How can you describe Jennell Jaquays in a few sentences. An acclaimed game designer, one of the pioneers from the early days of gaming who invented a new way to design levels? A superb artist who created iconic images? A woman who, with the help and support of her wife, found the courage to live her true life?

However you describe her, Jennell was special.

Back when I was writing a gaming column for a daily newspaper in 2014 Jennell graciously agreed to an interview over Skype. It was never published. 

So here it is in simple transcript. Rest in peace, Jennell.

When did you start playing D&D? What got you into gaming?

Dungeons & Dragons per se, I discovered the game in, like, 1975, late in the year. I was working at my college radio station as an announcer and my younger brother, who was a very avid war gamer, particularly Avalon Hill type war games, called me up on the phone and read to me two reviews inside a magazine that he had been sent, just out of the blue, called The Space Gamer. It was two reviews of Dungeons & Dragons and it was at that point that I… it was kind of like one of those epiphany moments, where you suddenly realise that your life has changed. And that was one of them. I knew that when he read those descriptions to me that this was something I wanted to be a part of and I immediately started that. So I got a copy of the magazine from my brother and started submitting art to the magazine because I had been, I mean I was an art student, and they needed art and this was an outlet for those little goofy sketches I was doing in my, quote ‘copious’ free time, when I wasn’t being an art student or a radio announcer. So I used the money that I got from doing that art to actually order the rules and by early the next year I’d started playing.

There must have been something that your brother figured you be interested in, in that game, for him to give you a call.

My brother and I, all through growing up we had basically created worlds. In fact my Dad never really got a chance to use the pool table in the basement because we would build worlds on top of it. We’d set up our own war games using small Airfix figures, we’d build worlds out of blocks, all sorts of things. We were already making games when we were 10, 11, 12 years old. And that continued on, probably until I went to college. It was just a natural step for me. And again, I actually really got into the industry because I saw it initially as an outlet for doing my artwork.

And it wasn’t that long before you started publishing The Dungeoneer.

No. We were getting into the fandom – again, this was 1976, so we were kind of like early into the fandom – we looked around. There were APAzines at the time, like Alarums & Excursions, and I think there was a British one, Trollcrusher, even Owl & Weasel, which later became White Dwarf.  So I was looking at this, and I said, “Well, no one’s really seriously publishing roleplaying game, Dungeons & Dragons, material, publishing it on a fan basis,” so we thought, “Why don’t we try this.” I had several other friends from college and we thought, “Well, I’m interested in publishing, so I can carry that load of it,” and by this time most of us were all writers of some sort, if it was only college papers. [She laughs].

It was the artists that were in short supply, really, wasn’t it?

Well, I carried the lion’s share of the art for several issues. I actually contacted TSR and had an exchange with Tim Kask [first editor of The Dragon magazine] back in the day, and they pretty much gave us the go-ahead, “Sure do this, there’s no problem with the name. IF you use actually TSR copyrighted material, note that.” Notice how forgiving that was at the time, you know, note that in the publication, but they gave us full go-ahead, so that summer we put together the first issue, which was like 8 pages long in a digest size, and went to press with it. We gave away about half the print run, just sent it out in the mail to people, addresses we’d found from other magazines, and by the next issue we already had subscribers. Jim Ward [TSR game designer, responsible for D&D supplements and the game Metamorphosis Alpha], who’d spent years and years and years at TSR, was our first subscriber.

At what point did you start think, hang on, I can make a career out of this?

Actually, I really never did. You’d asked if this was something I planned out or something I fell into. When I graduated from university, or college, in the summer of ’78 I had actually planned on going into a career as basically graphic design and art.

I was actually working for a local print shop, doing their pre-press work – this was all done by hand at that time, no computers really – and I got laid off after about a month and a half on the job because traffic had stopped due to construction out in front of the office. And around that time I was also doing some work for the publisher Martian Metals – they were a miniature company.

I remember their Traveller miniatures.

