LGBTQ+ Vanguard, Woman, Geek: My Interview with Jennell Jaquays
This is my inaugural posting for V.A.P.R. — Visionary, Artist, Philosopher, or Rebel a monthly Transcendence International expose. Every month I’m showcasing and interviewing a trans person to showcase their uniqueness, accomplishments, and learned wisdom. This month I interviewed Jennell Jaquays. Jennell was one of the first women I contacted at the start of my journey. I knew her from a convention she was a guest at. She was the sweetest kindest person to a stranger asking her 20 questions. For that I am in her debt. Oh and she’s a decorated artist and game developer too boot!
Who is Jennell and why is she important? Jennell has worked in the gaming industry since before many of us were born. Starting out in pen and paper role playing games (TSR, Flying Buffalo, Judges Guild) moving on to Coleco, Id Software, Ensemble Studios (now Microsoft) , and helping found the Guildhall game design program at SMU. Her career has spawned the industry from pen and paper to pixels and bytes. Her adventure Dark Tower was nominated for a 1979 H.G. Wells Best Role playing Adventure. It was an adventure with hints to who she really was hidden in metaphor. She was actively involved in a petition to create “Leelah’s Law” outlawing conversion therapy of LGBTQ youth.
She identifies as a lesbian and is married to a wonderful woman showcased in Netflix’s “High Score” Documentary. You’ll have to look her up. She’s a future
V.A.P.R. Interview. <hints and spoilers>.
The Dark Tower was voted one of the thirty greatest adventures of all time by Dungeon Magazine. (People still play it today!) Ms. Jaquays has been voted a top 50 Transgender Americans You Should Know by LGBTQ Nation, 2015 Honoree, and Walter Day’s 2015 Super Star Hall of Fame (He tracks the world video game records), as well as a Hall of Fame Inductee from the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design, and in the 2015 class of Trans 100. 1
(To the reader: For the non-nerds her trans wisdom is broken out first followed by her gaming history and experience.)
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1. What was your hardest struggle to overcome in your transition?
Jennell: When someone’s body is relatively far outside the expected normal range for their gender, it can be difficult to find clothing that both fits and looks good. I think about my college roommate, Randy. He was a small guy. Even as an adult, he had to shop in the boys section of department stores to find clothes that fit him. I have the opposite problem. I’m a BIG girl. Even when my weight was under control, it’s hard to find clothing. And when one of your father’s gifts is feet of unusual size, the problem is compounded. Great for balance, but difficult for finding shoes, even in my former gender. As a woman, nearly impossible. And it’s my greatest source of dysphoria. I can’t even go near the shoe section of a department store without having a dysphoria attack. Even online shoe shopping is problematic for me, since most companies don’t make shoes and boots in my size and when they do, they are basically drag or stripper gear. I’ve had some bespoke boots and shoes made, but the process is long and the cost outrageous.
I wear athletic shoes most of the time now (when I’m not barefoot) and try to find them in fun colors. For a while, I had a pair that reminded me of rainbow colors. But living in Seattle, and walking nearly everywhere on rough sidewalks meant that my feet eventually chewed their way out of them. My current pair are purple, but are beginning to show wear, meaning another adventure in shoe shopping dysphoria is imminent.
2. If you could go back in your life and change anything in your transition what would it be?
Jennell: Like many transgender people, I wish I would have started everything sooner. I was in my my mid 50s when I finally accepted that I was transgender and that I could do something about it (and probably survive the process). But I would also have to acknowledge that doing so earlier my life would likely have come with an entirely different price to pay… one possibly much more expensive than the one I did experience and would have put me on a different path through life. It might have cost me my family, my children, and any number of career opportunities. It would have likely been a different life than the one I have lived.
The other might be more controversial. Professional success gave me the resources necessary to accomplish a number of the transition procedures that make my life easier as a transgender woman. Each one came with its own post procedure complications. With 2020 hindsight, I may have chosen to not have one of them performed, or at least have an alternate procedure performed.
