Kelton Flinn

He is a co-founder (with his University of Virginia classmate John Taylor) of the seminal online game company Kesmai, which they began in 1982.

His best known title is the first graphical multi-player online game offered by a major service, Air Warrior (1987).

[1] Like Marc Blank, Will Crowther, Don Daglow and Gregory Yob, Flinn and Taylor were key innovators in the 1970s university gaming culture, where students played for free on college mainframe computers.

Flinn took advantage of his pursuit of an advanced degree (a PhD in applied mathematics) to build a long series of games across his undergraduate and graduate school career.

But once they began porting their code it turned out that the code that ran for free on the university's computer was hugely inefficient, and they burned $100,000 USD in computer time on CompuServe's system in three days before concluding they needed to rewrite their engine.

Kelton Flinn at the Game Developers Choice Online Awards in 2011.