I actually did a great deal of the concept work for those. And around that time, the person to whom I had sold The Dungeoneer said, “Hey, I’m working at Judges Guild now, I took the magazine there with me, we’re going to start publishing it there, are you interested in working with us?” Well, unemployed girl was unemployed. I loaded a bunch of spare artwork I had available in the apartment and drove down to Decatur, Illinois, for a weekend job interview. They liked me, I liked them well enough, and they bought a bunch of pieces of my art and sent me off with an employment contract. I worked for them for a year. That was literally how it started.

I read an interview I found online where you were talking about the time at Judges Guild not being especially happy, that it was minimum wage, basically.

It was minimum wage. They don’t like me talking about being unhappy. The truth was it was a minimum wage job, I had some personal difficulties working with the manager, and after a year there I decided that I could do better.

That kind of began the freelance period, and from my memory of that period, around 1980, ’81, almost any time you turned to a game supplement there was either the name Jaquays there, or it was the fabulous furry Keith brothers.

Yeah, them!

What was it like at that point? Was it immensely creative, or was it, “Oh, God, got to ship some products, my money depends on it?”

Well, at that time I was sharing an apartment with a roommate, so rent was mostly covered. And it was a lot cheaper back then, so I didn’t have to produce quite as much big-dollar stuff. But I did turn the crank a lot, and working for Judges Guild, that was the whole point, just turn the crank as fast as you could, and I did a lot of small artwork. Then, when I moved on from that, the projects like what became Griffin Mountain – and that just went on for ever and ever and ever.

Griffin Mountain was a huge volume.

Yeah. It wasn’t what we intended originally, but it’s what it grew into.

I remember reading a piece by Rudy Kraft saying that Griffin Island was the original idea, and then it got shoe-horned into Glorantha.

Yeah, it essentially started with… he had some areas that he had developed in Glorantha that grew out of the Snakepipe Hollow work, and then into some of the other products at Judges Guild and we created this area of the Judges Guild gateway world that we were going to call Adventures Beyond the Pass, in fact I still have the logo artwork for that that I did, but when it went through Chaosium to get their take on it, Greg Stafford came back to me and to Rudy and said, “Hey, we want this in Glorantha. How do we work that out?”

You may have been the first people to get Gregged.

[Jennell laughs] Well, what we ended up doing was, as he had a lot of input on it, Rudy and I, we just cranked. Rudy was very good at creating creature stats and building balanced enemy teams. I was really good at turning them into people and giving them interesting characters. We worked very well together that way.

Griffin Mountain is one of the all-time great campaign packs. People who’ve never played RuneQuest have heard about it. How does that feel, to have that kind of prestige attached to your work?

 I’ll be honest, I’m very mystified. Most of the stuff that I’m really famous for in the roleplaying game industry I did when I was like 22 years old, I mean, 22, 23 years old. I’ve more than lived that in my life since then, yet this work is still going on. People are still playing in it, it’s still in press. I’m, I dunno, dumfounded. Sometimes you peak early in some areas and you spend the rest of your life trying to recreate that.

A lot of the work you’ve been doing is either scenario modules or, in video gaming, level design work, rather than creating the system around it. Is there something that appeals particularly to you about working within somebody else’s established structure?

I think that the notion is that I got started doing this as writing adventures. The F’Chelrak’s Tomb in the original Dungeoneer was my idea of a very short very intensely loaded-with-stuff adventure. It was the kind of stuff that not only was I interested in running for my own campaign, but I kind of added in extra stuff to make it even more punchier, so all of my good ideas from a few other dungeons were thrown into that mini-dungeon. And what I found between what I did as a child, growing up with my brother, and writing comic books when I was a kid and drawing my own comic books and then going through art school, it kind of all led towards… I like creating and telling stories, in a sense, not necessarily as a writer. I don’t have the novelist bug, the fiction writer bug, but I like creating worlds. I guess that’s the best way to put it. What has attracted me over and over to different types of work, is the ability to create worlds that other people experience.

That moves on a little bit to after the first sort of great freelance period…

It was all of a year!

You then moved into – was it straight away? – into working with Coleco.

Yeah. The brief story on that is, if you know the name Rick Loomis, Flying Buffalo…

Yeah.

