You found me! Perhaps you'd like to know that I’m currently the Creative Director for BUCK Games. We’re a part of BUCK, a fancy global animation and creative studio.

For our latest game, we teamed up with Netflix to create The Electric State: Kid Cosmo. It blends narrative and retro gameplay, centered on a fictional handheld console. We released our first original game in 2023, a colorful roguelike-Minesweeper mashup called Let’s! Revolution! The original soundtrack by Antfood is my favorite thing (especially that last track!)

Still reading, huh? Well, before BUCK, I worked at Bad Robot Games in their early days and I got to witness the studio’s beginnings firsthand. I also freelanced with The Game Band, contributing to Where Cards Fall. Around that time, I became a dad, took time off, and made some small experiments.

I had my first full-time job in games at thatgamecompany, working on Sky, first as a Feel Engineer and ultimately as Lead Designer. Before moving to Los Angeles in 2013 to join at thatgamecompany, I was living in Philly and met my future partner. She encouraged me to pursue game development full time (get a real job!) and thankfully joined me in LA when I did!

The period before that was full of wandering. I co-founded a "startup" (everyone was doing it back then) focused on digital well-being—but, alas, we were ahead of our time. I lived in Hong Kong for a few seasons, fell in with some ex-pat spiritualists and wound up becoming a yoga teacher, meditating a bit too much, and writing about consciousness and video games. I even worked on a yoga-themed Xbox Kinect game caled Leela at one point. A lot of those opportunties came after a film I made about my relationship with video games, called As Real As Your Life, was shown at TED in 2006.

If you’ve made it this far—congrats, your reading skills are top notch! What else can I say? I went to college for Digital Media Design and earned a degree in engineering, despite mostly hanging at the art building and making weird little videos with friends. I did produce my first game back then, a Philly-themed pixel-art biking game on iOS called Hipster City Cycle. I grew up in New Jersey, not far from where I now live with my wife and daughter in the The Sourlands.

That’s all I got. You can find me on LinkedIn for work related updates.

Yours Truly,
Michael Highland