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Andrew Gower - Happy 30th + Biography


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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

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Mechscape World (the original MechScape fansite)

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Happy B-day :)

 

 

 

By the way thats a pretty nice biography :shock:

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Where do you get all your info?

 

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

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His stated interests include karate, sailing, computer programming, playing the keyboard, reading science fiction, playing board games and flying kites. He also thinks that penguins are cool, dedicating a page on his old website to them.

 

 

 

SAILING SKILL OMG!!!

 

 

 

Happy birthday Andrew. ::'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Penguins = win. :thumbsup:

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Good little (or not so little) post there!

 

 

 

Happy birthday to the true Runescape god.... may your GP's be coming for long to see! ( mean gold pieces not general practitioner........ ill health would be a poor birthday wish! :P)

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already 30 years old. i first knew him when he was about 25. but he's still so young for the head of a million dollar company :thumbsup: .

 

 

 

*Cough* 100 Million Dollar Plus company/corporation *cough*

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already 30 years old. i first knew him when he was about 25. but he's still so young for the head of a million dollar company :thumbsup: .

 

 

 

*Cough* 100 Million Dollar Plus company/corporation *cough*

 

 

 

when is it that you'll stop trying to be a smartass and try posting something that'll contribute something.

 

 

 

seriously, is your ego that big? :roll:

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already 30 years old. i first knew him when he was about 25. but he's still so young for the head of a million dollar company :thumbsup: .

 

 

 

*Cough* 100 Million Dollar Plus company/corporation *cough*

 

 

 

when is it that you'll stop trying to be a smartass and try posting something that'll contribute something.

 

 

 

seriously, is your ego that big? :roll:

 

 

 

Sorry I offended you so much.

 

 

 

By the way that wasn't my first post on this thread:

 

 

 

Happy 30th Drew!

 

 

 

Better to be over the hill, than buried under it!

 

 

 

(30k if you know what series that line came from)

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