Josh Martel

Eighties

Atari BASIC, Byte magazine, a four-foot stack of NES games, homebrew D&D.

Nineties

From IBM XT clone to Pentium 100. From text adventures and BBSs to Quake and Teh Intarweb. From "teach yourself C" books to writing C code all the time. I worked on some small Doom/Heretic/Quake editing utilities, some mildly successful Quake mods, some mildly unsuccessful Quake mission packs, commercial Quake front-ends, helped kick-start machinima with Operation:Bayshield (which I now violently cringe at), rendered a few wireframe meshes in mode 13h, made the LEDs on my keyboard blink, cheated in games I didn't really care to cheat in just because it was fun to hack savegames and EXEs, wrote a war-dialer and never used it, and generally soaked up and regurgitated every bit of information I could find. I helped create a small startup company to make a Quake mod, made said Quake mod, then buried said company and Quake mod.
... lived in dirty 3-bedroom house with 6 to 8 other people because it meant I could program and play games all day.
... lived in a friend's art studio because it meant I could program and play games all day.
... worked various crappy side jobs because it meant I could program and play games part of the day at least.

Somehow I never got tired of it.

Etc

I finally got my first "real job" at Ion Storm working on Tom Hall's Anachronox. I was there for about three years and it was an incredible experience. After Ion went under, I was lazy for a while. You know... playing games and programming. Some other stuff happened. Eventually I worked at Monkeystone Games, worked on a few mobile-phone games that never shipped, and worked on Hyperspace Delivery Boy, which did ship.

After I left Monkeystone, I was lazy for a while. Some other stuff happened. Eventually I worked at Ritual Entertainment, where I helped ship Star Trek: Elite Force II, Sin Episodes: Emergence, and a few other things. I was there for about four years.

Then I spent a year in Austin, which is a great place to live. After chasing a fool dream of working in audio design, I found the now-defunct Fizz Factor, where I helped ship WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2008 on the DS and generally had a great time.

Now you can find me at Escalation Studios.