Joe Balshone

Joe Balshone we interred to the everlasting on March 26, 2008. His gaming career started with Kesmai Studios in Charlottesville, VA and ended in that same city with EA.com. His interests in the industry were in Community and Customer Support in which he worked as a volunteer and professionally for many years.

iEulogy by Bruce Linton:

"Joe "DeathWalker" Balshone was there in the early years before the “interweb” when the only on line places to game were CompuServe and your local electronic bulletin boards. Joe was the both the Forums Section Leader and the Game Master for a game on CompuServe called MegaWars I, a shoot-the-other-guy space game in ASCII graphics. Joe was very instrumental in a lot of what happened behind the scenes as far as communities and customer service went for the games on CompuServe and also did similar duty for Battle Tech on Genie. I think in those days, if there was an online game, Joe was playing it….

All this and running his family’s Pharmaceutical company too. They were the 3rd largest Pharmaceutical Company in the US in the ‘80s, but you never heard of them, because they were wholesalers, and their name never got on a bottle of pills anywhere. Joe ran it full time when his father, who founded it, became ill. The company was very successful and Joe made it more so during his years at the helm.

Joe’s love in life, though, was gemology and he was a certified gemologist. When his father died his obituary was written up in Time Magazine and his family sold their company to Eli Lilly, Co. Joe finally got a chance to do gemology, full time. Of course he also was still doing online games, and working part time for Kesmai with both Battle Tech and Air Warrior, In 2000 when EA bought Kesmai and did their grand and glorious "Online All the Time Games" push, Joe moved with a lot of the rest of us to Charlottesville. Joe was also modest, to some degree, never really looking for the limelight, but he was also a fierce competitor and extremely intelligent, more so than most people who met him realized. After Kesmai was shut down, Joe stayed on in Charlottesville and got a second Masters Degree in Human Resources Management. He had been working on his PhD in the same area for the last couple of years and was writing his dissertation to complete it, which he was scheduled to do this Spring.

Of all the things I like and remember about Joe, I think the thing I liked the most was that I never, ever saw him angry about anything. And lord knows I tried! He was good at argument, although a bit of a tease, but never got angry, and always saw it as a debate or a discussion. He sometimes had some far-out ideas, but he was also a true team player and worked as hard for ideas he disagreed with as those he promoted once the decision had been made. He drank good scotch, on the rare occasion when drank at all, smoke good cigars and shared that and everything else he had or was with his friends.

The last couple of years, I hadn’t talked with him as much as I had in the past or would liked to have done, calling once or twice a year. But when I did talk with him, he was always the same Joe and it was easy to slip back into the familiar roles. Joe was great at what he did in the game industry and he taught me a lot of what I learned about it over the years.

I’m going to miss Joe, a lot."