Number None

Jonathan Blow (born 1971) is an American video game designer and programmer. He is best known for his work on the independent video games ''Braid'' (2008) and '' The Witness'' (2016).

Born in California, Blow developed a passion for game programming during middle school and later pursued a double degree in computer science and creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley. He dropped out of college and briefly worked as a software developer before he started a game company with a friend. Once the company closed a few years later with the dot-com bubble bust, Blow worked as a game development contractor. He co-founded the Experimental Gameplay Workshop and wrote a monthly column for '' Game Developer'' before he started part-time work on ''Braid'' in 2005. The game was released in 2008 to critical acclaim, made Blow a millionaire, and is often credited with catalyzing a period of independent game development in the years following its release. He co-founded investment organization Indie Fund, and is one of the subjects of the 2012 documentary film '' Indie Game: The Movie''.

Blow began work on ''The Witness'' shortly after the release of ''Braid'', using most of its revenue to fund development. Blow hired many people to work on ''The Witness'' full-time, forming the company Thekla, Inc. in the process. After more than seven years of development, the game was released in 2016 to critical acclaim. It was financially successful, and received several nominations for British Academy Games Awards and Game Developers Choice Awards. During development of ''The Witness'', Blow became frustrated at using C++ to program its game engine, and began designing and creating a new programming language for game development. Full-time work on the language, codenamed Jai, and a new game written in the language, began in 2016. By working on both Jai and the game at the same time, Blow is able to test out the design of the language, improve it early in its lifetime, and demonstrate the capability of the language. Jai has been released in a closed beta, and in December 2021 its compiler reached beta version 100.

Early life

Jonathan Blow was born in Southern California in 1971. His father worked as a defense contractor for TRW, and his mother was an ex-nun. He has an older sister. He was raised Christian, Blow noting "we went to church every Sunday". Blow attended middle school in Northern San Diego County. While there, he attended a fifth or sixth-grade computer class with Commodore VIC-20s which provided him with his first introduction to programming and computers. Blow said "That was my favorite thing at school. I got it right away." When his parents noticed that he was very interested in computers, they got him a TRS-80 Color Computer, on which Blow learned how to program in BASIC, often using exercise books from RadioShack. In high school he also programmed games on a Commodore 64. Some of the games he programmed were inspired by Indiana Jones and ''Pac-Man''.

Blow attended UC Berkeley as an undergraduate in 1989, majoring in computer science and creative writing. He started as a physics major, but switched to computer science because he "just felt called in that direction". Blow said that of the computer science major "you had to know what you were doing", while the bachelor's degree in english was "all about bullshitting things". He was a member of the university's undergraduate computer science association, the CSUA, going on to become a president of the club. Blow said he wrote some science fiction during college, but published it under a pseudonym. His favorite game in college was made by some fellow UC Berkeley students called Netrek, which Blow described as "like playing football with Star Trek ships". He spent five years at UC Berkeley, but dropped out with less than one semester to go. When asked about why he left, Blow said "I was really depressed about being at school, I didn't like it. I didn't have a good time."

Career

19942000: Career beginnings and ''Wulfram 2''

After leaving UC Berkeley, Blow worked at a "really boring" enterprise software company for six months, before taking up a contracting role at Silicon Graphics. There he ported ''Doom'' and ''Doom II'' to a set-top box. Blow noted "trying to play ''Doom'' on a TV remote is terrible, but I had it working."

Around February 1996 Blow started a game company in Oakland with a friend from college using $24,000 of savings. They worked on a game which Blow described as an "online-only, 32 player drop-in drop-out science fiction Hovertank combat game". The game was playable in 1997, but they kept working on it to make it better. The name of the game went through several changes; the final version of the game on the internet was called ''Wulfram 2''. The company signed the game with Total Entertainment Network (TEN), which made it available through a subscription service. Blow said the contract "kept us alive at subsistence level for some amount of time". After TEN was shut down in 1999, Blow brought the game to Interactive Magic. Blow said his company lasted until the dot-com bubble bust of the early 2000s, after which a former business partner of his ran the game for free on the internet.

In a 2020 interview, Blow said he was convinced that 1996 was the hardest time in history to start a video game company, because of the transition from 2D to 3D titles. A number of components of the game were challenging to implement, but Blow learned a lot from the experience. He summarized "we went broke, and I was burned out for several years after that from working hard... but that's how I became a good programmer."

20012004: Contracting work

After Blow closed his first studio, he did contracting work with a number of game studios with larger budgets. Games he worked on included '' Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee'', '' Deus Ex: Invisible War'' and '' Thief: Deadly Shadows''. In 2002, together with Chris Hecker, Doug Church and Robin Hunicke, Blow co-founded the experimental gameplay workshop at the Game Developers Conference. Around this time, he also wrote ''The Inner Product'', a monthly column for magazine '' Game Developer''.

During this time period, Blow moved to New York City where he was introduced to an IBM research project about servers based on cell processors, which IBM had partly developed. Blow pitched them a proof of concept of a physics-intensive online multiplayer game about giant robots attacking a town. The idea was that the server would run the physics simulation of the game and then send the results to the clients. The robots in the game, for example, moved not through fixed animations, but by physics simulation of forces applied to the robots' joints. The players could shoot and destroy these joints, and the game's server would simulate the results. Blow and Atman Binstock did most of the programming for the game, Blow writing the client-side code, graphics, and gameplay, while Binstock wrote the physics engine to run on the server from scratch. After submitting their final report to IBM, the team tried to bring the game to EA, but Blow said, "they were like, 'Yeah, we're not impressed'".

Further contract work for Blow included particle effect programming on '' Flow'' (running on the PS3, which used the cell processor), and code review when MTV purchased Harmonix "to make sure there weren't legal landmines" in the company's code. Blow said of this part of his life "I didn't really know what I was doing in life yet, I was just stumbling forward like people do sometimes, and doing the best that I knew how to do, which at that time was programming."

20052008: ''Braid''

The 2D puzzle-platformer ''Braid'' (2008) was a landmark of independent game development. Released on the Xbox 360 through Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA), the game was "an immediate sensation", and a critical and commercial success. ''Braid'' demonstrated that it was possible for indie developers to release games on storefronts (instead of through publishers) and remain financially successful. The game "is often credited as the catalyst for the indie ame
{{redirect category shell, {{R from other capitalisation{{R from ambiguous page ...