As a little kid, my favorite place to visit, besides Grandma Suki’s food-filled house, was a place my father never set foot in during his entire life: Grandpa John and Grandma Ann Marshall’s house. And who could blame him? As I mentioned, Grandpa John was an unabashed racist who completely opposed my parents getting hitched. Even though his grandmother was Cherokee, he was disgusted that his daughter had married a Mexican who was Yaqui! I’m sure nobody expected him to embrace me, the offspring of the union that he was dead set against, but life is funny that way. I was his favorite. He adored me instantly, according to my mother, and I adored him back.
Our relationship felt completely natural, and it was. Thankfully, blood, even blood he didn’t like, was thicker than water where Grandpa John was concerned. As I got older and started talking and interacting with him, his affection for me grew and grew.
My Grandpa John was originally from Henryetta, Oklahoma. He had the chiseled features, short gray hair, and a weathered, rugged face. Every time I was around him, he was the gentlest person. It was only later in life that I learned how violently he treated his own kids. He drank vodka every night, but I had no idea he was an alcoholic. In fact, I never saw him drink during the day. There were few times that my grandpa was out of the house: I recall him attending my eighth grade graduation and going to see Silverado in Prescott. He really lived like he was personally quarantined. He watched TV all day and took naps. I rarely saw him eat anything.
Grandma Ann was a petite woman originally from Chicago. She lost her mother when she was ten years old, something that affected her for the rest of her life. Her father sent her to a Catholic boarding school for a couple of years, and when she returned home she found him remarried, to a woman who had kids of her own. So she took a back seat and became more reserved, sometimes even cold. That said, she did have a soft side, but she would not put up with anything that didn’t agree with her. She spoke up often. Overall, I heard her speak more negative comments than positive. She never traveled, because my grandpa John didn’t want to leave home. Once they settled in Tucson, Arizona, that was it.
My grandpa and I were an odd couple. Grandpa John was a crusty, creative, passionate man. A survivor of the Great Depression, his life had taken him to hell and back. His mother died when he was three, and his father was rarely around—when he was, he wasn’t much of a parent. Food was scarce and so was supervision. Grandpa John quit school after fourth grade. When he was eleven, his father threw a pitchfork at him, aiming to injure. The sharp-tined missile missed its target, but the message was received. John Marshall took to the streets, even though the Depression was on, and food, work, and money were hard to come by. He spent his early teens hopping train cars across the country with hobos. Eventually, he decided to join the army at fifteen, lying about his age. According to my mother, he needed food and a secure place to sleep. He also needed shoes. Joining the army was a move that ended nearly four years of hustling, hoboing, and hunger. As promised, his uniform included the first pair of new shoes he’d had since the death of his mother; his army cot was the first bed of his own, and the three daily seatings in the mess hall were the first regular meals he’d had in more than a decade. Grandpa served from 1933 until the end of WWII. After that, he worked as an air conditioning engineer and landed a job at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson in 1954, where he worked until he retired in the 1970s.
As for me, I was his funny-looking, faithful sidekick (he was on the outs with Ralph because Ralph slammed a door). I wore thick glasses, and for a time, I had to wear an eye patch to fix an eye that was looking at my nose instead of straight ahead. I inherited my father’s strange teeth problems, too. He had a tooth in the roof of his mouth, and although I didn’t have that specific problem, my teeth appeared to be procedurally generated without a logical algorithm—overlapping each other and growing at slanting angles. I also bore my father’s dark eyes, brown skin, and dark hair, but they didn’t unleash Grandpa’s toxic prejudices.
Grandpa John was a self-taught oil painter and craftsman. There was an easel in the spare room, and he also liked working with wood, building stools and bookcases. He’d set me up at the kitchen table with paper, pencil, and crayons, and I’d draw, hanging out for hours together while he watched game shows and screamed at the people on TV. Then, after the game show was over, he’d come look at my drawings, which I was always proud of. The act of creating something from nothing is incredibly empowering. I think most kids discover this on some level. Drawing provides instant gratification—especially if you do it well. If grown-ups ooh and aah over your work, that gratification grows. Of course, creation is often at the heart of play; it doesn’t matter if you are playing make-believe with dolls, dress-up games, cops and robbers, or, in my case, drawing sports cars and 18-wheelers.
