me Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 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 Mechscape World (the original MechScape fansite) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Observer Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 Oh wow, happy birthday Andrew! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3rkid Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 Happy 30th Drew! Better to be over the hill, than buried under it! (30k if you know what series that line came from) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
x_bow80 Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 I laughed at your user name cus i kinda thought Andrew was writing about himself. Happy B-Day Andrew 99 Pics - Range, Defence, HP, Attack, Magic, Strength, Cooking Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Death Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 Happy B-day :) By the way thats a pretty nice biography :shock: Link to Forum Games signature.[hide=TIFer Quotes]This lack of discussion value..disturbs me.English is the only language on this forum.If you use another language, you need to include a traductionbgok5jn dsgtalgOh wow, I hate everything -.-Death kinda scares me.your obsession with phallic objects shows quite clearly in your artworks.Ffs, someone put this in their sig.[/hide] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Earpy Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 Happy Birthday Andrew! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jsboutin2 Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 I don't know if he reads these foums, but: Happy birthday Andrew!!!!!!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Danqazmlp Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 Where do you get all your info? Want to be my friend? Look under my name to the left<<< and click the 'Add as friend' button!Big thanks to Stevepole for the signature!^ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skill_Caster Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 Happy 30th Drew! Better to be over the hill, than buried under it! (30k if you know what series that line came from) Friends (the TV series)? Anyways, wow, he's only 30. For some reason I imagined him much older. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
me Posted December 3, 2008 Author Share Posted December 3, 2008 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 Mechscape World (the original MechScape fansite) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M_u_s_ii_X Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 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: ⅹ Last.fm YouTube Team A vs Team B M u s ii X Rocky Keane ⅹ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Erk02 Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 Happy Birthday, cheers. :) I do English to Japanese and Japanese to English translation for free! Just keep it under 5 sentences, and PM me to use my fluency in Japanese to your advantage! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rangeor Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 Happy Birthday!!! And that was very fun to read c: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
me Posted December 3, 2008 Author Share Posted December 3, 2008 And that was very fun to read c: I'm glad some people have taken the time to read it. It started off as a short bio then kinda grew a bit. Mechscape World (the original MechScape fansite) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bobbington Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 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) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Salad Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 WTF? Only 30 years old? Wow, hes good hes director of one of the most popular game in the world :o Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BBC3 Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 so young for his wealth. true success story. 4000000657th to 99 cookin555555406th to 99 flethcin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toad Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 his bday on the second? my mates bday too today had too many rofl happy 30th.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Star_Fox Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 already 30 years old. i first knew him when he was about 25. but he's still young for the founder of a million dollar company :thumbsup: . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3rkid Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 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* Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
me Posted December 3, 2008 Author Share Posted December 3, 2008 his bday on the second? my mates bday too today had too many rofl happy 30th.. No as stated in the first line his Birthday is on the 3rd. I'm in the UK. Mechscape World (the original MechScape fansite) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bombing_7000 Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 wow... awesome thread. I would like to say happy birthday to Andrew and thank you you for such a good game. Also, thanks for this aswesome biography! I actually read every single word :) ~Bomn Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Georgelemmons Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 Awsome biography! Nice research :thumbsup: Thanks to Uno for the awsome sig <3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Star_Fox Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 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: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3rkid Posted December 3, 2008 Share Posted December 3, 2008 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) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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