My first published game, Terminal Escape. One of one. Instant classic.

40 Years of Games

I turned 40 earlier this year, and it took me a bit to consolidate my reflections on my path to game design.

It Started With Homebrew Bowling

I hacked together a flimsy woodblock bowling alley in preschool in the late 1980s. The teachers had to all but ban the game because we would spend more time bowling than learning the alphabet or going to the bathroom.

On the back of that success, I cobbled up a bedroom minigolf course using encyclopedias and Legos. My friends and I played for hours. We missed our bedtimes by a mile. Our parents cheered us on.

I moved on to pilfering Monopoly pieces to power my hand-drawn rendition of a classic roll-and-move jaunt called Terminal Escape, pictured above.

These first few tastes hooked me deeper than the heaviest opiates.

The Halcyon Days of the Early Web

I hand-coded HTML as a literal child in the mid 1990s to write digital love letters to games that moved me.

I analyzed the source code that Geocities (Remember Geocities?!) spit out into its little "custom code" text box and reverse engineered—using nothing but notepad.exe and a mountain of trial and error—my first foray into what would become my big boy career: a webpage dedicated to my favorite SNES games.

You kinda had to be there. Bonus Throwback: Remember Ayla's Hut and the now impossible-to-locate Arris Dome?

Then I moved onto a password protected (!!) site for our Diablo guild. We started as Guild Eggroll and then later we "matured" into the Legion of Elites.

11 year olds, man. So edgy. 🙄

Still, games through and through.

Sports, Improvement, Improvization

Short story here: sports changed my life. Sports are games (obv). Sports teach you about yourself, about overcoming challenge, the merits of practice and reflection, and they afford no room for excuses.

Baseball, basketball, football, lacrosse, wrestling, judo.

And those are the organized sports I played.

My buddies and I spent countless after-school marathons inventing our own games and while I won't share with you the irreverent nonsense we dubbed them, I can say we dreamed up winners like an enduring game of manual dexterity using a found broken tennis racket and a bare soccer goalpost.

We may or may not have conducted pants-optional footraces on dirt trails.

We had the first friendly rules-based fight club in the neighborhood (if you got thrown in the ditch, you were out).

We pioneered a form of proto-LARP with an armory of sticks, rocks, and vines we used to stalk imaginary dragons.

See: edgy pre-teen boy commentary above.

Fast-Forward: I Combine My Superpowers

I made a choice in late 2019 to take my love of games and embrace my creative skills as a professional product designer and turn my lifelong passion (ugh, that word) into something tangible to share with the world.

I spent a month or so creating one game a day.

I called it Game a Day.

I still can't figure out why this game got so much traffic.

Rapid prototyping + games = whatever these are. You can actually play some of them!

Today

I'm proud to call myself a professional game designer.

Sure, I still help big companies build amazing products as a consultant. You can send your friendly local startup founder or SaaS CEO my way (matthewventre.com).

In 2022, I published a game that actually sold some copies. It was scary enough putting my flimsy little dice game out there. I figured it might net me a couple bucks and some interesting resume fodder.

I launched. Good stuff. Back to baseline.

I was wrong.

Turns out, it's changed a fair few peoples' view on what games and design can be. I found a community of people who make, play, and love them on a level I couldn't have imagined.

This is the real reward. This is what I've been looking for all along.

Tomorrow

It took me 40 years to find my voice as a game designer, and I know the next 40 will take me to places I never imagined possible.

All thanks to my parents, teachers, mentors, and coaches who encouraged me to explore my creative potential without boundaries or pushback.

All thanks to my friends who spent all those days in the woods, at the playground, in each other's bedrooms and basements creating and exploring worlds of our own.

All thanks to those fellow creators who found something interesting and exciting in my work.

All thanks to you for reading these words and loving what I do and make.

To future worlds,

Matt Ventre

Reflections of a Game Designer