At the time, I loved drawing cars, probably because my dad loved cars. Our house on South Oregon Drive always had a car or two in front of it, and sometimes, much to my mom’s fury, he bought cars on credit, rolling the current loan into the next loan, building up debt. More than once, he raced for pink slips—illegal street races where the winner takes the loser’s car. My mother remembers, none too fondly, only the times he lost, and they were left with the debt and without the car. During those times, he always seemed to get another car for them, whether by playing pool for money, borrowing someone else’s car, or making an old junker run. He also took us to drag races at the Tucson Dragway, where he shared his love of hot rods and the raw power of roaring engines. Cars were a big deal in our world.
Once, Grandpa John came to the table and picked up my drawing of a Lamborghini Countach, one of the coolest-looking cars in the ’70s, and asked, “Did you trace this?”
“No.” It was an honest answer, and I was surprised he asked me.
“Come on, Johnny. You must have traced this.”
“I didn’t!”
“Let me see you do that again.” He sat down and watched me while I drew another Countach, complete with the rear spoiler. “I can’t believe it!” he said. “That is really impressive.”
No doubt part of his joy came from thinking He’s taking after me. I even remember him saying stuff like that, comparing my early drawings to his paintings. He clearly thought I was talented and was the first person to express a sense of pride at my skills.
As much as I loved drawing as a kid, I also loved stories. My mother read to Ralph and me every night, and I also listened to stories on my own, putting my beloved 45 RPM single of a performance of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” onto my little record player. The story was terrifying to me at the time, but I couldn’t resist its lure. I suspect this early interest in horror and the macabre is something I carried with me going forward. I picked up reading quickly and began exploring the books around me. Grandma Ann was a big fan of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts cartoon strip and had a dozen paperbacks chronicling Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the gang—kids like me. I devoured those books, and although I didn’t realize it at the time, they clearly inspired me a few years later, when, as a teenager, I started writing and drawing my own semi-autobiographical comic strips about a boy named Melvin. Like Charlie Brown, my cartoon creation was a long-suffering kid whose painful reality provided the punchlines.
Of course, TV was as compelling as Peanuts. I grew up with Sesame Street, New Zoo Revue, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and The Electric Company. Like most of my generation, I also imbibed a steady diet of Saturday-morning cartoons—with Scooby-Doo, Tarzan, and live-action characters like Electra Woman and Dyna Girl. I also soaked up animation reruns after school—the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series featuring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, and so many others. These shorts exploded with gags, crazy voices, absurd plots, and soaring music. It was joyful, anarchic entertainment to me. Little did I realize how these elements would shape my creative future.
Grandpa John didn’t just love game shows; he loved games in general, and so did Grandma Ann. They played cards—hearts, spades, rummy—at the kitchen table for hours at a time. Grandma Ann was a huge fan of bowling, and so was my mom. They went to the bowling alley practically every week. While I loved games of all stripes, I didn’t bowl much. At the lanes, the grown-ups were serious about their fun—little kids got in the way—but bowling, indirectly, was a gateway to games for me. I liked the bowling alley because there were pinball machines, and I loved pinball. The glitzy games offered action, flashing lights, and loud sound effects. To me, they were the definition of fun. Everything about pinball was thrilling: putting a quarter in a slot to initiate this mechanized ritual, the “chunk” sound as five balls were released for your game to start, pulling back the plunger—the spring tension was different on every machine—to launch a ball, and then locking in. My fingers slapped the flipper buttons as I battled to control the game, beat the machine, and top the other scores on the board. The scores themselves were great too! You never had time to see the numbers climbing until a ball went into the gutter, but, man, you could hear the points piling up while you played, which really fed into the excitement.
Grandpa John and Grandma Ann’s house was near a strip mall with a small arcade called Spanky’s. It was a narrow place with a deli counter at the front and a line of pinball machines on one side. On weekend and summertime visits, my grandmother gave me a dollar, and I walked to the mall where I debated buying a Hot Wheels car, which I collected and played with, or playing four pinball games. It was a tough decision. The acquisition of another beloved toy or the utter excitement of trying to control an uncontrollable pinball machine? Since I already had a lot of Hot Wheels, I chose pinball most of the time. I was barely tall enough to see what I was doing, but the machines called out to me. It’s the first example I can recall of seeing a game respond to my actions in such a visceral way, engaging all the senses. Pinball was also competitive. I competed with myself plus everyone else who’d ever played the machine before me for the high score. It taught me the value of mastery—the better I was, the longer that quarter lasted. Though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, pinball set me on a path I couldn’t have imagined.
