Jake Simpson

Jake Simpson is currently located in Mesa, AZ. He's British but don't hold that against him.

He started out doing C64 coding in his bedroom back in the Canterbury, UK in his teens, as did so many of the older coders in the business these days.

He worked for a porting house named Lynnsoft UK Ltd, being involved in ports of games like Bubbler (a Spectrum game that went to the C64 which was never released), Archon and Archon II (to the spectrum and C64) and Live and Let Die for the C64, Amiga and Atari ST.

From there he fled, disgusted with the way publisher Domark had conducted itself, to main stream computer, gaining a degree in Systems Analysis and working as a Cobol mainframe programmer for a few years - his 'wilderness years' as he puts it.

From there he went to the US to a Cobol consultant - 'only for a few years' he insists. 17 years he is still there.

To date Jake has spent 7 years at Midway Games in Chicago, working on Arcade games like Revolution X, Wrestlemania, The TouchMaster pub game series, NBA Jam, and some periphery involvement in the Mortal Kombat series.

Jake went to Raven Software in Wisconsin for 4.5 years being intimately involved in Heretic II, Soldier of Fortune I & II, Star Trek Elite Force and Jedi Knight II. Jake was also the author of E3 Technology of the year award winning Ghoul 2 animation system, used in Soldier of Fortune II and Jedi Knight II.

Next stop and it's EA where Jake was on the originating team for Sims2, staying with them till the product shipped. Jake then jumped to the console team of Sims Next Gen until that project was merged into the Sims 3 team, moving to The Simpsons.

Jake's next port of call was Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment where he worked on Stargate Worlds - the Stargate MMO. After that Jake spent a couple of years working remotely for Linden Lab on the hugely successful virtual world Second Life.