COLLECTED WORKS - JOSH SAWYER

Journeying to the Forgotten Realms, Infinity and beyond with the RPG veteran

- ANDREI PECHALIN

Like many developers of his generation, Josh Sawyer stumbled into a career in videogames. “I went to school originally for vocal performance in a conservatory of music,” he tells us. “I switched over pretty quickly to history – that’s what I got my degree in. I wasn’t a good student, but I had taught myself web design and learned Flash animation to design a tattooing website. A friend of mine told me there was a job for a webmaster at Interplay. I didn’t know what I was going to do career-wise, so I applied for the job. There were only three applicants out of 62 that had [Flash experience], and they really wanted Flash, so I got hired.”

Sawyer had grown up playing Dungeons & Dragons, and started making his own tabletop RPGs in high school and college. He also remembers playing their computer counterparts: “When I was ten or so, maybe a little later, I saw The Bard’s Tale on a Commodore 64. I had only ever seen games on an Apple IIe – the audio was not very good, and it was black and white – so Commodore 64 was like I was seeing D&D. I played all the Gold Box games from Strategic Simulations Inc, and I really got into cRPGs.”

Ending up at the company responsible for The Bard’s Tale, that formative game, and getting to make cRPGs with the D&D licence, then, seemed nothing short of providence – even if Sawyer’s initial role was only tangentially related to actually making games. “My first job was to design the website for Planescape: Torment,” he explains, confessing that “I didn’t really have any conception of how videogames were made. But I was working pretty closely with the dev team, and immediately I was like, ‘Oh, this is what I want to do’.”