When I was a little kid, I wanted to be an architect or a filmmaker. I drew lots of pictures, mostly pen & ink of monsters and cathedrals. I built clocks and violins and artificial limbs with Legos. It was a typical (I suppose) childhood for a kid who liked to draw. I drew a few yearbook covers for school, and illustrations for other bits.

In 1992, I started playing around with Freehand and Photoshop. I later moved onto Illustrator, and very quickly my use of traditional media dwindled. I fell in love with Helvetica, post-modernism, Emigre and The Designers Republic. I tried and utterly failed to make it as a freelance designer in New York, and oscillated back to software engineering.

At a startup in Virginia in 1998, I was the closest thing they had to a designer, so design I did. The logo, the letterhead, marketing materials, even a trade show booth. It was a non-subtle nod to AIGA and Apple. Garamond Condensed, Bondi Blue and symbols evoking the original Interplay logo were the order of the day. We made tons of one-off products for various clients, skinning our site. Our business model revolved around integrating business data (sourced from InfoUSA) with WHOIS data (sourced from somewhere shady).

We were acquired by AltaVista in 1999, and with that the need for a designer evaporated and I moved to doing coding & software architecture full time. Until I occillated back to game design, that is…

Originally posted to ydnar.vox.com in November 2007.

From my office/kitchen window this morning.

Originally posted to ydnar.vox.com in November 2007.

Originally posted to ydnar.vox.com in November 2007.

Originally posted to ydnar.vox.com in November 2007.

Because I’m going to have to explain this a million times today:

• I’m a character from a videogame.
• For the PlayStation 2.
• It’s called Ico.
• The protagonist doesn’t have a name.
• He’s a little boy who saves a princess from monsters in a castle.
• He fights windmills and smoke with a wooden stick.
• I’m that character.
• I left the stick at home. I may go home and get it.
• The reason I’m wearing a suit is because the little boy grew up and got a job.
• Ico is probably my favorite game of all time.

Originally posted to ydnar.vox.com in October 2007.

Originally posted to ydnar.vox.com in October 2007.

This news post today regarding BioWare and LucasArts made me recall a phone conversation I had on the lawn outside AltaVista back in 2001. A producer from BioWare called me and said they were using a set of textures I’d made to prototype KOTOR. They wanted to know if I was interested in moving to Canada.

It was then that I realized that the game industry, as attractive and fun as it could be, was not going to, well, pay well enough to have the life I wanted to have. Especially in 2001. In Canada.

I ended up taking a 50% pay cut to go work on a PS2 game in Seattle later that year. Silly me, not learning.

Originally posted to ydnar.vox.com in October 2007.

Originally posted to ydnar.vox.com in October 2007.

Originally posted to ydnar.vox.com in October 2007.

Originally posted to ydnar.vox.com in October 2007.