I had met Rick through Michicon, near where I lived, game conventions, and one November in 1980 he said, “Hey, Mike Stackpole is up here with me and he’d like to get to meet you.” So Mike and I made friends at that point, and about a month later he called me out of the blue and said, “Hey, I’m here in Connecticut, working for Coleco on a project as a game designer. They need another person. Are you interested?” And I thought about it and I said, “Well, I’m at least interested in talking.”

That time was a really slow time in the roleplaying game side of things, so I went out and interviewed. They liked me, I liked them well enough, and I started immediately. That was late November, early December 1980. And it went forward from there. They weren’t doing video games yet.

Almost on the cusp of that first great home video game explosion, which – I might be slightly wrong, in Britain things happened slightly differently, we didn’t have the Coleco stuff, we had the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64. I’m remembering that as being about ’82, ’83 maybe, that things really started taking off.

Late 1981. The department I worked in at Coleco had literally been gutted. There’d been a political war inside and the director that I worked for basically lost. So they took all his engineers, they took away everything except his secretary, her assistant and three designers, which I happened to be one of. And we kind of puttered around on projects for about six to eight months, and then all of a sudden Coleco was noticing that hey, this Atari company is making money, and this Intellivision company too, they’re making money with these cartridges and we should be able to do that too, because that was Coleco’s style: find a market that’s been established, come in with another product that fits into that niche. And that’s how ColecoVision started. One of my friends, one of the other designers-slash-engineers, and one of the engineers from the engineering department, started putting together the specs for the new product and that’s eventually what became ColecoVision. Coleco decided to go forward with it, and all of a sudden my group turned back into a full-fledged production group. We brought on programmers and other people to make the products work and we grew from a handful of people, six or seven people, up to 140, 150 people in the course of the next two years.

By that point I was actually… I had gone from being just a designer to eventually being manager of game design, then eventually chief designer and finally director of design. But I went through this process of building a team, and by the point that WarGames was being worked on, most of the product was being handled by other people on my team. I was overseeing, shuffling papers, keeping them happy, keeping them moving, reviewing all their work. I didn’t get a chance to do as much hands-on design. But when we saw WarGames the movie, when they showed us the movie, a preview of it, I was sitting there in the audience watching it and when they got to the point in the movie where the computer just starts launching all those simulated nukes, I said, “Damn, there’s our game.” And that’s what I developed the game from. And then I worked with another designer, Joe Angiolillo, to split the work on it. He did a lot of the design and documentation based on some of my original concepts.

I see that the next in my list of questions is just about the number of different things that you’ve done. Are you a polymath, or are you a butterfly?

I understand polymath, what do you mean by a butterfly?

Do you flit from one thing to another?

Ah, yes. I sometimes wonder if – because I’ve never been diagnosed – if there might be some attention deficit issues. What I would find is that if I do a type of work for too long I get bored. I mean, seriously bored. So I had skills in writing, I had skills in art, allegedly some people think I had skills in management; I’ll dispute that. You be nice to people and you make sure their work gets done, so you’re a great manager. So, essentially, I would say, that I do have a variety of skills. A lot of that developed out of, one, a need to have them, and the other was I got bored. I got bored doing the same thing over and over again, so whenever I’m in a job situation that allows me to do a variety of tasks – right now, I’m creative director for a game company and today I’m supposed to be designing specs and another day I’m meeting with a lead programmer on another project to design the overall look of the art in the game, two days ago I did a logo for our company motto, so I move around. I get to do a variety of stuff and that makes me happy.

You have been involved, obviously, in both tabletop games and computer games as a designer. You’ve launched a game design course. What skills do you think that tabletop gaming develops that is useful for video game design?

Well, I think back to the ‘80s when we were putting together the ColecoVision team, because one of my responsibilities at that time was recruiting the design team, and the best resource… we had a time when there were no video game designers other than programmers, but the video game design industry primarily came out of, we’ll use the word polymath, but polymath programmers who had ideas for games, who could do every little bit of it that produced a shipping game. They were the talented guys who could do the sound, do the graphics, sort of, do everything at a certain level, but nothing that necessarily a polished professional level that, say, a specialist could do it. So one of my jobs in setting up the Coleco department was to find specialists. There were no video game artists at that time, so we had to make our own. There were no video game designers, so we had to make our own. What I looked for, having come out of the roleplaying game industry, I knew that roleplaying game designers could write. They could write technical specs, creative technical specs. And they could write rules systems, and they could analysis things and understand looking at the way something played, how that translated into better play, so I went to roleplaying game designers, and I picked up people who later became fairly reasonable names in the industry. Lawrence Schick was eventually my senior designer, he’s currently the loremaster for The Elder Scrolls Online, in charge of all their lore, all their story background.

