Andy Gavin | |
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Born | Andrew Scott Gavin June 11, 1970 Washington, D.C., U.S. |
Education | Haverford College (BS) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD) |
Occupations |
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Years active | 1984–present |
Employer | Naughty Dog (1984–2004) |
Andrew Scott Gavin (born June 11, 1970) is an American video game programmer, entrepreneur, and novelist. Gavin co-founded the video game company Naughty Dog with childhood friend Jason Rubin in 1986, which released games including Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter . [1] Prior to founding Naughty Dog, Gavin worked in LISP at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. [2]
Gavin earned a Bachelor of Science in Neurobiological Science from Haverford College. [3] He studied for a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, conducting research for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Mars Rover Vision Project, under advisor Rod Brooks. [4] As a student, Gavin learned the LISP computer programming language, and developed a number of custom programming languages that were later used for the graphics, controls, sounds, and artificial intelligence in Naughty Dog video games.
Gavin and Rubin sold their first video game, Math Jam, in 1985. In 1989, they sold Keef the Thief to Electronic Arts. [5] In the early 1990s, their fighting game, Way of the Warrior , led to a multi-title deal with Universal Interactive Studios. [6] Under the auspices of this Universal deal they produced the Crash Bandicoot series from 1994 until 1999, and later the Jak and Daxter series. At the end of 2000, Rubin and Gavin sold Naughty Dog to Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA), having released 14 Naughty Dog games, which together sold over 35 million units and generated over $1 billion in revenue. [7]
While at Naughty Dog, Gavin developed two LISP dialects for use in game development, Game Oriented Object Lisp (GOOL) and its successor Game Oriented Assembly Lisp (GOAL). These included innovations in terms of language choice and design. [8]
Shortly after leaving Naughty Dog in 2004, Gavin and Rubin co-founded a new Internet startup called Flektor with former HBO executive Jason R. Kay. In May 2007, the company was sold to Fox Interactive Media, a division of News Corp. [9] Fox described the company as "a next-generation Web site that provides users with a suite of Web-based tools to transform their photos and videos into dynamic slideshows, postcards, live interactive presentations, and video mash-ups." In October 2007, Flektor partnered sister company MySpace, and MTV to provide instant audience feedback via polls for the interactive MySpace / MTV Presidential Dialogues series with Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama. [10]
Gavin left Fox Interactive Media in 2008. In 2009, he and Rubin announced a new social game startup called Monkey Gods, which was working on a new version of Snood along with a casual word game called MonkWerks. [11]
Gavin also released a dark historical fantasy novel, The Darkening Dream , published in December 2011. [12] His second novel Untimed , which involves time travel, was released on December 19, 2012. [13]
Title | Release | Genre |
---|---|---|
The Darkening Dream | 2011 | Dark fantasy |
Untimed | 2012 | Time travel |
Jak and Daxter is an action-adventure video game franchise created by Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin and owned by Sony Interactive Entertainment. The series was originally developed by Naughty Dog with a number of installments being outsourced to Ready at Dawn and High Impact Games. The first game, Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, released on December 3, 2001, was one of the earliest titles for the PlayStation 2, and is regarded as a defining franchise for the console.
Mark Evan Cerny is an American video game designer, programmer, producer and media proprietor.
Naughty Dog, LLC is an American first-party video game developer based in Santa Monica, California. Founded by Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin in 1984, the studio was acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment in 2001. Gavin and Rubin produced a sequence of progressively more successful games, including Rings of Power and Way of the Warrior in the early 1990s. The latter game prompted Universal Interactive Studios to sign the duo to a three-title contract and fund the expansion of the company.
Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy is a 2001 platform video game developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the Sony PlayStation 2 on December 4, 2001, as the first game of the Jak and Daxter series. The game follows the protagonists, a young teenager named Jak, as he tries to help his friend Daxter after he is transformed into an "ottsel", a fictional hybrid of an otter and a weasel. With the help of Samos the Sage, a master of the mysterious energy called 'Eco' created by an ancient race known as the Precursors, the pair learn that they must save their world from the rogue sages Gol and Maia Acheron, who plan to flood the world with "Dark Eco", a mysterious substance which corrupts all it touches.
Crash Bandicoot is the title character and main protagonist of the Crash Bandicoot series. Introduced in the 1996 video game Crash Bandicoot, Crash is a mutant eastern barred bandicoot who was genetically enhanced by the series' main antagonist Doctor Neo Cortex and soon escaped from Cortex's castle after a failed experiment in the "Cortex Vortex". Throughout the series, Crash acts as the opposition against Cortex and his schemes for world domination. While Crash has a number of offensive maneuvers at his disposal, his most distinctive technique is one in which he spins like a tornado at high speeds and knocks away almost anything that he strikes.
Crash Bandicoot is a video game franchise originally developed by Naughty Dog as an exclusive for Sony's PlayStation console. It has seen numerous installments created by various developers and published on multiple platforms. The series consists predominantly of platform games, but also includes spin-offs in the kart racing and party game genres. The series was originally produced by Universal Interactive, which later became known as Vivendi Games; in 2008, Vivendi merged with Activision, which currently owns and publishes the franchise.
