Difference between revisions of "Mehul Patel"

Revision as of 21:01, 30 December 2011

Mehul J Patel is a creator of Utopia and it's coder and owner till July 2008.

Mehul was Born in 1977, lives in Texas, USA. He holds a B.B.A. in Finance from The University of Texas at Austin which he graduated on May 1998.

Early Projects

Mehul Patel was the creator of some of the most influential and revolutionary BBS games of all time including Barren Realms Elite and Falcon's Eye. Barren Realms Elite were based on his older brother Amit Patel's own Solar Realms Elite. Mehul wrote an SRE-like game called Alpha Colony VI (AC6), then BRE, Falcon's Eye, The Arcadian Legends, and Earth:2025. The games were based on the same type of interface, and were designed with an almost identical look and feel. Also, they were InterBBS capable which was quite an acheivement in and of itself. however, After developing Falcon's Eye, Mehul began losing interest in the dial-up BBS world and began a project he called "Earth".

Earth 2025 was his first web-based game, built in Borland Delphi in six weeks and hosted on his Solarianet.com site. At first his target audience was 500 users, but within weeks thousands were playing the online BRE clone.

Utopia

Utopia was his next project, and was essentially a clone of Falcon's Eye with many teamwork-type enhancements taken from BRE that weren't implemented in Earth. Utopia came online in November 9, 1998 after a series of betas (referred to by players as "First Beta", "Long Beta" and "Short Beta") and was even more popular than it's predecessor. Utopia was originally created under the company Solaria Games, which had its roots as early as 1996. In 1999 Solaria Games was renamed to Echelon Entertainment, then renamed in July 2000 to Swirve.com.

At July 2008 Mehul sold Swirve.com to OMAC.