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Weird Game Designer Facts #62 Noah Falstein Noah got his start at Milton Bradley's short-lived videogames division; his first published game was the arcade title SINISTAR (Williams Electronics, 1983), famous from the eponymous opponent's synthesized audio, "I live! Run run run beware coward, run!"

Weird Game Designer Facts #61 Joseph M. Balkoski I worked with Joe Balkoski at SPI, and also shepherded several of his freelance games through the publication process when running the design/art/editorial departments at West End Games.

In 1983, after a conversation with Jeff Dee at a conference (where we agreed that a game based on cartoons probably wasn't viable), I went home decided why not? Assuming it couldn't reasonably by a stand alone project, I wrote the first iteration of TOON

Weird Game Designer Facts #59 John M. Ford Mike Ford (as he was known to his friends, and I was one), was a multiple World Fantasy Award winning author, and a "writers' writer." Meaning "an author who was greatly admired by other writers" without every achieving great commercial success.

John M. Ford - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Weird Game Designer Facts #58 Rhianna Pratchett One of the field's most eminent and well regarded narrative designers, Pratchett is best known for her work on the Overlord series, more recent Tomb Raider games, and Heavenly Swords.

Weird Game Designer Facts #57 J.K. Rowling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Hermann Hesse Since my last post was about game designers who wrote interesting novels about this field, this post will be about novelists who describe games that are kind of craps.

Weird Game Designer Facts #56 Austin Grossman, Richard Dansky, Hal Barwood Novels about games that actually impart what it's like to be a game developer In recent years, there have been novels about game development that are completely implausible.

Austin Grossman - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Weird Game Designer Facts #55 Jesse Schell Schell is a former Disney Imagineer, CEO of Schell Games, author of The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, and Distinguished Professor of Practice for Carnegie-Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, where he teaches about game design and development.

Mission: It's Complicated on Steam

Mission: It’s Complicated is a narrative-based, visual novel where you match super-awesome superheroes to go on missions during the night and dates during the day. The more compatible the pair of supe...

store.steampowered.com

Weird Game Designer Facts #54 Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig Hellwig (1743 - 1831) was a mathematician, university professor, and entomologist who, in 1780, published the first board wargame.

Weird Game Designer Facts #53 Mike Pondsmith I've known Pondsmith for many years, because everyone involved in TTRPG design in the 80s knew each other. He was CA based, and I in NY, and I imagine we first got to know each other at a GenCon.

Weird Game Designer Facts #52 Reiner Knizia Reiner Knizia has designed more than 800 commercially published games. Let that sink in for a minute. I do know of designers with more than 100 credits to their name, including George Parker and Jim Dunnigan, but 800 is astonishing.

Weird Game Designer Facts #51 Keita Takahashi You may not know Takahashi by name, but you probably know KATAMARI DAMACY (2004), a cult hit in which you roll up the world in increasingly larger balls, while being lectured, by your Daddy in the Sky who tells you what a loser you are

Weird Game Designer Facts #50 Janell Jaquays All right, I'm going to (again) violate rule #1 for talking about trans people, which is "don't mention the dead name." This was pretty easy with Danielle Bunten Berry, because she was quite open about her transition.

Weird Game Designer Facts #49 George S. Parker When I was a kid, virtually every game for sale in the US was published either by Milton Bradley or by Parker Brothers, both companies Massachusetts-based (Bradley in Springfield, Parker in Salem).

Weird Game Designer Facts #48 Christine Love Love is one of my favorite indie developers. I first noticed her work with DIGITAL: A LOVE STORY, a sort of visual novel love story carried in text, with the frame being that you are interacting with an 80s BBS.

Download the latest indie games

itch.io is a simple way to find, download and distribute indie games online. Whether you're a developer looking to upload your game or just someone looking for something new to play itch.io has you co...

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Weird Game Designer Facts #47 John Butterfield Butterfield has had a long career in tabletop gaming, but is by far the most interesting designers of soloplay boardgames. I first worked with Butterfield at SPI, in the 1970s.

Weird Game Designer Facts #46 Orson Scott Card So... multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winning author (and notorious homophobe) Orson Scott Card, whose landmark novel Ender's Game is used in grade school English classes across America, is a game designer?

My review of The Berlin Apartment is up here: indiegamereviewer.com/the-berlin-a... It's a narrative game set in a single apartment, but with each episode in a different era (from 1933 to recent years), all in the same apartment, but with different tenants and core mechanics.

This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

lnkd.in

Weird Game Designer Facts #45 Greg Stafford I first encountered Stafford as a teen; he published a fanzine that I'm not finding evidence of online now, but that predates his involvement with games, but he was already writing about his world of Glorantha.

Weird Game Designer Facts #44 Sid Meier Sid is one of the designers I admire most, but the problem with talking about him here is that he is NOT weird. He is the antithesis of weird. He is a boring, conventional person...

Weird Game Designer Facts #43 Stewart Butterfield Butterfield is, oddly enough, the creator of two failed online games. And now a billionaire. What? How does that work? In 2002, he founded a company called Ludicorp, to work on his vision for a sandbox style MMORPG called The Game Neverending.