Julian Gollop

Julian Gollop was born in 1965. He came of age in Harlow, England. When he was a child, his father introduced him to many different types of games, including chess, card games, and board games. His family played games regularly, choosing to play games instead of going to see films. When he was about 14 years old, Gollop started playing more complex games like Dungeons & Dragons, SPI board games, and Avalon Hill board games. After home computers became a reality while he was in secondary school, Gollop's fascination for complex strategy games helped him recognise how computers could allow him to make and play games he enjoyed.

Early career (1982 to 1988)

In 1982, while he was still in secondary school, Gollop started designing and programming computer games. For £25, Gollop bought his first computer, a ZX81, from a school friend to learn programming. Even though the ZX81 only had one kilobyte of memory and no real graphics processing ability, he was "amazed" at its capabilities. His first published games were Islandia and Time Lords, which he made for the BBC Micro in 1983 with programmer Andy Greene, a school friend. Gollop subsequently upgraded to a ZX Spectrum and began creating video games like Nebula in BASIC. He recognised that his future involved computers.

When Gollop went on to the London School of Economics to study sociology, he spent more time creating video games such as Chaos: The Battle of Wizards and Rebelstar than he spent studying. He created the first Rebelstar by himself as a two-player game and brought it to a publisher that had an office near his college. They wanted it to be a single-player game, something he had not made before, so Gollop created functional path-finding algorithms from scratch, the game got published, and it ended up doing well.

Gollop moved to Sofia, Bulgaria in 2005. His wife Raina, who he married in 2003, is Bulgarian, and his two children were born circa 2011.