Leigh Graner

**Pronouns:** She/They

Lifted from LinkedIn:

Leigh is a Creative Director, Game Designer, Game Writer, and Programmer, with 13 years experience in games and interactive entertainment. Most recently as of this writing, she was Gameplay Programmer and did Additional Writing for Return to Monkey Island (2022)!

## Early Life: Lombard, IL (1982 - 1994)

Leigh was delivered with force and grew up in Lombard, IL, widely considered to be Chicago's most exciting exurb. There, at St. Pius X School for Litchcraft and Lizardry, she met deep lifelong friends such as the twins Tom and Dom Tancredi, Tony Mulhern, and Jeff Kmoch. They neurodiverged together in interesting ways, creating and destroying universes in Tony's attic bedroom, the Green Room, which was haunted.

## High School: Rochester, MN (1995 - 2000)

Leigh's fam moved up to the frozen north, where Leigh attended Lourdes High School for Bureaucratic Catholicism And Abstinence. Here, she was active in saxophoning at every opportunity, and offering high-concept entertainment performance art pieces which classmates mistook for a lack of social normalcy.

## Carleton College: Northfield, MN (2001 - 2004)

In the town of Cows, Colleges, and Contentment™️, Leigh earned her bachelors in Computer Science, and she certainly deserved a minor in Film for her many odd little movies about being a weird kid, but that wasn't a thing there then. She met odd lifelong pals Mike Ottum, Jess Rosenblatt, Taylor Curtis, Jess Radway, and more. She learned how to be progressive and was somewhat domesticated from her feral edgelord state by her patient then girlfriend who deserves the world.

## Barista Years: Madison, WI (2005 - ?)

In Madison, Leigh spent a few years doing Professional Odyssey stuff, after bouncing off the world of medical database software due to fossilizing levels of boredom and the growing sense that she ought to be Entertaining as a muppet would. She worked with Mike Ottum, Meghan Hade, and a cast and crew of legends to create The Strange Tale of the Crystal Penguin, a 45 minute adventure-comedy-fantasy film about 20-somethings who go looking for ancient pirate treasure downtown.

## LA, baby (? - 2011)

Yeeting West, Leigh found herself in a Film MFA program at ArtCenter College of Design and Slytherins, where she learned to storyboard, direct better, and make commercial products look good on tabletops. She got a whiff of something nasty there though, and she yearned to code once again, so she busted out to USC's Interactive Media Division (now Interactive Media and Games Division, part of USC Games). This became her new spiritual home, and she met Sean Plott, Sean Bouchard, Daniel Ponce, Logan Olsen, and other ratchet luminaries. She birthed her MFA game project Leafcutters, a bug AI adaptation game where you teach ants how to ant, and her thesis on Adaptation Games (basically holistic simulation games).

## San Francisco (2012 - now)

### Never was there a greater house

In San Francisco, Leigh cofounded Crater House, the scrappy lil studio that often could, with Daniel Ponce, Kim Cagney, and Sean Bouchard. They blasted out title after title, and Leigh kept the contracts coming. They created Shaq Sky Slam (2014), a bizarro iOS extreme sport game where Shaq and friends skydive out of airplanes and slam dunk on the Statue of Liberty and other world monuments. This did ok, especially with one particular player in New Zealand, apparently. They also made the first video game for the state of Israel, unexpectedly. When times were lean, they embraced the "any port in a storm" mentality. Eventually, they petered out and split for other pastures.

### Mostly Streaming

Sean Plott tapped Leigh and Sean Bouchard to flail with him on a streaming series called Metadating, where they embarrassed themselves playing romance themed games on Google Hangouts, under the banner of Geek and Sundry. Leigh and Seanbo earned their netwings and quickly became very funny and lovable and engaging cohosts forevermore.

Metadating was spiritually successed by Mostly Walking, the inflated-budget, pyrotechnic, weekly blastcast where the three dynamos play adventure games old and new until they can't anymore, presumably

### Games and games and monkeys

Leigh kept making games, too. At Creativity, Incorporated, she developed a pipeline for making entertainment voice apps for Alexa and Google Assistant, and shipped voice titles for Disney Hits, Stranger Things, Lost in Space, American Idol, and more big names. She also did some esoteric programming on kids' toy prototypes using arcane embedded platforms like General Plus, where each bit is precious. After Creativity, she went on to work a stint at Disney Streaming, on an internal tool. After this, she was handed more success in the form of a chance to contribute to adventure game history as a Gameplay Programmer and Additional Writing Writer on Return to Monkey Island (2022)! This remains one of her coolest achievements, and she hopes you all play it.