3. What advice can you give to trans men and women just coming out and questioning today?
Jennell: Read and listen, especially learn the stories of people like oneself who have experienced transition. Understand how those people came to make the decision to transition (or not). Understand in advance the costs one may incur. Those costs won’t be all monetary. They will nearly all involve loss… lost friends, estranged family, exclusion from social activities, ejection from faith groups, and reduced employability. The government can legislate and adjudicate how businesses handle transgender people, but they can’t tell your family to be supportive, or your friends to stay the course with your new life. Decide whether that cost is acceptable. I have friends and acquaintances who know they are trans, but are yet unwilling to pay that price for whatever reason.
Take your time with the processes of transition. They can be expensive and time consuming. Unlike coming out as gay, coming out as trans has a cover charge. New wardrobes, legal identity changes, new and often expensive grooming practices, hair removal, and especially trans related surgeries will all cost money.
While there is no one right way to be trans or to handle the processes of your transition, there are a lot of best practices by people who have been there and done that for how to go about accomplishing things, the best order for doing those things, and what to avoid or be aware of along the way. Before you come out, have an idea of how you are going to handle transition, what you hope to accomplish, and a reasonable time frame for those things happening. Plan for years, not just for a few months.
4. What are you most proud of in your transition?
Jennell: It may be just accepting that I was transgender. I had been terrified most of my life of “my secret” being known by others. I couldn’t even admit it to myself for decades. I was a “heterosexual crossdresser” which seemed relatively safe. But the label denied how I really felt about who I was and how I wanted to live. It took two marriages and two divorces and my kids finally being established in their own lives for me to finally have the courage to confront my truth. Everything after that was in some way or another, just working out the details.
5. Did transitioning change your work or how you approach work?
Jennell: I transitioned on the job at a game development studio near Atlanta. I wasn’t the only transgender woman at my company at the time, just the only OPENLY trans woman in the Atlanta office. For the most part, the company and my coworkers accepted my transition and did their best to accommodate me. There were some hiccups and inconveniences (the worst involving restroom use), but nothing major.
During the months before my coming out, I was the lead level designer on a massively multiplier online role-playing game project that had been in development for over five years. The team I lead designed the play spaces in the game world and populated them with the stories that would drive game play. My therapist and I had already discussed the style differences in the way that men and women manage their people in business settings and I was wrapping my head around changing the way I worked with people as a manager. But that role was taken from me. I came home from a short vacation to a layoff that let go of nearly everyone who reported to me. I “survived” that layoff, but my heart for both the project and the company was broken.
I left that company of my own choice seven months after coming out to pursue other things. My head and heart had been out the door for months, well before my body left the building. Although I did cofound a small woman-run game development studio with other veteran female developers that year, my enthusiasm for working on video games was mostly gone and my interest in becoming someone else’s employee again was entirely gone.
I even quit my own company several years later to work on personal game projects again (the work we were doing was almost entirely technical and did not require an artist designer). It really became more of a semi-retirement of sorts.
Transition made me much more sensitive to my failings as a writer and aware of the misogyny and even racism that I had written into my early work. As a transgender game developer, I’m a lot more sensitive about issues in games that may affect women, LGBTQ+ people, and BIPOC people. Word choices matter. Thoughtful treatment of sensitive situations matters. I’m embarrassed to read some of the game content I wrote as a young person, mainly for the casual misogyny inherent in a lot of.
6. How did the Dark Tower tie in to your feelings about gender?
Jennell: I was in deep denial about my own identity in the 70s, but at the same time secretly longed to present myself as a woman. In real life, I kept it as secret as possible, terrified that anyone my know. Yet, in my game writing, I let small hints out by including gender change scenarios, usually as traps sprung upon unwary characters, or in the form of cursed items.
The “Girdle of masculinity/femininity” was one such cursed item in the original Dungeons & Dragons game. It was a normal-seeming, yet magical belt that that would physically change a character’s body from male to female or vice versa. It was intended as a “curse” and definitely was one for a cisgender player, especially a male cisgender player who not only grew up in a culture where people insulted each other by suggesting they were somehow like a woman, but as a nerd, may have been struggling with their own identity issues. It was definitely NOT something they would want.
