Richard Thames Rowan

Richard was born in Missouri in 1974 as an identical twin under the zodiac sign of Gemini. He developed an interest in games at a young age, beginning his first game design at the age of 4 trying to create new rules for the "game" Cootie so that it didn't suck. He designed many amateur games and co-wrote with his brother throughout his childhood and adolescence in Missouri, Washington, Colorado, and Oklahoma.

In 1990, he enrolled in Western Washington University where he spent far more time playing Dungeons & Dragons and Axis & Allies than actually studying, but eventually graduated in 1997 with a Bachelor of Arts in Gaming Systems & Applications, a self-designed major. During this time, he worked for a retail hobby game store which further contributed to his absorption with board games and RPGs.

In 1995, he began working full time in R&D at Wizards of the Coast. As the playtest coordinator, he worked on almost every non-RPG that Wizards developed from 1995-1997. Concurrently with his time at Wizards, he co-founded his first company Rubicon Games and purchased the Everway line from Wizards as well as worked on several new properties.

In 1997, he left Wizards, got married and changed his name, and started working in the computer game industry with Microsoft Game Studios. Over the next 10 years, he worked on nearly 40 MMOs, PC games, Xbox games, casual download games, web games, Windows Messenger games, and Xbox Live Arcade games.He also started and ran a paper RPG company, Gaslight Press, which has since suspended operation but may return to active production at some point.

In 2005, his daughter Emily was born, and in 2007 he left Microsoft to found his own studio just in time for the economy to collapse, whereupon he joined another startup MMO game studio, The Amazing Society as the Executive Producer and is currently working on a kids MMO based in the Marvel universe.