![]() ![]() I don't have them here at my desk, but I still have them. I actually had a couple avatars that represented me. Jennell Jaquays: A lot of times we played with small plastic animals. ![]() ĭid you have an avatar that you carried from game to game, or did it change depending on the game? This was in the mid-'60s and early '70s, before. He'd be this figure, and I'd be that figure, and they would be our characters in the world. My brother and I each had our personal avatars that we would put into our play. ![]() I used blocks to build those worlds and populate them with small characters. Later on came Doctor Doolittle, a lot of young adult stories about exotic worlds. I came into roleplaying games with this rich experience of make-believe worlds, and fantasy and science fiction. I started reading the comics he collected, finding ones I liked, and I started collecting them. He read comic books, too, and Mad magazine. He was a hobbyist all his life, so just about every single hobby he got involved in, I got involved in, in some way. I got exposed to what he did as a very young person. My dad was a model railroader, so he was a world builder in that sense. Not as many big toys, but smaller figures. Growing up, my influences were having really cool sets of blocks, and having a lot of small plastic toys. Jennell Jaquays: I'd always been kind of a world designer, even as a child. I know some wargamers who enjoy the hobby for the deep tactics and strategy, while others see it as a form of roleplaying. My wife is over here saying everyone else got turned into Cabbage Patch Kids. I was one of the last to be let go from the design side. "When I left Coleco, we were all laid off. We just co-opted the surface and would set up armies, and have these massive battles. In fact, not long after he built it, he never got to play pool on it again. I played stuff like that with my brother we used to fighting miniature battles on our dad's pool table. Before then it was just tabletop wargaming. My younger brother was an avid wargamer-still is, actually-so it wasn't until college that I discovered fantasy roleplaying games, or any roleplaying games, because it didn't exist before then. My friends in high school played Risk, and we did play some of the Avalon Hill wargames. Jennell Jaquays: Before college, I played some. You attended college when tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons were in their infancy. Over our two-and-a-half-hour interview, Jaquays and I discussed her introduction to tabletop roleplaying, how she became one of the first publishers of a gaming magazine, and what it was like to work before and during the North American videogame market crash of the 1980s. To create faithful adaptations on Coleco's notoriously thrifty budgets, Jaquays and her team took the only approach available to them: observe and simulate. They were given no code, no art assets, no documentation-no foundation on which to duplicate hits like Donkey Kong and Pac-Man. Her mission as one of Coleco's principal designers was to recruit teams of engineers and artists and convert popular arcade games to the 8-bit system. Her desire to try her hand at designing and creating art for different types of games-as well as a burning need to earn a living wage-led her to Coleco around the time the leather company released the ColecoVision to go head-to-head with Atari's Video Computer System (2600) and Mattel's Intellivision. Already a veteran designer, Jaquays cut her teeth designing campaigns for Dungeons & Dragons and publishing The Dungeoneer, one of the first magazines tailored to gaming hobbyists. Right around the time the bottom dropped out from under the North American videogame market, Jennell Jaquays was stepping up. These developer profiles offer snapshots of our conversations that extend beyond discussion of id Software's culture and the Quake franchise. Over months of interviews and research, I got to know the names behind the credits screens on each Quake game. ![]()
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