Curses were hard to remove. And the resulting game play was rarely a sensitive exploration of what it would be like to live as someone of a different gender. Instead, their now-female character would often be raped by monsters in the game, or worse, by other male characters played by their (typically immature and often virginal) buddies. But for a closeted transgender person, it could be an opportunity to present as female in the game setting without the stigma associated with choosing to be a female character.
Dark Tower was my first commercial game adventure product. When I designed it in late 1978, I was an immature, virginal, deeply closeted and in denial 22-year-old transgender woman desperately attempting to present herself as male in a world that was not supportive of LGBTQ people of any kind, let alone transgender women. So what did I do? I included that girdle of masculinity femininity into an early encounter in the adventure.
Deeper into the setting, one of the “villain” characters in the dungeon was a disembodied wizard who kept a stable of attractive men and women as host bodies to use as they pleased. Chances are, this may have been the first transgender or at least gender fluid character in published table top games. When I had the opportunity several years back to create the concept art for the character for licensed miniatures based on the adventure, I created two of them as physical extremes in their gender; i.e.; a large, handsome muscular man, and petite, attractive woman. But in their poses, I gave them body language that seemed opposite to their expressed gender.
7. What was your experience coming out in the gaming (tabletop & video game) industry?
Jennell: It was surprisingly overall positive. I already knew, from my time at TSR that many of the people involved in making content for D&D were open-minded about the world. And many gamers had come out of SF and fantasy fandom which was, again more open-minded. They had already pushed back hard over the years against right-wing intrusion into their interests and hobbies. There was the expected trans-phobia from some fan circles online and I’m sure I lost a few fans, particularly those bought into conservative trans-phobic religions. Unfortunately, that category also included people from my college gaming group. That loss hurt and I was several years going through the mourning stages for them.
8. Can you talk about the trans colors used for the dragon cover of the North Texas RPG logo you snuck in? Any backlash?
Jennell: I had created seven of the previous nine dragon shield logos. Each represented a different chromatic, metallic, or gem dragon from the game Dungeons & Dragons. My intent for the for the 10th anniversary dragon shield logo of the convention was to make it a montage of all the dragons created for the earlier logos. I did that by using just the heads of those dragons breaking out of circular frames, which in turn, surrounded a shield representing the Texas state flag. I also injected a bit of variant mythology into it by including symbology from the Cthulhu mythos. So instead of the star on the Texas flag, there’s a star-shaped elder sign. Two of the scroll banners end in purple tentacles. And dragon at the bottom of the shield was adapted from a tentacle-faced cat I had drawn years earlier. Those elements are all a tip of the hat to designer Sandy Petersen and his Cthulhu Wars game, which is based here in the Dallas Metroplex. Sandy and I worked together at both id Software and Ensemble Studios and I got him involved as an instructor at Guild Hall after we were let go from Ensemble.
The dragon vignettes are all backdropped by sections of the flag shields from their year. Except the Cthulhu dragon. I put trans flag colors behind it. The scales on the white portion of the flag shield are rainbow hued, representing the tradition gay pride flag. Finally, the frames around each of the dragon heads have a colored inset that represents specific LGBT flags.
The medallion around the gold dragon (top right center) has all the colors of the Pride rainbow flag.
The white dragon is surrounded by the pastel pink, blue, and white colors of the transgender flag.
The lavender-colored amethyst dragon has colors taken from the lesbian banner (which is like a lipstick palette of pinks, reds, and magenta tints).
The red dragon, the first of the shirt logos that I designed, is framed in the black, gray, white, and violet colors of the asexual or “ace” banner.
At the nadir of the logo, the Cthulhu dragon is surrounded him with a border of genderqueer banner colors (Violet, white, and green).
The green is surrounded by the color of the non-binary flag, framed in that banner’s purple, robin’s egg blue, yellow, magenta, and yellow orange colors.
The black dragon represents a non-LGBT movement, but one that is intersectional with so many LGBT people’s lives, Black Lives Matter. I chose representative colors for this from the online literature of the movement, black, yellow, and white. LGBTQI people are represented in the populations of all races, all peoples, but this movement brings a focus on the unfair, violent, and often deadly treatment by people of color by law enforcement. It’s something that many marginalized people understand as well.
