One thing I’ve always loved about the work I do is hearing about people’s lives. I like hearing their stories, I like hearing about the things that shaped them, because they not only relate to me as a fellow human being but inevitably, they are the things that end up shaping what they make. The games they make. The games we love.
It’s a privilege to be able to focus on this in my podcast One-to-One which, hey, you should listen to (search “Eurogamer Podcasts” wherever you get them). And I’ve had some wonderful guests. But few struck me the way Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer did – the lead mind behind Pentiment – in the latest episode.
Sawyer was not what I expected – and I say this as someone who’s met him a few times. But on those occasions I got only a glimpse of him. He demoed a game, or we traded pleasantries while thinking about what work we were doing next – it was that kind of thing. But this time I got a chance to sit with him for a chunk of time and hear about his life, hear about who he is. And there’s much I didn’t know.
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I didn’t know, for instance, that he was almost a tattooist. He was doing some web design for a tattoo shop in the ’90s, and the owner decided to pay him not in money but in tattoos, which Sawyer liked. He still likes them. He has around 20 tattoos now, even one on the back of his head. “And then I was like,” he tells me, “‘Oh, maybe I can become an apprentice tattoo artist and I’ll do web design in the meantime.'” What a different outcome that would have been.