Jon Dean - Notes from a Videogame Career
Let’s begin with an apology. SORRY! This is an incomplete archive that I don’t know if I will ever finish. It is intended to chronicle my career but through the lens of the projects I have worked on and the brilliant people I have had the privilege to work alongside in making them. In recent years, I have had a wonderful time consulting for the great and the good, on lots of cool projects (most of which must remain confidential, unfortunately), as well as spending my heard-earned savings investing in a couple of startups that I felt passionate about. But nothing much about any of these recent endeavors can be found in these pages. At least, until I find a spare 5 minutes or days! I’ve been busy, OK?
What I have managed to document you should consider a starting point. Some projects have quite a bit of detail, others just listed as a starting point lest I forget! But a start is better than nothing, so please check back from time to time to see if I have managed an update or two.
Jon Dean Dec 2019, Utah
So… let’s start at the beginning…
I have been fortunate to have been making videogames my entire career, starting out with (the original) Atari in the early 80's, starting in England, relocating to the USA in 1999. I have worked as a senior executive with leading publishers and developers, including Electronic Arts, Activision, Atari, Argonaut and Midway. I have also been an independent developer and consultant. During this time I have produced or otherwise contributed to more than 250 games!
My career has been varied and fascinating, and I'm indebted to the brilliant people I have had the fortune to work with on the products that are detailed in these pages.
I have collected a wealth of material over the years, and over time I will try and add it to these pages, to add to the videogame historical record.
Some of these games you have heard of, some were never released. Some were truly great, and others, let's face it were turkeys. But you know what? I loved EVERY one of them. You know it takes just as much effort to make a B game as a AAA, and you never start out with the intent to fail or produce something that will be just "blaaah".
I hope you enjoy looking through! I have organized the games by the companies I was at when they were built, and added some additional notes as I thought of them. It will take me a while to get these up to date, so it's a work in progress.
The passing years have left my memory a bit fuzzy on some of the detail, so if you loved one of the games, please do feel free to add some memories. If you hated one, please just move on :-)
Also, if you worked on one of these games, please do leave comments and fill in some of the missing details so this can be a good record of a project we worked on together, even if you worked for a subcontractor and we didn't ever meet in person!