Jonathan David Blow (born 1971) is an American video game designer and programmer. He is best known for his work on the independent video games Braid (2008) and The Witness (2016). Blow became interested in game programming while at middle school. He studied computer science and English at the University of California, Berkeley, but dropped out to start a game company. After the company closed following the dot-com crash, Blow worked as a game development contractor. He co-founded the Experimental Gameplay Workshop and wrote a monthly technical column for Game Developer magazine.
Blow gained prominence in 2008 with Braid. He used its financial success to fund his next game, The Witness, and formed a company called Thekla Inc. After a lengthy development period, The Witness was released in 2016, and like Braid was critically and financially successful. During its development, Blow became frustrated with C++, the programming language Thekla used to create the game. He began designing and creating a new programming language. Full-time work on the language, code-named Jai, and a new game implemented in it began after the release of The Witness. A compiler for the Jai language is currently in beta release.
Blow's games are known for being artistic and challenging. They are made with custom game engines, and have larger budgets and longer development times than most independently funded games. Blow was featured in Indie Game: The Movie, and is known for his strong opinions about the gaming industry. Since the 2020s, Blow has come under criticism based on his political opinions.
Early life
Jonathan Blow was born in Southern California in 1971. His father worked as a defense contractor for TRW, and his mother was an ex-nun. He is the fourth of five siblings, having two brothers and two sisters. Blow was raised as a Christian and said his family regularly attended church. Blow went to middle school in Northern San Diego County. While there, he attended a fifth-or-sixth-grade computer class where the VIC-20 home computer provided him with his introduction to programming and computers. When his parents noticed his interest, they bought him a TRS-80 Color Computer, on which Blow learned to program in BASIC, often using exercise books from RadioShack. In high school, he programmed games on a Commodore 64. Some of the games he programmed were inspired by Indiana Jones and Pac-Man.
In 1989, Blow attended UC Berkeley as an undergraduate, double-majoring in computer science and English. He started as a physics major but switched to computer science because he "just felt called in that direction". He was a member and president of the Computer Science Undergraduate Association, as well as the eXperimental Computing Facility, an undergraduate computer-interest organization. During college, Blow wrote some science fiction, which he published under a pseudonym. He spent five years at UC Berkeley but dropped out with less than one semester to go. He said; "I was really depressed about being at school, I didn't like it. I didn't have a good time."
Career 1994–2000: Career beginnings and Wulfram
After leaving UC Berkeley, Blow worked at a "really boring" enterprise software company for six months, before taking a contracting role at Silicon Graphics, where he ported Doom and Doom II to a set-top box. In early 1996, Blow co-founded the game company Bolt-Action Software, which was based in Oakland, California, with Bernt Habermeier, whom Blow had met in the eXperimental Computing Facility. An artist later joined the company, and they created Wulfram, a 3D action-strategy game for up to 32 players where players took control of heavily armed hovertanks.
At its height, Bolt-Action Software had 14 employees. It folded in 2000 due to the dot-com crash. In a 2020 interview, Blow said he was convinced 1996 was the most difficult time in history to start a video game company because of the transition from 2D to 3D titles. A number of components of the game were challenging to implement, but Blow learned from the experience—he said; "we went broke, and I was burned out for several years after that from working hard ... but that's how I became a good programmer".
2001–2004: contracting work
After Blow closed his first studio, he worked as a contractor for game studios with large budgets. Games he worked on include Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, Deus Ex: Invisible War and Thief: Deadly Shadows. In 2002, Blow co-founded the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at the Game Developers Conference, which showcases game prototypes that include new mechanics or that are new video game genres or mediums. Around this time, he wrote The Inner Product, a monthly technical column for magazine Game Developer.
During this time, Blow moved to New York City, where he was introduced to an IBM research project about servers based on cell processors. Blow pitched them a proof of concept of a physics-intensive, online, multiplayer game about giant robots attacking a town. Blow and Atman Binstock did most of the programming for the game; Blow wrote the client-side code, graphics, and gameplay, while Binstock wrote the physics engine to run on the server from scratch. After submitting their final report to IBM, the team took the game to Electronic Arts, who Blow said were not impressed.
Blow's other contract work included particle effect programming on Flow on the Sony PlayStation 3; code review following MTV's purchase of Harmonix; and programming on the music-action iPod game Phase. Blow said of this part of his life; "I was just stumbling forward like people do sometimes, and doing the best that I knew how to do, which at that time was programming".