And I remember some of his early work for TSR as well.

Yes. And he’d just become available after leaving TSR, so he was followed by essentially a string of people who were associated with TSR, who’d all been kind of pushed out the door in one their downsizings. My second in command was Dr Dennis Sustare; he’s probably best known in roleplaying as being the designer of Bunnies & Burrows, or the original creator of the druid class for D&D. So, he had just been recently released from being a university professor and was looking for work, and so we picked him up and picked up a number of other designers from a few companies. We had people come in from Heritage Games, from Avalon Hill, SPI, one of the guys who worked on Ace of Aces, that sort of design background, and it all worked for us. It all worked for making video games. Now the downside is that when the industry collapsed, very few of them were able to stay in the industry.

And I think you yourself went back into freelancing, with a lot of work for TSR. But what specific skills do you think came out of that? I mean, what skills do you think that the tabletop design element managed to bring into video games?

I’m going to say that it’s always changing. What we looked for back in the day was writers who could be technical writers, so I’m going to say one of the strong elements for a good designer is the ability to write, to convey ideas simply and in a clear manner so that someone else can execute it. That came out from roleplaying games rules and scenarios, we pulled that forward. Another is the ability to diagram out play areas and to consider the play flow through those areas. Again, roleplaying game maps, the idea that you’re moving somebody through a story elements and trying to possibly tell a story by disjointed encounters. That comes out of roleplaying games. Again, sometimes the ability to think in three dimensions, that if you’re doing a game map and you’re thinking in terms of, “Well, this level sits here,” I’m thinking in terms of vertical and horizontal movement, time spent in spaces, balance ideas, this all comes out of roleplaying games. This is what we look for: communication and the ability to express complex ideas in as simple a manner as possible.

What impact do you think tabletop games have really had on video gaming?

Initially, we go back to the ‘80s when things were getting started, not so much. But when you start thinking about Richard Garriott’s work [the Ultima series], or the original Wizardry games and similar games, the original Adventure game. Those grew out more or less out of people’s tabletop experiences. The idea of trying… probably the original idea was to recreate the tabletop experience in a computer, which never has really worked where it’s all digital, where it’s all computer. But you create a similar experience, so yeah, there was that effect. And as the computer crash ended and the industry started ramping up again, there were these writer-designers who started filtering into the industry, and then eventually the artists, they started filtering in. I’m thinking of the Coleco guys we had, but if you’re familiar with some of the very early EA… I’m trying to think of the title… it was Mail Order Monsters, by Paul Reiche and Evan Robinson, they were both former TSR designers. And then they did a couple of others for the very early EA that grew out of their roleplaying game experience. Then you have Richard Garriott’s work on his avatar games, his Ultima games – again, very D&D, and that grew into an empire, and then… I don’t know necessarily Roberta Williams’ background as much, but her stories came out of that very roleplaying game design thing.

From my perspective there’s an obvious parallel with roleplaying games, computer roleplaying games and tabletop roleplaying games. I think the influences are unmistakeable. Even MMOs, obviously World of Warcraft, but EVE Online has a Traveller thing going on with it there. What about games like platformers and shooters? They seem to be less influenced.

Platformers, probably yes, because they grew up out of the tradition that created Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong was one of the classic platformers, but it wasn’t one of the first. There were a whole lot of different ones. In fact even things like the Jak and Daxter series of video games, and there was another similar one, but that’s technically a platformer. That idea of jump, roll, move, fight, run away, that’s technically the platformer. Not so much influence there, except where fantasy elements are brought in, The Lord of the Rings as interpreted through Gary Gygax’s worlds. Then as far as the shooters, I actually moved over into working for Id Software because I was attracted by the idea of being able to build these dungeon ideas I still had in my head in real 3-D. And for the most part I couldn’t, because most of the stuff I was doing was so very science-fictiony, but there were a few levels in Quake III Arena that were very definitely inspired by my roleplaying background.

