Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow is an American game designer and programmer whose puzzle game Braid (2008) is widely credited with helping launch the modern indie game boom. He studied computer science and English at UC Berkeley, co-founded the Oakland studio Bolt-Action Software in the late 1990s, wrote a technical column for Game Developer magazine, and in 2002 co-founded the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC.

Blow self-funded Braid, a time-manipulation platformer released on Xbox Live Arcade in 2008, reportedly spending around $180,000 of his own money. It became a critical and commercial hit, earning more than $4 million by 2014, and he was one of the developers featured in Indie Game: The Movie (2012). In 2010 he co-founded Indie Fund, which finances independent games.

He poured Braid's earnings into The Witness, an open-world puzzle game made over roughly seven years by his company Thekla, Inc. and released in 2016; Blow said it grossed over $5 million in its first week. Since 2014 he has been designing Jai, a systems programming language for games, often developed live on his Twitch and YouTube streams. Thekla's next game, the large puzzle adventure Order of the Sinking Star, is written in Jai and slated for October 2026. Blow is known for outspoken views on software quality and game design.