut it down don't be too shocked if this situation causes us to do a complete character reset. The following day Paul Gower posted a back down, stating: Ok Maybe I did overstate things a little and the character reset thing was a bit of a spur of the moment thing which i doubt will happen, seamed a good idea for a few minutes because I was angry. As to it shutting down, well we'll try not to but the possibility is increasing right now, as we wonder if doing this is worth the stress anymore. Fortunately Andrew kept with the game, and decided to re-code the server core and, more importantly, go commercial. He brought Constant Tedder on board to set Jagex up as a proper company, launched RuneScape premium in February 2002 to cover the cost of his 3 new servers and finally took RuneScape out of beta. He became dedicated to the game, and in July 2002 aborted his holiday because there were server problems which had to be fixed ("it seems I can't even take 1 week a year away from running this game!"). The rest is, as you know, history. Andrew and Paul Gower are now worth an estimated £109m and still own the majority of the company, although the sold a minority stake to Insight Venture Partners back in October 2005. Constant Tedder is no longer the head of Jagex, having been replaced by Geoff Iddison (formerly of PayPal Europe) in October 2007, however Constant still sits on the Board of Directors. Paul works as a Content Developer. And Andrews role at Jagex is Lead Developer, and he works to bring all the disparate elements together and help give creative vision to Jagexs various projects. However, according to Mod Steven H Andrew Gower is very security conscious and apparently spends a lot of his time on security. Andrew Gower is human and can get emotional over things which he feels is unfair. He was rightly annoyed about programme which removed advertising and publicly stated I am EXTREMELY pissed off. Those adverts are all that pay to keep the free game running. What a great way to thank us for running the free game for you, by deliberately cutting all the adverts off! NOT! before going on to say I am so extremely annoyed with this total stab in the back by a supposed 'fan' community who are actually just harming us. However, he is not stubborn, and can back down if he feels he went too far. In response to one tip.it times article in 2006 he wrote Posting untruths about our policies does not make us happy. We are considering legal action against the author of this article on the basis of libel. However, he later stated: I would just like to say I am sorry for overreacting in a previous post I made, regarding an editorial piece on tip.it. I was very upset by it at the time and can see now that I went a bit far in what I said. He then goes on to say Unfortunately I'm a bit of a computer geek, I'm not very good at PR (pretty obvious that!) People seem to think of me as some sort of corporate suit, and forget that I'm actually still a programmer who started this game as a hobby. I don't normally get involved in customer support or rules enforcement at all I try to stick to what I'm best at which is sitting in a darkened room and programming the game itself. My absolute aim above everything else is to make the best game I can. So Happy Birthday Andrew You may only be human, but you are a pretty awesome human

http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Star_sprite On a side note Jagex own http://www.alienscape.com/

Let's compare the above two, one by Darren and one by Tom. Both feature a stylised fortified structure with light emanating from a central entrance with vertical beams of the same colour on the edge of the structure and a clear limited path to get to the entrance. Could this be a coincidence, or something more? All of the art on MechScape World comes from people who've worked for Jagex. But seeing as the artists don't state if it is for MechScape or not a proportion will be either for other projects or just done as practice. Anyone who knows for certain the origin of a specific image is not MechScape-relate is free to comment on the picture and explain the source.

The best I can give you is this quote from a February 2008 interview:

It is aimed at 18+, that doesn't necessarily mean it is unsuitable for minors. Demographics are for marketing, not content restriction.

That is unrealistic. FunOrb didn't have a fully-functioning website until its day of release, and they didn't announce it on the RuneScape website for a few days. They talked about it at E3. Mentions of MechScape directly by name: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a3e9ed54-a1e6 ... 07658.html http://www.massively.com/2008/07/15/jag ... mechscape/ http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/914/914559p2.html https://www.runescape.com/css/jagex/global-20.css https://www.runescape.com/img/jagex/logo_mechscape.gif ...and the EU trademarks. There are various other articles which mention MechScape not by name, and Jagex employees who talk about it in their CVs or portfolios. Jagex have been talking about an undisclosed project in their job vacancies for ages. If you doubt MechScape is real then do a bit of research.

At E3 they started by saying "It's nothing like RuneScape" before stating that it would be browser-based, based the same technology as RuneScape, sci-fi and aimed at an older audience (later expanded to mean 18+). Release estimate from Jagex was Q1 2009, then March 2009 and is now Spring 2009.

One theory is that there at least two species - one technological (Mechs/Robots?) and one biological (Pliigi), with potentially a third based on magic or some other mystical force.

Just thought I'd post some of the more recent potential MechScape concept art finds... Source: MechScape World Gallery.

Better than Java Gaming Experts?

* 28 March 1999: DeviousMUD beta released * Circa March 2000: RuneScape invite-only alpha released * 4 January 2001: RuneScape beta released * 6 April 2001: Asgarnia released * 26 July 2001: Item bank released * 13 August 2001: Wilderness released * 28 August 2001: Everdred gets 99 woodcutting and becomes first to max out a skill * 27 February 2002: RuneScape premium launched * 1 December 2003: RuneScape 2 beta released * 16 May 2006: RuneScape 2.1 released (major engine update)

Yeah, http://www.runescape.com/img/main/kbase ... 0x1200.jpg seems like the best source we have.

I'd assumed that it was a company that Constant Tedder set up, but it has never been explained. I am unfamiliar with the practice you refer to.

I'd guess so. I don't see why it'd be there otherwise.

The name DVD came from "digital visual disc", but the official specification doesn't define it as meaning anything. The official press release from 1995 said it meant "digital versatile disc". In 1999 they said DVD just meant DVD, but on their website they repeat that it means "digital versatile disc". Yeah. Andrew Gower originally used the Jagex name as a sole trader, and Jagex the company was originally called Meaujo (492) Limited.

Oh, JAGeX also stood for "JAGeX Audio+Graphics Extension" making it a recursive acronym:

Older folks may remember this, but while the Jagex name officially stands for Java Gaming Experts, it was originally created by Andrew Gower as an acronym of "Java Audio+Graphics Extension": ...Which by late '99 became: ...And is now: