Brad Wardell

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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.

1 Online personality
2 References
3 See also
4 Further reading
5 External links

[edit] Online personality

Brad is well-known to regulars in the skinning and customization community. He is the co-founder/webmaster of WinCustomize, a site specializing in the distribution of skins and themes, and founder of JoeUser, a blog community, as well as being an administrator 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.

Brad is a regular on the PowerUser.TV podcast, which used to air bi-weekly from October 2005 to December 2006, but which is now restricted to occasional broadcasts.

Brad is also known in the gaming world. Brad's approach to game development tends to be open, allowing users to see what is involved in making games - both good and bad. However, some critics have noted that it also means that Wardell will aggressively defend his positions. An example would be regarding Galactic Civilizations and Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords, on the topics of artificial intelligence and the obsfucation of many of the game's internal mechanics, where Wardell has accepted some criticism while defending other choices. After announcing a recent patch for the second game, Brad talked about the patch by criticizing users who disagreed with game development choices as "armchair game designers"

In another example, when Avault reviewed the original Galactic Civilizations, the reviewer noted that the AI was doing things that didn't make logical sense, and suspected it to be cheating. Defensive, Brad ran the savegame through a debugger, showing that the AI wasn't cheating, and argued that the review be changed to reflect this finding. The Avault review, even after the change, was still the lowest review that Galactic Civilizations 1 received.

Brad's outspoken point of view on-line can create controversy such as his positions on copy protection, game development, magazine reviewers, and nearly anything else. Some of this freedom stems from Wardell's position as the principle shareholder of Stardock Corp. Critics might argue that this also means he can act without restraint.