2005–2008: Braid
Blow created a prototype for a 2D puzzle-platform game involving time manipulation in December 2004. Five months later, he began work on turning the prototype into a proper game, and by December 2005 the first version of what would be known as Braid was completed. Much of the work was done part-time because Blow also did consulting work and martial arts training. Blow felt the graphics and art style of the first version of the game "looked extremely amateur", and hired David Hellman to create all of the game's art. For the story, Blow drew inspiration from some of his favorite books and films such as Invisible Cities and Mulholland Drive. The game's narrative is told through textual exposition between worlds, environmental art, and gameplay, and has been interpreted in many different ways.
In mid-2007, Blow signed with Microsoft to release Braid via its distribution platform XBLA. Blow felt time spent meeting the XBLA certification process would have been better spent polishing the game, but he noted Microsoft was "very hands-off" with game design, and that "the final game is exactly what I wanted to put there". Blow estimated he spent more than $180,000 of his own money to develop Braid. Braid was released in August 2008 to universal acclaim, was "an immediate sensation", and made Blow a millionaire. Braid was one of the earliest indie games to grace seventh-generation consoles.
In 2010, Blow co-founded funding organization Indie Fund together with some other successful independent game developers. Blow appeared in the documentary film Indie Game: The Movie, in which he discusses his experiences developing and releasing Braid. In 2014 Blow stated sales of Braid had earned more than $4 million, which he used to fund The Witness (2016).
20092016: The Witness
Blow's next project was The Witness (2016), a first-person game in which players solve puzzles by drawing paths. Blow wanted to create a game using non-verbal communication; the puzzle rules are never explained with words but the puzzles themselves teach the player the rules. Blow felt solving puzzles in this way could generate epiphanies for players, and tried to design the game so the player experiences "miniature epiphanies over and over again". Blow estimated solving every puzzle in the game would take more than 80 hours.
Work on The Witness began in 2008. Blow created prototypes of several game ideas before choosing the one he liked the most, despite it being a 3D game which he "absolutely didn't want to do". Throughout development, Blow hired developers full-time and founded the company Thekla, Inc., of which he is president. The Witness was revealed to the public in 2010, when three people were working full-time on the game. Blow hoped to release The Witness in 2013 as a launch title for the Sony PlayStation 4, but the goal passed as the scope of the game increased. By 2015, the core team had grown to eight. At the time, it was very rare for a small, independent game studio to spend more than seven years on a game.
The game was released on Windows and the PlayStation 4 in January 2016. Blow reported that the first week sales revenue of The Witness totaled over US$5 million, and was one of the top downloads on illegal BitTorrent websites. The game received critical acclaim, several BAFTA and Game Developers Choice Awards nominations, and appeared on 'Best of the decade' features from IGN, Polygon, NME, CNET, and National Post.
2017–present: Jai programming language, Order of the Sinking Star, and Braid, Anniversary Edition Towards the end of development of The Witness, Blow became frustrated with C++, the programming language Thekla used to create the game. Blow considered the language to be over-complex, noting; "C++ is a powerful language in some ways ... but it makes [software development] a lot harder than it should be". In September 2014, Blow delivered a talk on his Twitch channel about the possibility of a new programming language designed for game development. He evaluated alternative programming languages such as Go and Rust, but ultimately expressed the desire to create a new language. Blow estimated a new programming language designed for game development could reduce typical development time by at least 20% and make programming more enjoyable. He also said the language would be relatively easy to create compared to creating a game like The Witness.
In 2014, Blow began designing the language, which is codenamed Jai, and started creating a compiler for it. The first year and a half of work on Jai was part-time because Thekla was shipping The Witness. In mid-2016, he began full-time work on the language, a game engine written in Jai, and Order of the Sinking Star. In 2023, Blow described the game as "the biggest single-player puzzle game that anybody's ever made", and estimated that it will take 250 hours to complete at a "normal pace", and more than 500 hours for completionists.
Among other things, Blow hopes the language will improve the experience of game programming and allow programmers to build more functionality with less code. By working on the Order of the Sinking Star, its engine, and Jai at the same time, Blow is able to test the language's design and adjust it early in its lifetime. , the Jai compiler is in a beta release.
In August 2020, Thekla announced Braid, Anniversary Edition, a remastered edition of Braid. Blow said the remaster will be faithful to the original, saying Braid will not get any "Greedo shoots first" changes. The game was to include more than 15 hours of developer's commentary. Thekla originally planned to launch the game in early 2021, but it was pushed back, and eventually released on May 14, 2024 for multiple platforms. Blow was frustrated with the weak reception to the launch, saying Anniversary Edition "sold like dogshit" and that Thekla could not afford to pay any of its employees to work on the Jai compiler.
Long-term project