Game Oriented Assembly Lisp is a programming language, a dialect of the language Lisp, made for video games developed by Andy Gavin and the Jak and Daxter team at the company Naughty Dog.
Allegro Common Lisp is a programming language with an integrated development environment (IDE), developed by Franz Inc. It is a dialect of the language Lisp, a commercial software implementation of the language Common Lisp. Allegro CL provides the full American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Common Lisp standard with many extensions, including threads, CLOS streams, CLOS MOP, Unicode, SSL streams, implementations of various Internet protocols, OpenGL interface. The first version of Allegro Common Lisp was finished at the end of 1986, originally called Extended Common Lisp. Allegro CL is available for many operating systems including Microsoft Windows (32/64-bit), and many Unix and Unix-like, 32-bit or 64-bit, including macOS, Linux (32/64-bit), FreeBSD (32-bit), Solaris, UNICOS, and UTS. Internationalization and localization support is based on Unicode. It supports various external text encodings and provides string and character types based on Universal Coded Character Set 2 (UCS-2). Allegro CL can be used with and without its integrated development environment (IDE), which is available for Windows, Linux, and on macOS in version 8.2. The IDE includes development tools including an editor and an interface designer. Allegro CL can be used to deliver applications.
Crash Bandicoot is a 1996 platform game developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation. The player controls Crash, a genetically enhanced bandicoot created by the mad scientist Doctor Neo Cortex. The story follows Crash as he aims to foil Cortex's plans for world domination and rescue his girlfriend Tawna, a female bandicoot also created by Cortex. The game is played from a third-person perspective in which the camera trails behind Crash, though some levels feature forward-scrolling and side-scrolling perspectives.
Jason Rubin is an American video game director, writer, and comic book creator. He is best known for the Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter series of games which were produced by Naughty Dog, the game development studio he co-founded with partner and childhood friend Andy Gavin in 1986. He was the president of THQ before its closure due to bankruptcy on January 23, 2013. Rubin is the vice president of Metaverse Content at Meta Platforms.
Flektor was a web application that allowed users the ability to create and “mashup” their own content and share it via email, on social networking websites MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, Digg, eBay or on personal blogs. The company’s website (Flektor.com) launched on April 2, 2007 and over 40,000 people began utilizing its features just one month later. Flektor closed down in January 2009.
Amy Hennig is an American video game writer and director, formerly for the video game company Naughty Dog. She began her work in the industry on the Nintendo Entertainment System, with her design debut on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System game Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City. She later went to work for Crystal Dynamics, working primarily on the Legacy of Kain series. With Naughty Dog, she worked primarily on the Jak and Daxter and Uncharted series.
Way of the Warrior is a fighting game developed by Naughty Dog and published by Universal Interactive Studios for the 3DO. It was released in North America on August 30, 1994.
Jak and Daxter Collection is a 2012 collection of the remastered ports of the first three games in the Jak and Daxter series. The remasters were developed by Mass Media Games, with grounds on the originals by Naughty Dog, and published by Sony Computer Entertainment.
Babak "Bob" Rafei is an Iranian video game art director, character animator and concept artist. He is the CEO of Big Red Button Entertainment, a video game development studio he co-founded with Jeff Lander in 2009.
Bruce Straley is an American game director, artist, designer, and studio director. He previously worked for the video game developer Naughty Dog, known for his work on the video games The Last of Us and Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. Straley's first video game work was as an artist at Western Technologies Inc, where he worked on the Menacer six-game cartridge (1992) and X-Men (1993). Following this, he formed a company, Pacific Softscape, where he worked as a designer on Generations Lost (1994). After the company disbanded, Straley was eventually hired at Crystal Dynamics, where he worked as a designer on Gex: Enter the Gecko (1998) and was initially game director for Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko (1999); he left the company partway through development of the latter.
Charles Steve Zembillas is an American character designer, art director, educator, and author. Zembillas designed early concept art for games such as Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, and Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, as well as animated television series such as Wish Kid, Where's Waldo?, James Bond Jr., and Ghostbusters.
Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy is a 2017 platform game compilation developed by Vicarious Visions and published by Activision. It includes remasters of the first three games in the Crash Bandicoot series: Crash Bandicoot (1996), Cortex Strikes Back (1997), and Warped (1998); which were originally developed by Naughty Dog for the PlayStation. Initially released for the PlayStation 4, it was later ported to Nintendo Switch, Windows, and Xbox One in 2018.
Evan Wells is an American video game designer and programmer and former president of Naughty Dog. Wells's first video game was at Sega, where he worked on ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron, before moving to Crystal Dynamics in 1995 to work on Gex and Gex: Enter the Gecko. He was employed at Naughty Dog in 1998, working on several Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter titles before becoming co-president of the company alongside Stephen White in 2005; White was replaced the following year by Christophe Balestra, who retired in 2017. The two oversaw the release of the Uncharted series, and The Last of Us. Wells remained the sole president, overseeing the release of The Last of Us Part II, until Neil Druckmann's promotion to co-president in 2020. Wells announced his retirement in 2023.
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