And you finally get to wander through the dungeon.

Yes, that was it. At some point… what I’m doing with my career right now, we hope to get back to something like that. That’s what always appealed to me about that type of, that aspect of both MMOs and shooters, was exploring the world, seeing the world, seeing what it looked like.

Do you still tabletop?

About once a year.

What do you play?

When I play, I have been running RuneQuest at a retro gaming convention down in Texas every year.

Where I lived in Michigan was just about an hour away from where the 1978 Origins convention was held, and that’s where it was introduced, at least big time to the public. And my room-mate and I both saw it, we both fell in love with it, we both bought copies of the game and the two of us immediately shifted over from playing, running Dungeons & Dragons to running this RuneQuest game, and it became our heart as far as gaming, for the next couple of years.

You did some work with Sandy Petersen [designer of the RuneQuest-influenced Call of Cthulhu tabletop game, level designer for Doom, Doom II, Quake and Quake II] at one stage, didn’t you? In video as well?

Sandy and I have an interweaving career path. When I was at Coleco, when we were hiring, staffing up, I actually interviewed Sandy for a position, a game design position on my staff, and I think we went so far as to offer him a position, but he looked at what we were offering, his interaction with the vice-president of our group, and a few other things, and decided against it. It was not a good idea for him at that stage in his life. He had a young family, he was out in California, it would require… it wasn’t going to work for him. Which was a good idea, because within a year or so, we were shut down. He ended up going to, oh, gosh, the people who were doing Civilisation at the time, where Sid Meier was at… [Microprose]

One of my designers, Lawrence Schick was already down there, he and Lawrence wove their threads together for a number of years. Come forward seven, no, ten years, maybe 12, I was working at TSR as an artist and I’d stayed in touch with Lawrence, who was friends with Sandy and Sandy and I were both at a game convention in Chicago which was devoted to RuneQuest-type gameplay, and because I lived two hours away, three hours away, they brought me down as a guest on a terribly snowy January weekend and, you know, I was one of the guests and Sandy comes up to me and says, “Hey, can I buy you lunch.” And so he takes me out to lunch there at the convention site and over the course of that hour sells me on at least coming down to interview with Id Software, and why I was going to be so good, why I was perfect for the job, what they were looking for, they were looking for an artist with a game background and, yeah, I was intrigued, particularly by what eventually became the money aspect of it. At that point I was working for TSR, we had just had a major lay-off, a lot of people had been let go that I worked with, and I was thinking, “OK, things are looking kind of rough here, and here I have this opportunity to change career,” and I was bored again. I was painting, yeah, I love to paint, but I was bored, and so here was this opportunity, shiny, a new shiny opportunity to go to Texas where it’s warmer in the winter. I’d just been shovelling snow off my driveway three times a week that year. So I was like, “OK, check it out,” flew down there, interviewed with the company for a week onsite, built the first game level for them, and they offered me the job. And I worked with Sandy for all of three months, because he had sold me on the idea that they were looking to replace John Romero as a designer on their staff. Well, I didn’t know who John Romero was at the time, but, um, sure. Well, what I came to find out, several years later after I left Id Software, after Sandy said to me, “You’ve got to come and work with me over at Ensemble Studios now,” I found out that he hired me to replace him. Then I worked with Sandy for another seven years over at Ensemble. I’d been at Id for five years, but only three months of it with Sandy, then over at Ensemble for seven, working with Sandy. And then I helped him connect into teaching for the Guildhall, the school.

OK, he was demoing some software at Gencon one summer and he said, “Here, take these,” and one of the copies was Sid Meier’s Pirates. The original on the C64. And I put so much time into that game. I just played it and played it. And I realised what I liked in it was the open-ended nature of it. There was a sort of a storyline weaving through it, but really you were just left to find your way through the world, improve yourself, take things as you were interested in doing them, not following somebody’s storyplan. And I really liked that. And then many years later, when Grand Theft Auto III became all the rage, and everyone was hating on it, parents were hating on it for teaching children to be criminals, I found… you know, I was trying to take the standpoint where, “I really don’t want my children playing this because it’s a such terrible game, it teaches bad things,” but then I started playing it and realised, “Wow, this is just like Pirates.”