The blue Dragon is bisexual. They are framed in the magenta, violet, and blue colors of the banner representing those amongst us whose attraction is to more than a single gender, people often rejected by gay and straight people alike.
Finally, moving clockwise to just left of center at the top is the original dragon. This is my reinterpretation of the green dragon on the convention’s first logo. It seems fitting that it is surrounded the somewhat complicated banner of our Straight Allies, with its rainbow upward-pointing chevron silhouetted against alternating bands of black and white. This represents so many of my friends at the convention, as most of them were supportive of me from the first.
As far as I know, there wasn’t a backlash. The only dragon that I’m aware of that wasn’t as popular as the others was the amethyst dragon, mainly because it was a purple color.
9. How did you hear about “The Dragon” and Dungeons & Dragons?
Jennell: I learned about Dungeons & Dragons from my brother while I was in college. Of the two of us, my brother was the actual gamer. He subscribed to a magazine produced by Avalon Hill called The General. Because of that, another game company by the name of Metagaming Concepts (in Austin, TX) sent my brother a copy of their magazine, The Space Gamer. One night in the fall of 1975, while I working as an announcer at the college radio station, my brother called me up and read me two reviews of this game called Dungeons & Dragons. I was hooked by what I heard. My life literally changed direction in that moment. I ordered the game from magazine and entered my future. As far as Dragon magazine goes, I was a subscriber to TSR’s house magazine, The Strategic Review. In June of 1976 it transformed into two magazines, The Dragon which was devoted to Dungeons & Dragons and fantasy gaming and Little Wars which focused on table war gaming, mostly involving miniatures rules. I chose to keep my subscription in The Dragon.
10. What made you decide to start your career in gaming?
Jennell: When I realized that I probably wasn’t going to have a career drawing comic books (one of my teenage aspirations), I set my sights on eventually becoming an illustrator, with an eventual goal of painting books covers for fantasy fiction. That eventually DID happen, but not exactly in the way I expected.
At first, games were a way to get my art published. I was a college student, majoring in art at a small liberal arts college. I began submitting filler or spot illustrations to a small game publisher in Texas as a way to help pay for my first Dungeons & Dragons books (they were also a catalog store for games and they paid double if one took payment in store credit). I just sent small things I had drawn. They weren’t assignments in any way.
That segued into publishing my own fan magazine for Dungeons & Dragons and creating most of the content for that magazine while I was still in college. That publisher who I had been sending my work to contracted me to create the artwork for one of their new microgames, Chitin I: The Harvest Wars. The game was loosely based on a science fiction novella by Jack Vance called The Dragon Masters. In the story, humans genetically engineered capture aliens to become all manner of fighting monsters. The aliens in turn, had done the same with humans and the story ends with a climactic battle between the two. The game was just about creatures similar to the genetically modified aliens. No humans at all in the game.
I did the art for one more of those games before I graduated. This time about humans and Martians (modified humans) fighting on Mars. At their request, I interviewed with them for an art position in Austin, TX over spring break the year I graduated college. I didn’t get the job. They chose to hire a secretary instead.
After graduation, I ended up going to work full time as graphic designer and paste-up artist for the quick print company I had worked for while in school. That job ended abruptly when the city blocked the road in front of the print shop long enough to drive away all their walk-in traffic.
But, around that time my endeavors with the fan magazine and the other work I had done on game projects translated into a job offer from Judges Guild, a small publisher of licensed Dungeons & Dragons adventures. And in one way or another, I’ve been in games ever since.
11. What are you most proud of in your career?
Jennell: Becoming of one the founders and first industry guildmasters of the SMU Guildhall (original The Guildhall at SMU). The Guildhall was a graduate level program at Southern Methodist University in Dallas that offered a Master’s degree in game development. I worked with the director of curriculum to design the overall program, and create the initial coursework for the art focus (the program had three focuses, art, level design, and programming). I was on stage at graduation for the first 10 cohorts that completed the 18-month degree program, including being there for my son’s graduation. He was in the second cohort to go through the program and still works as an artist in the digital game industry.
