Guild Wars 2

Jeff Strain is a game programmer and one of the three founders of ArenaNet. He served ArenaNet and NCsoft as the leader of the Art and Production teams and President of Product Development respectively. He was previously the lead programmer of Blizzard’s MMORPG World of Warcraft; he also created the StarCraft campaign editor and worked on Diablo and Warcraft III. He is credited as a programmer and executive producer for Guild Wars.

He left NCsoft in August 2009 under amicable terms with the company.¹ On November 23, 2009, it was announced that Jeff had founded Undead Labs, to create a zombie game for the major consoles, called State of Decay.

Patrick Wyatt is a game programmer and one of the three co-founders of ArenaNet.¹ He was the leader of the Network and Technology teams and a programmer for Guild Wars. Before the founding of ArenaNet, he was working in Blizzard Entertainment where he was the Vice President of Research and Development and a senior programmer. Wyatt was the leader of Battle.net gaming network’s programming and a major contributor on the multiplayer parts of Blizzard’s popular games including StarCraft, Diablo and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.¹ Having been in Blizzard for more than eight years, his work also includes earlier Blizzard games like Lost Vikings and Rock N’ Roll Racing.

On February 24, 2010, he became the Chief Operations Officer for En Masse Entertainment, along with other industry veterans.¹ The first official En Masse title, an MMORPG titled TERA, launched in 2011 in South Korea and 2012 in North America and Europe.

Patrick was employed by Undead Labs on January 30th, 2014, where he works with Jeff Strain, another co-founder of ArenaNet.

And the one who stayed behind:

Mike O’Brien is the president and co-founder of ArenaNet and executive producer of its games Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2.¹ He led the design and content creation teams of the original Guild Wars.²

Before co-founding ArenaNet, he worked as a company director and a lead programmer at Blizzard Entertainment where he developed the 3D rendering engine of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and led the development of Battle.net. He also worked on Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, Diablo and StarCraft, where he, among other things, designed and created the MPQ archives used in all Blizzard games after Diablo. Mike O’Brien was featured as one of the most influential people in the computer and video game industry on PC Gamer’s September 1999 cover story “Game Gods”.

O’Brien also previously developed an Apple II emulator for Windows, AppleWin, and old DOS ASCII game, Pyro 2.

I think this infographic is also relevant to this post:

http://dl.pcgamer.com/other%20files/dna2.jpg

Oh man, I love copy pasterinos!

because anyone cares…if we did we’d just google it

I was promised fun. I am disappointed.

And their CV with Blizzard is likely the a contributing factor of getting NCSOFT to buy ANet yet grant the company relative autonomy. It was very prestigious for a young game company in South Korea to get three Blizzard senior employees back in 2000.

Rumor is if NCSOFT ever wants to get rid of ANet, ANet gets to keep the GW/GW2 IP. And ANet can also choose to end the relationship with NCSOFT if so desired, with likely a buyout payment. But as long as NCSOFT chooses to act as ANet’s banker during development, there’s no reason for ANet to leave.

But all of that is just rumor …

Edit: Brainfart

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Nothing fun about those facts.

Just tells us that Mike O’Brien missed his chance to leave ANet on time, now being stuck with developing GW2 instead of something new and interesting for the rest of his life.

One still has to wonder why you’re still here. After all, you seem to have nothing but simmering hatred for this game yet you can’t seem to let go.

Nah, I enjoy the game for what it is. Best waiting simulator ever.