Will Harvey

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Will Harvey (born ~1967) is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and game programmer who first made his mark in the video game industry when he was just fifteen and still in high school. Harvey is the Founder of IMVU, an instant messaging company, and of There, Inc., an MMOG company.

In high school, Harvey was taking a computer programming class. His teacher asked the class if anyone knew anything about assembly language. Though he did not, Harvey raised his hand. The teacher said, "Good!" and asked him to give a presentation on it the following day. Harvey says, "I learned a lot about assembly language that night!"

After his presentation, Harvey continued to learn assembly language by reading Roger Wagner's "Assembly Lines" column in the back of Softalk magazine. His experience with learning assembly language, the computer's lowest level language, led to his development of his first game 1982's Lancaster. The need for music in this game led directly to his development of 1984's Music Construction Set (MCS) for the Apple II. MCS was published by Electronic Arts (EA) and was an instant hit. EA quickly ported it to various platforms of the era.

After high school, Harvey studied computer science at Stanford University, where he earned his Bachelors, Masters, and Ph.D.. While earning these degrees, he started and ran several small game development companies.

After earning his degrees, Harvey went on to become Vice President of Engineering at Rocket Science Games, a now-defunct computer game developer.

In the 1990s, Harvey founded Sandcastle, an Internet technology company that addressed the network latency problems facing developers of interactive applications. Sandcastle was acquired by Adobe Systems in less than a year.

After leaving Adobe, Harvey went on to found There, Inc. in 1998 in a small room in his parent's house. From this room, he recruited the technology team and built an end-to-end prototype before raising capital to grow the company and hire the management team. There's first product was There, a virtual 3D world designed for online socializing.

Harvey is now the Founder and CEO of IMVU, a 3D instant messaging company.

[edit] Games

Harvey has 5 games, 1 virtual world, and 1 avatar chat product to his name. Other than IMVU and There, all but his first game were published by Electronic Arts. Games to his credit include: