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 f ...

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

Naughty Dog Naughty Dog, LLC (formerly JAM Software, Inc.) is an American First-party developer, first-party video game developer based in Santa Monica, California, Santa Monica, California. Founded by Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin in 1984, the studio was acqu ...

with childhood friend Jason Rubin in 1986, which released games including '' Crash Bandicoot'' and '' Jak & Daxter''. Prior to founding Naughty Dog, Gavin worked in

LISP A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lispi ...

at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

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 university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...

, 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 ...

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, ''Math 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 Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry and promoted th ...

. 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 '' Crash Bandicoot'' 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 outsourced ...

'' 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 (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 Flektor was a web application that allowed users the ability to create and “ mashup” their own content (photos, videos, music, etc.) and share it via email, on social networking websites MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, Digg, eBay or on personal b ...

with former HBO 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,

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 (United States), Democratic Party, Obama was the first Af ...

. Gavin left Fox Interactive Media in 2008. In 2009, he and Rubin announced a new social game startup called

Monkey Gods Monkey is a common name that may refer to most mammals of the infraorder Simiiformes, also known as the simians. Traditionally, all animals in the group now known as simians are counted as monkeys except the apes, which constitutes an incomple ...

, 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