Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow (born 1971) is an American video game designer and programmer.

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 is the fourth of five siblings, having two brothers and two sisters.

Blow was raised as a Christian and said his family regularly attended church.

Blow went to middle school in Northern San Diego County.

While there, he attended a fifth-or-sixth-grade computer class where the VIC-20 home computer provided him with his introduction to programming and computers.

When his parents noticed his interest, they bought him a TRS-80 Color Computer, on which Blow learned to program in BASIC, often using exercise books from RadioShack.

In high school, he programmed games on a Commodore 64.

Some of the games he programmed were inspired by Indiana Jones and Pac-Man.

In 1989, Blow attended UC Berkeley as an undergraduate, double-majoring in computer science and English.

He started as a physics major but switched to computer science because he "just felt called in that direction".

He was a member and president of the Computer Science Undergraduate Association, as well as the eXperimental Computing Facility, an undergraduate computer-interest organization.

During college, Blow wrote some science fiction, which he published under a pseudonym.

He spent five years at UC Berkeley but dropped out with less than one semester to go.

He said; "I was really depressed about being at school, I didn't like it. I didn't have a good time."

After leaving UC Berkeley, Blow worked at a "really boring" enterprise software company for six months, before taking a contracting role at Silicon Graphics, where he ported Doom and Doom II to a set-top box.

In early 1996, Blow co-founded the game company Bolt-Action Software, which was based in Oakland, California, with Bernt Habermeier, whom Blow had met in the eXperimental Computing Facility.

An artist later joined the company, and they created Wulfram, a 3D action-strategy game for up to 32 players where players took control of heavily armed hovertanks.

At its height, Bolt-Action Software had 14 employees.

It folded in 2000 due to the dot-com crash.

In 2002, Blow co-founded the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at the Game Developers Conference, which showcases game prototypes that include new mechanics or that are new videogame genres or mediums.

Around this time, he wrote The Inner Product, a monthly technical column for magazine Game Developer.

He is best known for his work on the independent video games Braid (2008) and The Witness (2016).

Blow was born in California, United States, and became interested in game programming while at middle school.

He studied for computer science and English at the University of California, Berkeley, but dropped out to start a game company.

After the company closed following the dot-com crash, Blow worked as a game-development contractor.

He co-founded the Experimental Gameplay Workshop and wrote a monthly technical column for Game Developer magazine.

Blow gained prominence in 2008 with Braid.

He used its financial success to fund his next game, The Witness, and formed a company called Thekla Inc. After a lengthy development period, The Witness was released in 2016, and like Braid was critically and financially successful.

During its development, Blow began designing and creating a new programming language after being frustrated with C++, the language Thekla used to program the game.

Full-time work on the language, code-named Jai, and a new game implemented in it began after the release of The Witness.

A compiler for the Jai language is currently in beta release.

Blow's games are known for being artistic and challenging.

They are made with custom game engines, and have larger budgets and longer development times than most independently funded games.

Blow featured in Indie Game: The Movie, and is known for his strong opinions about the gaming industry.

In a 2020 interview, Blow said he was convinced 1996 was the most difficult 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 from the experience—he said; "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".

After Blow closed his first studio, he worked as a contractor for game studios with large budgets.

Games he worked on include Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, Deus Ex: Invisible War and Thief: Deadly Shadows.