Sandy Duncan, 1960 - 2026

This will be long and meandering. I do apologise.

My first interactions with Sandy were when YoYo Games, he and a handful of others' recently-formed company, bought the program "GameMaker" from Mark Overmars. The crossings were minimal at first; I believe his first personal interaction with me was when I photoshopped a Santa hat and beard onto him and the then-leading GM news source GameMaker Blog added it to a post. He found it funny, thankfully.

2008-2009, we had several more interactions. I had a couple of games reach YoYo Games' frontpage of featured GM games, which I think helped me going into 2010. I also remember publishing a blog post titled "I Like GM8's New Logo" on my personal site admitting to being a rare fan of its new infamous "smiley cog" logo, which remains a community meme to this day. I still have Sandy's message of support of me as a dev, on that blog post as a source of pride.

Meanwhile, 2009 saw me crash out of sixth form with a D in graphic design and Ungradable on every other A-level. Due to well-deserved parental pressure, I had to start job-seeking at the start of 2010; as part of this, I resigned from my Moderator position on YoYo Games' forum and sandbox that I'd held since 2008.

On January 4th, 2010, I received a Twitter DM from Sandy. He offered me a job making games, with the caveat that I'd been moving 400 miles north, from the sleepy village I'd lived in all my life into the city centre of Dundee. I was a nervous, terrified introvert. So I said yes.

After a singular visit to Dundee in May 2010, in which I got to meet Sandy, Mike Dailly and Russell Kay for the first time, and accidentally overcharge Sandy in Dil-Se by blindly choosing my favourite number and increasing his tip a bunch, I found a flat, lost it, found a second backup flat, and moved to Dundee one week into YoYo Games starting up their first full-time office within the University of Abertay. I was the fourth full-timer in the office, with Sandy visiting weekly/biweekly, and additionally Kirsty Scott.

In the span of 6 months, I went from a sixth form crash out with zero chance in the real world (my only true skill at the time was programming specifically within GameMaker, which basically no major game studio used at the time), to working with people behind Grand Theft Auto, Lemmings, Crackdown and the entire Xbox.

All because Sandy Duncan took a chance on me.

I spent 5 years working for YoYo Games. It barely ever felt like a job - it was just my primary hobby, with structure, and resulting in games with a higher degree of polish and a far higher play-count. (And an increased amount of Mike being utterly infuriated with my coding style. I never used tutorials to learn GML - I drip-feed taught myself everything I knew to that point.)

Over those years I got to meet an unending slew of my heroes. Mark Overmars ruffled my hair. Jesse Venbrux took inspiration from my game madnessMADNESSmadness (the game that spent the longest on YYG's homepage too) for They Need to Be Fed. I got to co-work with two of the people behind TimeSplitters 2 and Future Perfect, two of my favourite games of all time. And so, so many GameMaker people, too.

The office kept growing as well. I was the 4th; by the end of 2010 there were 8; by 2013 there were like 20 and we ended up moving to a bigger, gorgeous office on the Tay riverside.

Not only did the office grow, but my living space did as well. Sandy originally opted to hire every room in the flat share I was in, after two of my new colleagues, Jack and Darrell, moved there too. He then led us to a larger place. It had a snooker and darts room and an ornate spacious living room. And we didn't have to pay a penny of rent, either - it was covered by the company as a raise of (dramatic) sorts. I spent 5 years doing the best-possible job for me, in a life that kept getting better and better.

All because Sandy Duncan took a chance on me.

In mid-2015 Daniel and I opted to exit YoYo Games after it was bought by a bigger company, who made a number of changes that made it lose the lustre it gained under Sandy, Michel etc. Daniel and I formed our own company, Chequered Ink, which still exists 11 years later.

Chequered Ink only exists because of Sandy taking a chance on me. Those years at YoYo Games were the most invaluable, and some of the happiest, of my life. I learnt so much under his wing, and credit his gamble on me with everything I currently have, both inside and out of the professional sphere. I'm only where I am in literally every way because he stopped a dark alternative route where I was stacking shelves in a Tesco while GM remained a hobby and my programming knowledge remained, at best, clumsy and niche.

And he never felt like a boss to me. In spite of him steering YYG and GameMaker to clear, perceivable success over just those 5 first office years - GameMaker became wildly more popular and saw its first HUGE games being made with it in that time frame (Undertale, Hotline Miami etc) - he just felt like a pal.

The biweekly visits to Malabar that got more crowded the larger the office got. The evenings in pubs getting sloshed on mojitos and listening to his insane stories from his Microsoft days. Even the time he picked up my brand new PS Vita and called it the most useless piece of tech he'd ever seen. The office had an Ouya and a Gamestick in it at that time and he was still correct.

Sandy was a treasured memory generator. Every second of time spent with him was a new opportunity for something fun to happen.

Sandy took a chance on me, and I will never, ever forget him.