Guild Wars
Guild Wars is a persistent online role-playing game set in a fantasy world, featuring cooperative and competitive play, with no monthly fee. The game is a skill-based RPG where player ability matters more than time invested or equipment collected.
I co-founded ArenaNet in 2000 with Mike O'Brien and Jeff Strain, and spent the better part of a decade helping build Guild Wars and its expansions. We raised funds in the aftermath of the "dot-bomb" financial meltdown, which saw our investment banker go out of business. We managed all the hiring, team-building, marketing, PR, HR, IT, and more. I led the creation of the ArenaNet and Guild Wars logos.
On the development side I helped design the game, and wrote 400K lines of code over seven years, or around 229 lines of code per day.
I led the development of online services, wrote the server platform and 80% of the backend services, the multi-threaded asychronous server networking code, client & server network protocols, key exchange & message encryption, forward-kinematic model animation system, crash reporting, sound/music player, model viewer, 3dsMax exporter plugin, art-processing tools, and more.
I wrote the dynamic service loader, build server, authentication server, file-patch server, matchmaking server, tournament server, chat server, database connect server, database cache server, distribution configuration management server, crash report server, game recording & playback server, billing integration servers, open proxy detection server, and more.
Guild Wars achieved 99.995% service reliability -- including all maintenance downtime -- during my tenure.