Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow
Blow in November 2008
Born	1971 (age 45–46)
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley
Occupation	Video game designer, programmer

Jonathan Blow (born 1971) is an American video game designer and programmer, who is best known as the creator of the independent video games Braid (2008) and The Witness (2016), both of which released to critical acclaim.

For many years Blow wrote the Inner Product column for Game Developer Magazine. He was the primary host of the Experimental Gameplay Workshop each March at the Game Developers Conference, which has become a premier showcase for new ideas in video games. In addition, Blow was a regular participant in the Indie Game Jam. Blow is also a founding partner of the Indie Fund, an angel investor fund for independent game projects.

Blow was born in 1971. Blow says he started to "check out" from his parents as early as elementary school. His mother was an ex-nun who constantly reminded her son about the imminent coming of Jesus and would later disown Blow's older sister for coming out as a lesbian in the mid-1980s. Blow's father worked all day as a defense contractor and would come home to be alone in his den, where children were not allowed. Blow would say in an interview with The Atlantic, "Early on, I detected that there weren't good examples at home, so I kind of had to figure things out on my own ... I had to adopt a paradigm of self-sufficiency."

Blow studied computer science and creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley and was president of the Computer Science Undergraduate Association for a semester. He left the university in 1994, a semester before he would have graduated.

He worked in San Francisco in various contracting jobs, including one with Silicon Graphics to port Doom to a set-top device, until forming the game design company Bolt-Action Software with Bernt Habermeier in 1996. Their initial game project was to be a hovertank-based combat game called Wulfram, but at the time, the video game industry was undergoing a transformation of focusing heavily on three-dimensional graphics, making it difficult for them to complete the project; the team was forced to take some online database work to cover their expenditures. Subsequently, in the wake of the crash of dot-com bubble, they opted to fold the business after four years in 2000, with them $100,000 in debt.