12. What is your least favorite project you’ve worked on? Any advice to avoid such projects?
Jennell: I worked at id Software from early 1997 to early 2002. As the level designers and artists were focusing on the content for Quake 3 Team Arena, the team-focused expansion of our Quake III first person shooter game, our lead designer, Graeme Devine was working on the big picture design for our next game. The game would use John Carmack’s new graphic engine, but be a departure from the first-person shooter genre that id was known for and move into the area of role play games. Graeme envisioned something along the lines of the Final Fantasy series. And with my background in table top RPG adventures, I was going to lead the level design effort. But internal company politics had other ideas.
Unfortunately for me, company politics got in the way. Two on-staff developers convinced John Carmack to leverage his majority ownership of the company to force a change in direction and to do yet another version of DOOM with his new game engine (which turned out to be one of the least versatile and resource intensive game engines id had ever produced). This decision created a rift between him and the other company owners. One of them definitely did NOT want to do DOOM again. One of the conspirators was fired by the two dissenting company owners (he was a violent drunk both inside and outside of the office and seen a potential liability because of that, and had caused a drunken scene in front of our publisher at a trade show event the week before). One of those owners eventually ended up parting ways with the company after I left.
For me, it broke my spirit. It hurt to be shoved aside like that and while I tried to be positive about the DOOM project, my enthusiasm for it was never there. Instead, I focused on engaging with our Quake III community, encouraging fan support for our new game, Team Arena and teaching people how to work with our tools. For a time, I became the person who engaged with our fans. People have since told me that this made them believe that the company cared about them as fans.
In the end, I parted company with id Software over DOOM 3. Unlike my coworkers, I never had that nostalgia for the original DOOM. The direction that the new game was taking had even less appeal to me and in the early days of development, the design tools were almost inaccessible unless one could program in the C language (which I could not). The person who had become my immediate supervisor earlier in the year was also one of the worst managers I had ever worked for. I’ve not forgiven him for how he mishandled me as a staffer that year.
How to avoid such projects? Be careful about working for companies where one person has authoritarian creative say over the direction the company takes in its games as Carmack had over id while I worked there.
13. What was it like working for Coleco and ID software?
Jennell: Coleco was my first experience working in any kind of office setting. Previous to it, I had worked in a radio station broadcast, my own home art studio, or at a light table in a small quick print shop. In my not-quite-five-years at the company, I went from being a contracted designer who part of a small R&D team coming up with ideas for electronic toys and games; to being a full time employee and surviving an internal politics reorganization that reduced us to my boss and his secretary in one part of the building and two other designers and I sitting in an out of the way closet … er … room trying to keep ourselves busy; to managing the creative team responsible for the art and design of all the game content produced by Coleco for the Colecovision game console and the ADAM computer.
I was there for the entire life cycle of Coleco’s video game product line; from the first pitch to make a game console to compete against Atari and Intellivision to being laid off less than four years later as Coleco shut down it’s game and computer development group. I touched every video and computer game product that we produced in one way or another. In that time, my department grew from six people working in a corner of the basement to 140+ people spread across a sprawling labyrinth of cubicles in the course a couple years and then they let us all go. It was quite the roller coaster ride. I was able to hire on designers from the role-play game industry and artists who had never worked on a video game before to analyze and then document the parade of arcade consoles that came through our offices. We worked with programmers to turn pixel art drawn with markers and design documents based on playing and watching the arcade games into Colecovision cartridges that looked like and mostly played like the original games.
Very little is known about our teams and development processes because Coleco intentionally kept us under wraps. Unlike the creators at Atari, Activision, Intellivision, and Electronic Arts; we had to fight to eventually get our names associated with a few of the final titles the company produced. For Coleco, the brand name was everything and the people who created the product were incidental, interchangeable cogs not to be recognized inside or outside the company. When the company was finally shutting down my design group, human resources didn’t even know what we did for the company.
That design team bonded in ways I’ve not experienced with other companies. Thirty-five years later I’m still friends with several of the designers and artists, and know how to get in touch with many of the rest.
