Andrew Scott Gavin (born June 11, 1970) is an American

video game programmer A game programmer is a software engineer, programmer, or computer scientist who primarily develops codebases for video games or related software, such as game development tools. Game programming has many specialized disciplines, all of which fall ...

, entrepreneur, and novelist. Gavin co-founded the video game company

Naughty Dog Naughty Dog, LLC (formerly JAM Software, Inc.) 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. Gav ...

with childhood friend Jason Rubin in 1986, which released games including ''

Crash Bandicoot ''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 c ...

'' and '' Jak & Daxter''. Prior to founding Naughty Dog, Gavin worked in LISP at the

MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Lab ...

Education

Gavin earned a Bachelor of Science in Neurobiological Science from Haverford College. He studied for a Ph.D. at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

, conducting research for the

Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center in the City of La Cañada Flintridge, California, United States. Founded in the 1930s by Caltech researchers, JPL is owned by NASA an ...

on the Mars Rover Vision Project, under advisor

Rod Brooks Rodney Allen Brooks (born 30 December 1954) is an Australian roboticist, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, author, and robotics entrepreneur, most known for popularizing the actionist approach to robotics. He was a Panasonic Profe ...

. 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

video games.

Career

Gavin at the Naughty Dog Wrap Party, Santa Monica, CA, 2009 Gavin and Rubin sold their first video game, ''Math Jam'', in 1985. In 1989, they sold ''

Keef the Thief ''Keef the Thief: A Boy and His Lockpick'' is a video game developed by Naughty Dog and published by Electronic Arts. It was released in 1989 for the Apple IIGS and then later ported to the Amiga and MS-DOS. ''Keef the Thief'' is a comedic sword ...

'' to

Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry and promoted the ...

. In the early 1990s, their fighting game, '' Way of the Warrior'', led to a multi-title deal with Universal Interactive Studios. Under the auspices of this Universal deal they produced the ''

'' series from 1994 until 1999, and later the ''

Jak and Daxter ''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 outsourc ...

'' series. At the end of 2000, Rubin and Gavin sold

Sony Computer Entertainment America Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), formerly known as Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE), is a multinational video game and digital entertainment company wholly owned by multinational conglomerate Sony. The SIE Group is made up of two legal co ...

(SCEA), having released 14

games, which together sold over 35 million units and generated over $1 billion in revenue. While at Naughty Dog, Gavin developed two LISP dialects for use in game development, Game Object Oriented Lisp (GOOL) and its successor

Game Oriented Assembly Lisp Game Oriented Assembly Lisp (GOAL) 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. It was written using Allegro Common Lisp and us ...

(GOAL). These included innovations in terms of language choice and design. 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 Fox Sports Digital Media, formerly known as News Corp. Digital Media and Fox Interactive Media, is a subsidiary of Fox Sports Media Group which operates Fox Sports' online properties in the United States. History Fox Interactive Media was form ...

, a division of News Corp. 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 Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the ...

. 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''. Gavin also released a dark historical fantasy novel, '' The Darkening Dream'', published in December 2011. His second novel '' Untimed'', which involves time travel, was released on December 19, 2012.

Works

Games

Bibliography

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gavin, Andy 1970 births 21st-century American novelists American video game designers American male novelists Haverford College alumni Living people Place of birth missing (living people) Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni American video game programmers Lisp (programming language) people American computer businesspeople Businesspeople from Washington, D.C. Naughty Dog people Disney people 21st-century American male writers