[1][2] After high school, Harvey did not intend to pursue studies in computer science,[3][4] but eventually earned Bachelor's, Master's, and Ph.D. degrees in that discipline, all from Stanford University.
[5] During this period, he started two game development companies and published several additional software products through Electronic Arts.
[6] After acquiring a Commodore PET in 1979, which he paid for with earnings from a newspaper delivery route and splitting the cost with his parents,[4] the first program Harvey developed was a project for a mathematics class to implement Wythoff's game.
He then wrote Grade Base Manager, a program to automate a norm-referenced test for his mother, a teacher at Menlo College.
[8]Harvey contacted the president of Sirius,[8] but the game was eventually released by minor publisher Silicon Valley Systems in 1983[9] and was not successful.
In the mid-90s, Harvey founded Sandcastle, an Internet technology company that addressed the network latency problems underlying virtual worlds and massively multiplayer games.