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April 13, 2001
OSI: Comments from Jack Benny
The following was recently posted to the Team Comments page of the Ultima Online Web site:Comments from Jack Benny
Hi! I'm Drew Adams - the Manager of Online Operations here for Ultima Online. What that means is that I manage the team that administers the servers here.
It's always strange starting out something like this... where to begin? Well, I'm a gamer and I guess that's really what brought me here. I was one of the first players in Ultima Online (started my first account over 3 years ago) and I'm a huge fan of online gaming. My background is really what got me into online gaming - in college, buddies and I used to get together and play on a LAN - that was back when nothing was out in TCP/IP and it was all IPX/ODI DOS-based gaming. Hands down, network gaming is the king. AI routines have definitely come a long way since then - but when it comes right down to it, humans do some really strange, unexpected and fun things that AI can't hold a candle to. After college, I decided to work for an ISP - I went from Network Engineering to running the Network Capacity Planning for one of the largest ISP's in the country. I had a front seat to watch online gaming go from 2-4 person games set up using KALI to full blown persistent worlds like Ultima Online.
Coming to work for Origin/EA was really just the next natural step for me. I've always scanned the EA job site (http://jobs.ea.com/), and saw this one open up last year. It's always been a dream to come and work for a company like this. Coming from the "outside" of the gaming industry, I knew that one of the things I could bring to Ultima Online was a really strong feel for what the customer base was looking for from the technical teams here at OSI. One of the things I've tried to foster is communications - I post mostly on the Connectivity board at http://boards.uo.com under the pseudonym "Jack Benny". I know many of you want to know more about how things work inside the company, and I try and answer what questions I can there.
I'm excited that UO is growing and I'm looking forward to helping lead the team that will make it possible. I'm committed to the game, and I'm committed to making UO better.
Drew Adams
Manager, Online Operations
Origin Systems
EA.com
Posted by Keith at April 13, 2001 5:29 PM