At home, I didn’t draw or play games. My mom struggled to provide food, and so art supplies and toys were out of the question. When I did find something to occupy myself, I was often on edge, waiting for something to happen. Life on South Oregon Drive was unpredictable. My Dr. Jekyll dad continued to come home late at night, acting more and more like a drunken Mr. Hyde. Nothing had prepared my mother to leave situations like this—she was programmed to endure and to survive by her own family. As children, as horrible and surreal as this sounds, we became accustomed to this, too. It didn’t happen every day, but sometimes being scared felt like part of everyday life. We froze in place or were told to run. We steered clear of our dad when he was angry to avoid provoking him further.
In spite of the challenges at home, I was happy most of the time. Everything I needed, I had—a loving mother, enough food to eat, friends to play with, and loads of places to explore. My brother, father, and I spent many nights sleeping under the stars at Madera Canyon, the Pantano Wash, and Patagonia Lake, and I grew to know the Sonoran Desert like the back of my hand. When he wasn’t the Mr. Hyde version of a drunk, my father was outgoing and fun. There was so much of my life that felt happy. Perhaps because things in my homelife were often chaotic, I grew to expect bad things to happen, so when they didn’t, that was good enough for me.
Even the challenging aspects of my life—the poverty and alcoholic chaos—had an upside: I learned to escape into my imagination as a protective device. Behind my drawings of trucks and cars, I imagined whole stories: what life would be like as a trucker or someone who raced a super sports car. Eventually, that escape turned into fantasy, war, or sci-fi settings. Because we didn’t have any games that kids could play, I had to make my own fun and games from things I found in the desert or around the house. These early experiences are foundational to the game designer I would later become.
Around the time I was in third grade, I began to notice that my dad was disappearing for days at a time. This was not new behavior, but the frequency was a new development. Sometimes, during his longer absences, my mom ran out of money. She called Grandma Suki, and we went there to eat and bring home supplies. It was a mixed blessing when my dad was gone. There was no chance of sudden flashes of rage. No whippings. No dish throwing. No attacks on my mom. When my dad reappeared, an alcohol-fueled assault was always a hair-trigger away, but we embraced fun and humor whenever we could, the better to escape the lows we sometimes endured. I am sure that my mother felt differently. She never asked my father where he had been and neither did we. We knew better.
Perhaps hoping to show that things were fine, it was around this time that I got something cool from my mom and dad. A radio wristwatch! Or rather, a radio you wore on your wrist like a watch—it didn’t actually tell time. I guess this was the mid-’70s equivalent of a kid getting their first smartphone now. My Aitron Wristo transistor radio was made of white plastic, with a rounded, dappled black speaker cover in place of a watch face. It had three silver control knobs for power, volume, and tuning, and a black wristband so I could attach it.
I thought my Wristo was so great—it played FM and AM stations crystal clear. It was something straight out of the Dick Tracy comic strip I read in the funnies at Grandpa John’s. I wore it all the time, but since it was battery-powered and batteries cost money, I learned to be judicious about playing it. At night, in bed, I tuned into CBS Radio Mystery Theater. I remember every show started with a creepy, squeaking door opening—I imagined a giant vault, actually—and the sound morphed into ominous, dramatic strings. Then, there came a voice: “Come in. Welcome. I’m E. G. Marshall.” It was a classic, old-school horror series hosted by a guy with my grandpa’s last name who narrated and commented on these creepy horror stories. When the chilling episode was over, E. G. delivered his cynical sign-off: “Until next time, pleasant … dreams,” which I thought was both wicked and funny.
The biggest event that occurred during third grade was also a kind of horror story, but it began as a mundane-sounding venture, almost like the beginning of a country song: My dad told my mom he was going to the store for cigarettes.
He got in the car and drove away.
He never came home.