About Me
The rest of this site showcases my experiences and works, the things I am proud and excited to share. But here I’ll instead talk about who I am and why I’m here!
So hi! I’m Max, pronouns He/Him. I grew up exploring the woods of New Hampshire and the digital landscapes of my favorite games in equal measure. My lifelong goal as a game designer has always been to create immersive worlds that players are intrinsically motivated to explore and inhabit.
I’ve been a game designer professionally for years, but a designer at heart for many more. I’ve wanted to make games since I was very young, 12 or 13 years old. By that age I had had profound, important, and inspiring experiences playing games like The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening and Chrono Trigger. Some part of me back then wanted to get even closer to whatever intangible thing I had found through those games!
Over time that morphed into a desire to understand and articulate why those experiences felt the way they had, and to use that knowledge to help me and my teams build new experiences that could touch players in the same way.
I love figuring out how games impact players, sorting and taxonomizing and formalizing my knowledge. I’ve always cemented what I learn by teaching it to others. I think I’m an excellent communicator of complex or abstract game design concepts—mostly because I’ve had a lot of practice! On every team I’ve worked with, I’ve been enthusiastically documenting everything that we learn as we iterate and build. I build training materials, give presentations, talk my juniors through the hows and the whys of the feedback I give them.
Another example: I run a website called Hyrule Interviews, a database of interviews and quotes from developers who’ve worked on the Zelda series. This project happened to me because I decided I wanted to build this database for myself, to better learn from and understand the thinking and design aesthetic that led to my favorite gaming experiences. But I was too excited about everything I learned to keep it to myself, so I built a public-facing site and post daily quotes on social media. Today I have thousands of followers. and I’ve even been paid to write about this history in publications like Lock-On magazine. I inadvertently became a professional Zelda historian!
As you can see, I love to understand the dynamics between game and player, and I love to share what I’ve learned. And ultimately, the best way to do that is to find an amazing team and, together, show the world by creating groundbreaking and inspiring games.