Jonathan Blow

Early life and education

Blow was born in 1971. Blow says he started to "check out" from his parents as early as elementary school. His mother was an ex-nun who constantly reminded her son about the imminent coming of Jesus and would later disown Blow's older sister for coming out as a lesbian in the mid-1980s. Blow's father worked all day as a defense contractor and would come home to be alone in his den, where children were not allowed. Blow would say in an interview with The Atlantic, "Early on, I detected that there weren't good examples at home, so I kind of had to figure things out on my own ... I had to adopt a paradigm of self-sufficiency."

Blow studied computer science and creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley and was president of the Computer Science Undergraduate Association for a semester. He left the university in 1994, a semester before he would have graduated.

He worked in San Francisco in various contracting jobs, including one with Silicon Graphics to port Doom to a set-top device, until forming the game design company Bolt-Action Software with Bernt Habermeier in 1996. Their initial game project was to be a hovertank-based combat game called Wulfram, but at the time, the video game industry was undergoing a transformation of focusing heavily on three-dimensional graphics, making it difficult for them to complete the project; the team was forced to take some online database work to cover their expenditures. Subsequently, in the wake of the crash of dot-com bubble, they opted to fold the business after four years in 2000, with them $100,000 in debt.

Following Bolt-Action, Blow continued to perform contract work for companies like Ion Storm, and writing for industry publications such as Game Developer Magazine. He also worked on a project with IBM to create a technology demo similar to the Wulfram idea that would highlight the features of the Cell processor that IBM was collaborating on, which would become a part of the PlayStation 3. Blow attempted to get additional funding to turn the demo into a full game from both Sony and Electronic Arts but was unsuccessful.

Braid

In December 2004, feeling inspired during a trip in Thailand, Blow made a prototype for a time manipulation puzzle platformer game. The demo had crude graphics, but featured the ability of the player to rewind all the objects on screen backwards in time to a previous state. Encouraged by feedback from his peers, Blow worked on the game from about April 2005 to about December that year before having the final prototype of his game, titled Braid. This version won the Independent Games Festival Game Design Award at the 2006 Game Developers Conference.

He continued work on the game mostly focusing on art and music while polishing some of the design until its release in 2008 on Xbox Live Arcade. By then, Blow was $40,000 in debt and had invested $200,000 into the game's development.

The game was released on August 8, 2008 to critical acclaim and achieved financial success, receiving an aggregate score of 93% on Metacritic, making it the top-rated Xbox Live Arcade game. Braid was purchased by more than 55,000 people during the first week of release. Blow recalled that he didn't receive any money until one day he saw a lot of zeroes in his bank account.

The Witness

Announced in August 2009, The Witness has been Blow's recent work. It's a 3D first person puzzle game in which a player is stranded on an island, trying to solve various maze puzzles. Like Braid before it, Blow has invested his own money—reportedly $2–3 million.

Early public reaction to preview footage resulted in underwhelming assumptions that the game would simply be "solving simple maze puzzles." Blow has responded by saying that footage does not capture the problem solving process that goes on in the player's mind like in his previous game Braid, and that he "wouldn't make a game about solving a series of rote puzzles."

In previews of The Witness (often at noisy conventions), Blow has had journalists play the game by themselves in a quiet environment so as to fit the tone of the game's design. There has been praise of the game's previews, notably Kirk Hamilton from Kotaku calling it "an exercise in Symphonic Game Design."

Blow reinvested all of his remaining profit from Braid into The Witness, and had to borrow funds when his own ran out.

Future projects

Blow's next project, tentatively titled Game 3, is scheduled to be a twenty-year development period, broken into episodic, individual playable games, each related thematically and deepening in investigation of subject matter for each chapter. Blow stated that the game would not be puzzle related.

Other work

In March 2010, Blow, along with several independent game developers including Ron Carmel and Kellee Santiago, became a founding member of the Indie Fund, an angel investor fund for independent game projects.

In 2012, Blow was one of the subjects of the independent documentary film, Indie Game: The Movie, where he discussed his views on the role of independent video games and his work on Braid.

JAI language

In September 2014, Blow began work on a new programming language called JAI based on ideas he had previously expressed about video game development. It is aimed at "low-friction" and fluid development, whilst directly supporting data oriented design for high performance. The language is currently active, but is a work-in-progress, as no JAI compiler has been publicly released yet. A small demo of the language was shown at Reboot Development 2017. Blow also uses Twitch to regularly stream demonstrations of new language features as well as improvements to the game engine that will be bundled with the language.

Philosophy and views

Blow has spoken many times about his views on independent video games both in interviews and in public speeches, although he has said on his blog that he has got what he wanted out of conferences from speaking at them. For his sometimes controversial views, he has received praise, notably being called "the kind of righteous rebel video games need" and "a spiritual seeker, questing after truth in an as-yet-uncharted realm."

Blow often speaks of the potential for games to be more. He has said that he tries to make games that are more adult for people with longer attention spans and noted that games could have a "much bigger role" in culture in the future, but current game development does not address this potential, instead aiming for low-risk, high-profit titles. Additionally, formerly being a physics major, Blow has expressed that games could examine the universe in similar ways that a physicist could.

In referring to the progression of development in his games, Blow stated at the PlayStation Experience that he prefers to, "keep them playable and just make them better." This was stated during the live-cast panel while overseeing Justin Massongill on the playable demo.

Blow has spoken out against some games for immoral game design. On World of Warcraft, he has said it causes societal problems by creating a false image of the meaning of life, calling it "unethical." On Farmville, he has said that the design of the game reveals the developers' goal to degrade the quality of players' lives, ultimately calling it "inherently evil."

Despite Braid's success on the platform, Blow has claimed that Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade certification process would turn away developers because "they kind of make themselves a pain in the ass" and that they would lose market share to Steam as a result.