The Standup Legendary Game Dev Jonathan Blow
30 snips
Jan 3, 2026 
Jonathan Blow, the visionary behind the games Braid and The Witness, takes us on a fascinating journey through his game development process. He reveals the innovative rewind mechanic in Braid inspired by a mailing-list debate and shares insights from early prototypes like Raspberry. Discussing his upcoming game, Order of the Sinking Star, he explains its unique structure of four standalone islands. Blow also talks about his creation of the Jai programming language aimed at addressing developer frustrations with C++. His thoughts on modern game design are equally enlightening!
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Origin Of Braid’s Rewind Mechanic
- Jonathan describes a mailing-list argument with Casey, Doug Church, and Mark LeBlanc that seeded the rewind idea used in Braid.
- He implemented rewind as a core mechanic and redesigned the game around it to preserve interesting tension without death stakes.
Simplicity Scales Into Emergent Complexity
- Jonathan argues great games start from simple rules that produce surprising emergent complexity.
- He wanted to study why rule-sets interact to create richness, comparing it to fractals and cellular automata.
Four Games That Become One
- Order of the Sinking Star starts as four essentially independent games that later fuse, creating new interactions and surprises.
- Jonathan purposely built each island as a complete game then combined them to amplify complexity.
