Jason Ely

Jason Ely is Lead Server Engineer at Cloud Imperium Games.

Early Years
He started programming games when he was an early teen in the 1980s.

Ultima was always his inspiration. He reversed engineered the Ultima games on the Commodore 64 and fixed a few bugs on the C64 version of Ultima 2.

His first serious game project was an Ultima clone and a very sophisticated toolset for map and content generation. He sent it as part of his resume to Origin Systems in 1988 but they were no longer doing C64 games and he needed to learn DOS, x86 Assembler and C.

He joined the Army and was eventually stationed at Ft. Hood Texas, close to Origin’s home base of Austin.

He purchased his first PC and began making a modern version of his toolset and game and ended up making an engine that used Ultima 6 assets and a game editor that could be used to modify the Ultima 6 game world directly. He got a job at Origin working on Ultima 8 as a programmer and designer.

Other Works
He started working on Ultima 8, after which he chose to work with Tony Zurovec and start the Crusader series.

He later created the MMORPG Elderlands inspired by the Ultima series, before joining Cloud Imperium Games.

Trivia

 * Colonel Ely in in Crusader: No Remorse is based on him.