John Watson

I just found out that my friend and former coworker, John Watson passed away this weekend.

John was an incredibly hard worker. He was the sort of guy who would be at work until 4am fairly regularly because he wanted to make the game better. There were those who disagreed with him on what would make the game better, but John certainly worked incredibly hard to achieve his vision.

He was a great guy to work with in general. He stayed very grounded in logic and reasoning in terms of both game design and implementation, so I got along very well with him. We frequently had late night discussions about game design (both about the games we were working on and the games we thought we should work on one day) and there were some truly good ideas tossed around. These ideas will probably never come into existence now without him, though. All in all, John was one of those rare game developers who could both come up with a solid game design and be capable of implementing it in script.

As a friend, he was always good to talk to. In a company where frustration ran rampant because of decentralized design and general lack of guidance, John always just kept his mind focused on making the game as good as possible. I found talking with him always restored my hope a bit that the game would be good. John basically carried himself with a maturity that most game developers seem to lack.

John, you will be missed....