Today is Father’s Day, which got me thinking about how my dad inspired me to become who I am today.
When someone describes themselves as a “creative,” it means they’re in a creative profession, like a video director or a copywriter. My dad is not a creative by that definition. He’s a radiologist, but he’s extraordinarily creative by any other definition of the word. He wrote the scores for four original musicals and staged them in our hometown of Buffalo, NY. (Off-Off-Off-Off… Off-Broadway.) A longtime theater and movie critic in his spare time, my dad ended his reviews on the local NPR station with rhyming couplets. And we have some of his unique, abstract landscape photography of decaying buildings hanging on our walls. No one else I’ve driven in a car with has ever insisted on pulling over to capture geometrically-pleasing urban blight.
Of all the things my dad created, his games impressed me the most. He designed two board games! This was in the 1980s, when board games were a mainstream form of family entertainment. They were one of my favorite types of toys. (I think the order was Video Games, Action Figures, Board Games, Trading Cards. Bottom of the list: Sports Equipment.) We used to play board games all the time at my grandma and grandpa’s house. Clue was a favorite. My dad and I played a lot of Scrabble together after the divorce. He usually won. He had an Ivy League education and I was in middle school, lol. On my mother’s side, card games like Uno and the family game Splash were perennial favorites. The idea that my dad actually designed his own games was really cool.
The first game of his I remember was a horse racing themed roll-and-move game. He drew a racetrack and spaces on thick cardboard. I asked him about the game recently, but he couldn’t remember much about it, besides rolling dice and moving pieces. We would play it with company after dinner and dessert, usually jello.
Okay, this is a tangent, but we ate a lot of jello back in those days. I don’t know why! When I went over to other family’s houses for dessert, we’d have ice cream or cookies. The closest thing we’d get to “jello” was pudding pops. Jello with bits of fruit in it was big in our house. A time warp dessert straight out of Nick at Nite. I can’t remember the last time I ate jello. I don’t miss it!
The second game he designed was special. Inside Track is a grid based strategy game. The board looks like a pixel art rendition of the Target logo with alternating red and white layers that lead to a center red square. Players have to move three pieces in a row on a layer, which allows the middle piece to move up a layer, towards the center square. To win, you have to get one of your pieces in the center square first. I really liked how players got to decide if they would play offensively, trying to bring their pieces together, or play defensively and block their opponent from creating rows. A lot of kids’ board games (Candyland, Chutes and Ladders) are entirely based on random chance. Inside Track felt deeper, like Chess. I generally went on defense in Inside Track, hoping to stymie my opponent, then make an unexpected offensive move. This slowed down the game considerably, which I’m sure no one who played me enjoyed.
My dad was proud of Inside Track. He got a nice wooden version made with a clever box design. The board was the top of the box, and it slid off into storage for the pieces and rules. No plastic and cardboard packaging required, unlike the other clunky board games on our shelf.
The story goes that dad submitted the game to different publishers. After many rejections, he found one who was excited about the game! The publisher gave the game an Egyptian pyramid theme and showed off the prototype at a toy industry show in New York City. They were ready to mass produce this version of Inside Track in China, but the publisher’s production pipeline got crushed by authoritarian shit. Without a cheap manufacturer, the publisher went under and the deal fell through. I remember him hand-selling copies of the wooden prototype version of Inside Track to local toy stores. I think the whole experience left him frustrated with the games industry and he pivoted back to theater, which was his true love creatively.
Until I came to Los Angeles and got my first jobs in game design, I didn’t know a game developer in person. I was aware of Shigeru Miyamoto and Will Wright, but I didn’t know much about them, besides their names being associated with games I loved. My dad was the person in my life who made his own games. By watching him, he gave me an intimate understanding about how games are conceived, designed, playtested, and marketed. He showed me the way and I continue walk that path. Thank you, dad, for giving me an inside track.
🎲 Your Turn: Do you have a creative family? In what way? Has your family inspired any of your own creative pursuits? Reply to this email to let me know, or tell the whole world by hitting the orange button below to leave a comment.
4 responses to “Game Boy, Game Father”
I’m a little late to this obviously, but that was such a fascinating story! Your father sounds like such a positively formative force in your life, and ideally, that’s what a great parent should be. It’s interesting to get such an in-depth look at the childhood and relationships that made you who you are today. So, this was definitely one of the more memorable reads in the Equip Story collection. Thanks for sharing!
Regarding creativity in my family, it almost completely comes from my mother. At a young age, she started making me take classical carnatic music lessons for singing. Carnatic music is the classical music of South India (if I’m not mistaken). Since a great deal of my childhood was about music and singing, I think it programmed me to want to be an artist in some capacity from a very young age. My mother was slow to come around to my creative passions; she initially wanted me to go into a STEM subject, as many Indian parents do. But sooner or later, especially after seeing what I was capable of, she became fully supportive of my creative endeavors. I only sing as a hobby now, but it was undoubtedly my origins in creativity and the arts.
Thank you for reading! I love my dad and he had a major influence on who I am today. I haven’t written a lot of autobiographical pieces in the past, so it’s been a trip going down memory lane, and an unexpected extending of my craft.
Having supportive parents is so important to healthy development. I’m so glad your mother came around to support you pursuing a creative career. I mean, she’s the one who pushed you into music, so she only has herself to blame, lol.
I think I got my creative genes from my mom, who among other things played piano, sewed, crocheted, cross-stitched, and when I was at the height of my paint-by-numbers phase, while I did the smaller, cartoony kits with like a dozen colors of tempura or acrylic, she was doing the more realistic kits with dozens of oil colors and micro print numbers, and I was doing large suncatchers with large areas that could be easily brushed while she was doing the tiny ones where you had areas requiring single drops of paint.
My dad knew his way around cutting lumber and plywood, but while he could frame a wall, he wasn’t that great at the finer details.
Granted, they were from a time when it was still common for the man of the house to be enough of a handiman to handle most household repairs and for mothers to be as likely to make or repair clothing for the family as buy it.
My brother also played trombone and tried at one point to become a performer at Disney World and my sister played Saxophone( I even used her old sax when I got drafted into the school band in middle schol, though I did so poorly I got cut for the school concert.
In retrospect, I regret not asking them to teach me their creative skills while they were alive.
My grandfather got into abstract photography and ceramics and I wish he’d taught me his techniques.
Sounds like your mom was very creative and you came from a highly skilled family. That’s wonderful.
I definitely have some guilt around not being handy enough around the house to do repairs, based on my upbringing and general expectations. It’d also come in handy repairing the broken, retro appliances I’ve collected over the years.