Brendon ChungFounder Blendo Games (Gravity Bone, Thirty Flights off Loving, Quadrilateral Cowboy, Skin Deep).

Brendon Chung is an American designer, artist, and programmer of some of the most tightly edited video games yet devised. In 2008, while working as a level designer for Pandemic Studios in Santa Monica, he began to make a series of prototypes under the name Blendo Games. In 2012 members of the Idle Thumbs podcast contacted my guest, and asked if he would create a short game to be distributed as a reward to their Kickstarter backers. The result, Thirty Flights of Loving, is a heist game involving motorcycle chases, shootouts and dashes through airports. Drawing influence from action cinema, it uses disorientating jump cuts, erratic hops back and forward in time to create a story that is as opaque as it is disjointed. The game lasts just fifteen minutes but its impact is enduring, and has defined my guest’s work ever since. A 2016 sequel titled Quadrilateral Cowboy, in which players assume the role of a computer hacker, was nominated for an Innovation Award at SXSW, and won the Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival. He is now working on a new project, Skin Deep, due to be published by the Hollywood studio, Annapurna Interactive.