Games - Brad Wardell

Home > Listing Index > Games > Brad Wardell

	Games - Brad Wardell

Bradley R. Wardell (born 24 June, 1971 in Texas), commonly known as Brad Wardell, is an American residing in Michigan. He is the founder and current President and CEO of Stardock, a software development and computer games company.

Brad graduated in 1994 from Western Michigan University with a degree in Electronic Engineering. His first notable achievement was the design and implementation of Galactic Civilizations for OS/2, one of the few games ever released for that operating system. He proceeded to organize the development of OS/2 Essentials, and followed it with a second product called Object Desktop, a package of utility, skinning and desktop enhancement applications. When the OS/2 market collapsed in 1997, he led Stardock onto the Windows platform, where he designed and led the development of the PC game Entrepreneur (later Business Tycoon, now known as The Corporate Machine). His programming speciality is artificial intelligence for turn-based strategy games.

Brad was a member of Crains Detroit's 40 under 40 in 2003, and has been a finalist for Ernst & Young's Michigan Entrepreneur of the Year for 2002, 2003 and 2004.

Online personality

Brad is well-known to regulars in the skinning and customization community. He is the co-founder of WinCustomize, a site specializing in the distribution of skins and themes, and founder of JoeUser, a blog community, as well as being a moderator at Neowin, a technology news site. In the past, he was a columnist for the game websites Avault and Quarter to Three. Brad usually goes by one of two nicknames — Draginol or Frogboy. The first tends to be a personal screen name, while the latter is often used instead of his name when representing Stardock.

Brad has been criticised by members of various online forums for what they see as inappropriate promotion of his products, although often this is in response to what Brad sees as incorrect assertions made about them by other members, usually those who are hostile to what they see as the "corporate invasion" of their skinning world. These postings, while generally factual, tend to generate controversy, and as a result, he has begun to restrict his activities to those sites whose membership is not typically opposed to Stardock products.

He currently speaks on the PowerUser.TV podcast which airs weekly.

Brad is also known in the gaming world, with some controversy. While one of the most open game developers in the industry, many players believe that Brad is historically dismissive of certain criticisms of both Galactic Civilizations and Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords, especially with regards to the artificial intelligence and the complexity of many of the game's internal mechanics. After announcing a recent patch for the second game, Brad talked about the classes of users who would and would not be satisfied by the changes in the patch, dismissing the opinion of those he called "armchair game developers" - those who called parts of the game "broken" or "unusable".

When Avault reviewed the original Galactic Civilizations, the reviewer noted that the AI was doing things that didn't appear to make logical sense, and suspected it to be cheating. Brad ran the save game through a debugger, showing that the AI wasn't cheating, and demanded the review be changed to claim the AI was fine.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Brad Wardell ]

Searches on eBay

brad wardell