Former VP of Technology and Operations at Jagex, the studio behind RuneScape. Greater Cambridge, UK.
We are glad to say that Justin Edwards is joining Forked.gg as an advisor. If you have played an MMO in the last twenty years, you have felt the kind of work Justin does. He was VP of Technology and Operations at Jagex, the studio behind RuneScape, where he ran technology, operations, and people leadership across a game that millions of players live in every day.
Who he is
Justin modernized how RuneScape gets made and runs, rebuilding its technology, production, and live-services capabilities so the team could ship faster without putting the world at risk. Along the way he led web development, ran operations, and stepped up to VP of Technology and Operations. Across all of it he became the person you hand the hard, tangled projects to, the external partnerships and the commercial deals that touch a dozen teams at once and still have to land on time.
His former CEO at Jagex, Phil Mansell, describes him as calm, thoughtful, and people-focused. That reads on paper like a nice thing to say. In live-service games it is the difference between a launch that holds and a launch that falls over. When a world has to stay up for real players in real time, the calm person who has actually done it before is the one you want in the room.
Forked.gg is building an AWS-replacement for game hosting: decentralized failover and sharded storage that keep a game world alive across independent nodes. Justin has run live worlds at the scale we are aiming at. He knows where these systems break, and he can tell us before we find out the hard way.
What he brings
The failover and hosting architecture we are building is the heart of the platform, and the hardest part to get right. You do not learn where it breaks from a diagram. You learn it from having kept a live game up through the nights when it tried to go down. That is exactly the experience Justin carries, and it is the experience we most needed to add.
He also complements the industry side of our bench. Where our growth and marketing advice leans on go-to-market and audience, Justin leans on production and live operations, the machine underneath a game that most players never see and never should. Having both in the room means we can pressure-test a plan from the studio floor and the storefront at the same time.
What comes next
Justin is already helping us pressure-test the failover approach the platform leans on, and opening doors to the kind of real-scale validation you cannot fake with bots. We will share what we can as it happens. For now, if you see him in the community, say hello.
Welcome aboard, Justin.