About

The Memoir

I’ve been working in the video game industry for more than 40 years. I’ve also been trying, in one form or another, to write this story for almost 25 of them.

Early attempts here focused on the output: the games, the companies, the platforms, the tools. Useful, perhaps, but incomplete. Over time, my attention shifted toward the personal side: the uncertainty, the improvisation, the missteps, and the slow accumulation of experience that actually defines a career.

This project concentrates on the first decade of that journey. Although my career stretches far beyond it, those early years contain enough change, pressure, success, and failure to stand as a complete book-length narrative on their own.

I’m publishing the material chapter by chapter on Substack and refining it as I go. All posts will remain free to read. Paid subscriptions are enabled for readers who want to support the work and its eventual transition into print.

The story starts with Chapter 1: The Dee-Dar and the Chemistry Lab.

If you’re a reader, welcome.

If you’re a publisher and this sounds like something you’d like to talk about, I’d be glad to hear from you.

I started out as a game programmer on 8-bit systems like the Sinclair Spectrum in the early 80’s. Since then I’ve worked on a wide range of systems in technical and creative roles. Throughout my career, I have always done programming work, most recently in Go, PHP, JavaScript, ActionScript, C/C++, C#, Java, and Objective C, with bits of Python thrown in for good measure. I have also designed and produced a number of games over the years. The list below is an abbreviated softography. On these titles, I was involved variously as technical director, programmer, designer, producer, and in some cases all of the above:

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The Memoir

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