A Little Bit About Me

UPDATED: October 26th, 2007

I realize that as I start writing posts and linking to other blogs and articles, people will end up visiting my site and wonder who the hell I am in the games industry.  I was planning to  dump most of this info into my about page, but I might as well throw it into a post instead. 

So, I am John "Mundinator" Mundy.  I have been in the games industry for over 12 years now.  I started my adventure at age 15 working as a level scripter/designer at Ronin Entertainment.  Let's just say, I got lucky and I owe my break to Kalani Streicher and Edward Kilham.  Unfortunately, Ronin is not around any longer, but I spent 7 years with them cutting my teeth on game development.  While there I worked on American McGee's Oz, Bruce Lee: Quest of the Dragon, Legend of the Blade Masters, Armor Command and Neo Hunter.

After Ronin, I landed an LD spot at Namco working under Matt Sentel and Chris Esaki.  While there, I really began to hone my skills while working on kill.switch as well a good deal of research on adaptive sound design, third-person shooters, multiplayer and massively multiplayer environments.  I spent just about two years there before joining just about my entire team in a layoff.  I am proud to say that it seems as though the cover mechanic of Gears of War was inspired by our cover system in kill.switch and I am sure some of that came from Chris Esaki who was the Design Director on Gears from Microsoft Gaming Studio.

After Namco I landed a spot as the Lead Level Designer at Perpetual Entertainment working on Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising.  I was at Perpetual for almost three years and saw the company grow from around 30 employees to almost 200.  I managed 9 people of my own at the peak of production and was the go-to lead for 30-40 people during that same time.  We hit an unfortunate decline and had a few rounds of layoffs before I was caught in the complete cancellation of the project.

I have been working on a few of my own game projects over the last few years.  Mainly I have been working on my own IP, but I have also tinkered with XNA and XBLA games.  I am not only a passionate developer, but I am a passionate player.  I play all sorts of genres and really can't name any single one as my favorite.  Ok, well if pushed I would say shooters and adventure games since I am a sucker for story.

 

For some non-game related info...I live in San Francisco, CA.  I was an active progressive house DJ in the bay area for a few years and co-ran Republik Music with my good friend Jared Kelly. In 2004-5, the scene in the bay died quite a bit, and it became very difficult to keep people interested in the small venue progressive house nights...so we eventually closed shop.  I still spin every so often, but I am now officially just a bedroom DJ.  Gotta love it!

I graduated 2002 from University of California: Berkeley with a degree in Film Studies.  I almost got my minor in Computer Science, but 4.5 years was enough...I was done with school at that point.

So that's it...just a quick bit of info to hopefully make some sense out of who I am.  I look at too many blogs where I have no idea where the author is coming from...so now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

Comments

[ma269zda]

c690t

[teresa]

Hey John,

Fancy living and working in Australia?

Our client in Sydney is working in a next gen console AAA title and we need someone like you to assist us!!

Drop us a line if you wish to find out more?

all the best for the New Year!

Teresa
Director Muse Careers