“I was always goofing around.”
One thing I’ve always loved about the work I do is hearing about people’s lives.
The games they make.
The games we love.
And I’ve had some wonderful guests.
But on those occasions I got only a glimpse of him.
And there’s much I didn’t know.
I didn’t know, for instance, that he was almost a tattooist.
He still likes them.
He has around 20 tattoos now, even one on the back of his head.
What a different outcome that would have been.
Nor did I have any idea he sang.
And I mean he properly sings.
As in, he went to university to study it.
And the university he went to was Lawrence University Conservatory of Music - a prestigious place.
But it didn’t last.
And when he got to Lawrence, it showed.
As did his discipline.
“I burned out real fast because I was not a serious student and I wasn’t prepared.”
Singing wasn’t his first love, though.
His real desire as a child had been to do fantasy illustration.
He loved Dungeons & Dragons and wanted to draw the kinds of pictures he saw in manuals and magazines.
And again, he got off to a very good start.
The problem, however, was colour.
That’s where singing came in.
But college was never really for him.
“I never became a good student,” he says.
And even then, he walked into it oblivious.
“And I was like, ‘Oh, shit.
But indirectly, it absolutelyishim, and he absolutely is those games.
And in no game is it more apparent than the recent Pentiment.
This is as close as he’s come to fully authoring a game.
You don’t have to look too hard at Pentiment to see Sawyer’s love of art and history.
He loves The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, which runs through Pentiment like a river.
There’s even a character singing in an Abbey that I wonder whether is Sawyer singing himself.
I didn’t think to ask.
And from what gives the impression of an endlessly curious mind.
Campbell seemed to be interested in anything and everything, and Sawyer is like that too.
They fly to another memory, another interest, another story, endlessly.
