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 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. G ...

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 and Daxter ''Jak and Daxter'' is a platform 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 Re ...

''. Prior to founding Naughty Dog, Gavin worked in the

LISP Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...

programming language 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 L ...

Education

Gavin earned a Bachelor of Science in Neurobiological Science from

Haverford College Haverford College ( ) is a private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Haverford, Pennsylvania, United States. It was founded as a men's college in 1833 by members of the Religious Society of Fr ...

. He studied for a Ph.D. at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

, conducting research for the

Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) in La Cañada Flintridge, California, Crescenta Valley, United States. Founded in 1936 by Cali ...

on the Mars Rover Vision Project, under advisor Rod Brooks. As a student, Gavin learned the

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, ''Maths Jam'', in 1985. In 1989, they sold '' Keef the Thief'' to

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

. 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 1996 until 1999, and later the ''

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

to Sony Computer Entertainment America (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 Oriented Object Lisp (GOOL) and its successor Game Oriented Assembly Lisp (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 Home Box Office (HBO) is an American pay television service, which is the flagship property of namesake parent-subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc., itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The overall Home Box Office business unit is based a ...

executive Jason R. Kay. In May 2007, the company was sold to Fox Interactive Media, 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 Myspace (formerly stylized as MySpace, currently myspace; and sometimes my␣, with an elongated Whitespace character#Substitute images, open box symbol) is a social networking service based in the United States. Launched on August 1, 2003, it w ...

, and

MTV MTV (an initialism of Music Television) is an American cable television television channel, channel and the flagship property of the MTV Entertainment Group sub-division of the Paramount Media Networks division of Paramount Global. Launched on ...

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 was the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American president in American history. O ...

. 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 21st-century American male writers