I believe you were working on the World of Darkness MMO. Another tabletop/computer game crossover. [Shortly after the interview, CCP confirmed the World of Darkness MMO was shelved.]

I was let go from Ensemble Studios in early 2009. Microsoft shut our studio down, just told everybody, “You are redundant, you are not fired, your jobs no longer exist.” So I spent the next several months interviewing with other companies around the country and there was something attractive in what CCP was doing with this World of Darkness MMO. Now, understand, I had no interest in World of Darkness. I really… you know, playing the vampire, the dark bad boy, bad girl thing, it really didn’t do much for me. But what they were trying to do in the MMO at the time was to create this rich, robust game and life simulation sort of play that just drew me in. I liked the notion of the romance, the mystery, of players creating the actual story content that people followed. They were trying to figure out how to make EVE Online work in a vampire setting, basically, which considering the success with EVE Online, not a bad idea. And so I came in. They’d been working on it for about three years and I worked on it for about three years and then left because it wasn’t fun any more for me.

You were also involved in the Guildhall and setting up the game design course. I don’t believe it was the first game design specialist course, but it’s certainly one of them, isn’t it? One of the early ones. What made you think at some point, “Hang on, we need to teach people what’s involved in this?”

Well, I’ve always felt, all through my career that people who are fairly far into mastery of a craft really have kind of an obligation to… well, I’ll call it obligation to the craft, kind of like a guild hall. To pass skills and ideas and knowledge and experience on to younger people. You have to be bold enough and confident enough that these people aren’t necessarily going to take your jobs, but they’re going to be the resources that, as things go forward, they’re the people you work with, they’re the people who keep your industry vibrant and growing, and that’s the direction I saw possible in the Guildhall, and that’s what was presented to me by the guy who had the idea and had been trying to sell it to one of the local universities. He tried going to one of the public universities, and because of the way they were structured they really couldn’t make it work. They wanted it to be a certain way, they wanted to use existing classes, existing professors, have it for an undergraduate, where people who were to learn games were going to English class, phys ed class, and all these other things, all these distractions, and it really didn’t work. And they were kind of pushing him away from it already, so he took it to Southern Methodist University and he was working with Tom Hall and John Romero at the time. They were his strength inside the game industry saying that we should go forward with this.

This was 2002. By that point, Ion Storm had already pretty much run its course. 2002, 2003. They took it to SMU, and they had this tech centre that had been funded by outside money and they needed something for it to do. Their concept was the idea that it was at the intersection between academia and tech and industry. And they needed something that fit all these three things to make the centre go forward, and they saw that in this game design programme.

I was approached by David Najjab, the guy who had been pushing the idea. He had been working with another young developer in the area, Atussa Simon. She knew me through Quake fandom, contacted me and this intrigued me. I really liked the idea of doing it, and I jumped on to help them both create the programme and co-write the first art curriculum – not the game design curriculum or the game development curriculum, the art curriculum.

What of all of the very many things that you’ve done do you regard as the greatest achievement so far?

To be honest, I think the greatest achievement – so far – and after my kids – is the Guildhall. It has changed the lives of a lot of people. I’ve had a career where people are constantly coming up and saying to me, “You had such a great influence on me when I was young. The things you did, the things you wrote, they were such a part of my life.” Well, the Guildhall kind of allowed me to take that to the next step and give for students, for people learning through organised education, giving them a chance to take their ideas to come into the game industry and going forward with them. And I think ultimately, everything considered, that’s the thing that’s going to endure. Even if the school were to shut down next year, it’s still significantly changed enough people that I’d call it probably the best thing.

Jennell, thank you very much for your time. I don’t know about you, but this is my first Skype interview, so I’m kind of delighted with the way that’s gone, being able to face-to-face interview from opposite sides of the planet.