ANDREW M. ASTOR

Andrew M. Astor, 43, of Mill Valley, CA, formerly of Scarsdale, NY, recognized in his field as one of the foremost computer programmers, died December 29, at Stanford Hospital, Palo Alto, CA. A resident of Mill Valley, CA, he had played a key role in the creation of such computer games as EARTHWORM JIM, and MDK for the Shiny Corporation and the recently released Planet Moon Studios game, GIANTS. He grew up in Scarsdale, NY, where he attended the Edgemont schools before he graduated from Brown University in 1979. He moved then to California where he was employed first by McDonnell Douglas and then PDA in computer aided design and development work. While at PDA, he created PCL, a language that company still uses to create its products. He became a free lance computer programmer for a brief period before joining the staff at Shiny to work on EARTHWORM JIM and then MDK. During this period he lived in Tustin and in 1991 married the former Stacy Linn Hering, a financial planner. In 1997, he and two fellow Shiny alumni, Nick Bruty and Bob Stephenson, formed Planet Moon Studios with offices in Sausalito. As lead programmer and Chief Financial Officer for Planet Moon, and in spite of coming down with non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma in 1999, he was instrumental in the development of GIANTS which was published by Interplay early in December and quickly earned the award for Best Computer Action Game of 2000. He is survived by his wife, Stacy, his parents, Sonia and Gerald Astor of Scarsdale, NY, and his two brothers, Ted of Ardsley, NY, and Larry of Yonkers, NY.