Id Software was a different situation altogether. Where I came into Coleco, I was a relatively naïve, 24-year-old fresh-faced “kid.” When I arrived at id at age 40, I had already been making game content for 20 years, and was the third oldest person in the company at id. Only Sandy Petersen, the designer who brought me on board and Miss Donna, the office manager/company mom were older. The rest were all in their20s and 30s, including the company founders who were still working there. All too soon, I was the oldest developer when Sandy left a few months after I started. Supposedly, I had been hired to replace the recently departed John Romero on the design team. In reality, Sandy hired me to replace himself. Though I wouldn’t learn that until five years later when Sandy recruited me to work with him at Microsoft/Ensemble studios.
At id, I never really “clicked” with the team. I had little in common with most of them. They were young and rowdy guys, into aggressively playing the cartoonishly violent games id made and expressing themselves and their masculinity through sports cars, crude jokes (sometimes about competitors), titty bars, and violent, sexist, or even racist video games. Despite that, I enjoyed the world building aspects of my creative role and making challenging, fun play spaces. I also liked the amount of compensation I received there, which made sticking around easier to bear. But making games there wasn’t as fun as it seemed to outsiders. The company philosophy was to keep the development team as small as possible (for bigger bonus payouts), so the job required long hours to get the games done.
I remember working long hours on Quake 2 through the Thanksgiving holiday weekend with one of the other designers and a programmer. I was home for turkey dinner in Rockwall, and then drove back to id in Mesquite. Everyone else had gone away for the weekend. The three of us spent that weekend repairing bugs in game levels as they came in from the game testers in Santa Monica, CA, including mistakes made by other designers. We had to disobey orders from our design lead (who was half way around the world in Australia on a press tour) in order to make the fixes. Opening and recompiling maps risked breaking them in new ways. But it was the only way to fix the bugs.
White there, I struggled to maintain a good work/home life balance, but failed at it early on. By the time I left id five years later, I was desperately tired of remaking the same first-person shooter again and again. I felt deeply betrayed by the people I worked for and with and I struggled with feelings of self-worth. In truth, I was pretty much like everyone else who had left id before me. And to top it all off, I was on my way to my first divorce later that summer.
It was great to be a gaming rock star. But the price could be high.
14. How did you get involved with SMU’s “Guild Hall” and what was your role?
Jennell: One of the things I did while at id Software was get involved with the fan community that had an interest in making game play environments or maps for our games. Back then, the technology was approachable enough that someone with an interest and a moderate amount of skill could learn our tools and make maps comparable to those in the game. I moderated some of the official online fan forums for that and helped build up a community of map makers. Several of those people went on to careers in game development.
David Najjab was a local guy who was trying to set up a game development program through a university, in this case the University of Texas, Dallas campus. UTD was interested, but wanted to run it using existing undergraduate classes and using their current faculty without industry-experienced faculty or intensity of focus David and his industry supporters felt was needed. At that time, he had the involvement of Tom Hall and John Romero (both former id guys) who now had their own studio at Monkeystone Games. David then approached Southern Methodist University. They had a tech center up in north west Plano that had been funded to operate at the intersection of academics and the tech industry. A graduate degree level game development school fit that need exactly.
Atussa Simon had connected with David to develop the program. She was one of those id game fans in the Dallas area who knew me through my online involvement with would-be game developers. She and David reached out to me in early 2003 while I was at Ensemble Studios with what they were trying to do at Guildhall. At first, it was just as a consultant to validate the direction they were going, but that turned into an after-hours gig for me a couple times a week working with the program’s director of curriculum to actually create the structure of the program, define its goals and game project deliverables, and design the actual art and level design curriculum. Seven months later, the school launched with a few students. Atussa became the school’s first game design instructor. I stayed connected with school as a “Guildmaster,” taking part in recruiting open houses, intake portfolio triage, and occasional guest lectures. I was part of the first 10 graduation ceremonies (one every six months), including my son’s. He was part of the second cohort going through the program.
