Zach Gage ’08: The creative landscape of reimagined video games
Zach Gage ’08 was 8 years old when a friend smashed a favorite video game. “He took a hammer to it because I wanted to play it every time I came over to his house and he was frustrated,” Gage remembers. Devastated, Gage turned to his mother, hoping she would buy him his own game. Her reply: “If you want to have games, you should just make your own.”
Today, at 39, Gage is one of the most innovative and respected independent game designers
in the industry. His games — from word puzzlers to reimagined classic board games
— have been downloaded millions of times on mobile phones and other devices. Well-known
for his games like and , he has been featured in notable publications such as Wired and The New York Times
Magazine, which called him a “young design genius.” In 2014, he was on list. He also won an Apple Design Award.
Gage has a knack for innovating with familiar concepts and conventional games. Take Really Bad Chess, for instance, which puts a creative twist on traditional chess by randomizing the pieces at the start of the game.
“I always wished I liked chess. But the game is ideally geared toward players with a cerain level of skill,” he says. “Really Bad Chess makes the game a little more enjoyable now — and anyone can play it — because the chaos and unpredicatability level the playing field.”
Gage’s most recent venture, in collaboration with Orta Therox, is a puzzle gaming platform called , a one-stop virtual space for many of his games. Puzzmo was purchased in 2023 by the media conglomerate Hearst Corporation as a way to reinvent the classic newspaper games page. The platform was recently rolled out to more than 100 publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle, which offer free access to daily games via the platform.
Zach’s journey from a kid who loved to play video games to a lauded indie game designer and producer was far from straightforward. Raised in Brooklyn and the outskirts of New York City, he grew up amid generations of artists. His mother is a painter, his grandmother painted posters for Broadway shows, and his grandfather was an art director, among others. The artistic environment, combined with limited access to video game consoles, sparked his creativity in unexpected ways.
A screenshot from Ridiculous Fishing, which won an Apple Design Award
“Most of the experience I was able to have on my computer as a kid was with creative tools,” says Gage, who first used Kid Pix, a children’s drawing program, to create pictures and describe imaginary game levels. Later, he used HyperStudio to craft simple interactive adventure games.
As a studio art major at Skidmore, Gage immersed himself in photography, painting, drawing, and communication design coursework. From this diverse artistic background, he gained a unique perspective on game design. He also learned the value of unstructured creativity, and the concept of starting projects without a fixed end in mind became a cornerstone of his design philosophy.
The faculty at Skidmore gave me an incredible amount of space to explore the way I wanted, but enough guidance to put me on the road to great things.”Zach Gage '08Independent game designer
Gage earned an MFA in 2010 at Parsons School of Design, where he created interactive installations that blurred the lines between art and gaming technology. These installations — some of which had their roots in his Skidmore art projects — have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, and FutureEverything in the United Kingdom, among other places.
In 2009, as part of his dissertation, he released Lose/Lose, a controversial game that was received with a mix of fascination and alarm. On the surface, it is a classic arcade shooter video game. The player controls a spaceship and the goal is to destroy alien invaders. There is a real-life destructive consequence, however. Each time the player destroys an alien, a random file on the user’s device is deleted permanently.
“It raises questions about the value of digital data, the consequences of our actions in a digital environment, and the nature of risk and reward in video games,” says Gage, who noted that Lose/Lose is labeled as a game that deletes files. “I still consider it an important piece of my artwork. Today, society clearly understands the reality of the digital world, but back then, most people still treated computers like glorified calculators.”
Lose/Lose was a pivotal turning point in Gage’s career path, when he realized that he did not have to choose between making art or making games. They are in many ways one and the same.
“The literacy of interaction in games and art is identical, but games offer a much broader reach,” he says. “Only a small number of people might understand interactive art, but billions understand video games.”
