Will Harvey

Career After acquiring a Commodore PET in 1979, which he paid for with earnings from a newspaper delivery route and splitting the cost with his parents, the first program Harvey developed was a project for a mathematics class to implement Wythoff's game. He then wrote Grade Base Manager, a program to automate a norm-referenced test for his mother, a teacher at Menlo College.

Because he needed to transcribe sheet music for the computer to generate music for Lancaster, he developed a program which was published by Electronic Arts in 1984 as Music Construction Set. It was a tremendous success, described by Paul Freiberger of InfoWorld as "one spectacular accident".

Following the success of Music Construction Set, Harvey ported Atari Games's Marble Madness to the Apple II and the Commodore 64 (1986) and developed two original games, Zany Golf (1988) and The Immortal (1990). All three projects were for Electronic Arts. The Immortal and Zany Golf were written for the Apple IIGS and ported to other systems by EA.

Other companies In the mid-90s, Harvey founded Sandcastle, an Internet technology company that addressed the network latency problems underlying virtual worlds and massively multiplayer games. Sandcastle was acquired by Adobe Systems.

Harvey was one of the chief technical architects at San Francisco game studio Rocket Science Games, a company which failed in 1997.

In 1998, Harvey went on to found There, Inc., which produced a virtual 3D world designed for online socializing.

In 2003, Harvey founded IMVU, which combined the idea of avatars with instant messaging.

Games Lancaster (1983, Silicon Valley Systems) Music Construction Set (1984, Electronic Arts) Marble Madness (1986, Electronic Arts), port of the arcade game Zany Golf (1988, Electronic Arts) The Immortal (1990, Electronic Arts)