15. What was it like working at TSR in the 90’s?
Jennell: I arrived at TSR in the fall of 1993 and was there through the end of February in 1997. I mainly worked as an illustrator, painting book covers for Dungeons & Dragons games and books, but also spent about six months as director of graphics in 1995. My manager had been in charge of package design at Coleco when I worked there and he remembered me from then.
The company was organized by departments based on job function and people with similar roles worked near each other. Mostly. All but two of the staff illustrators worked in a bullpen setting, with work stations and easels facing in towards the center of the room. I wasn’t allowed to work in the art bullpen because I used an airbrush in my work. The oil painters didn’t want the dust from my spray settling on their paintings. Apparently ACTUAL dust and lint fibers getting stuck in the paint were ok though (oil paint attracts a LOT of debris while drying). I worked on the same floor as the artists, but at the edge of game design department where I had light filtering in through a north-facing glass block window. Because I had as much history creating game adventure material as I did art for D&, I interacted more frequently with the designers than the other artists. Still, I mostly kept to myself when I could.
As an artist, I worked with designers and editors to define the covers that would go on the game books and boxes, and then later painted them. It was an assembly line process that reset and repeated every year. People didn’t cross lines of responsibility. Designers and editors sometimes exchanged hats, or even wrote fiction. But artists did art. That felt constricting to me, someone who had worn all the hats over the years, often simultaneously. I could pick up freelance art projects from the company as outside work, but not freelance design. That’s how I ended up doing a LOT of icon art for the company’s dice games.
I was there as the company failed in 1996. The owner’s questionable business practices finally caught up with the company and forced it towards bankruptcy (again). As a senior staffer, I was asked to sit in the company president’s board room with her and other senior staff while Human Resources went around the various departments and told many of my coworkers to pack up their stuff so they could be escorted out of the building. We sat there silently with the president, watching coworkers leave carrying boxes of personal belongings. Did I mention that this happened the same day as the employee Christmas gift exchange was supposed to happen?
A week later, my family and I drove from Wisconsin to Disney World in Florida on a long-planned Christmas vacation trip. The weather was lovely and I mused about the idea of working at someplace in the south. Some place that might have winters like that. A month later, a peer in the game industry, someone I had once tried to hire to work for me at Coleco; invited me to go interview with id Software as a level designer. Six weeks later I walked through the doors of id as their newest employee.
16. What are you most proud of working on in the video game industry?
Jennell: It’s a toss up between the level design work I did on Quake III Team Arena game play environments, including managing the production of two unofficial (ok, semi-official) free map packs for the game, created by pro and semi-pro fans of Quake III; and my work as an artist on Age of Empires III’s expansion pack, The War Chiefs for Ensemble Studios. The latter is also my favorite game project in the video game industry.
17. What current projects are you working on that you would like to talk about?
Jennell: I have three primary projects in the works, two of which will eventually be published under my own brand, 5th Wall Games & Miniatures. The first of those is classic style dungeon adventure for the 5th edition of the world’s most popular role-playing game. It’s based on an adventure that I published for original D&D rules in my fan magazine, The Dungeoneer, back in 1977. It’s my first venture into writing for a modern rules system, so I had two separate rounds of blind playtesting done on it (testing where I’m not involved in any way). I’ll be starting on the final edits come September and hope to publish later this fall.
The second project is a near ground-up reboot of a background creator for fantasy game characters that I began working on while I was in college in the 70s, then published for the first time in 1989 called Central Casting: Heroes of Legend. The rights reverted to me a few years ago when the publisher stop sending me royalties and eventually went out of business. I’ve been working on writing the new version for a couple years now, increasing the amount of content in the books by as much as 10 times or more than the original. I’m at the point where I can see that the tunnel has an end, but still have much more to write.
Finally, I’m working with Goodman Games on the second “coffee table” book in their retrospective series on the early table top RPG publisher, Judges Guild. I worked for Judges Guild as a designer and artist for a year (1978–1979) right after college and produced some of their best and most memorable material. The Dungeons & Dragons game adventures that I created for them are still in print and actively being played over 40 years later. There should be more announcements on that book later this fall.
Question responses are © 2020 Jennell Jaquays
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