This is the central beacon for ToddWorld. The first survey craft is online, the universe is still under construction, and the basic flight systems are working.
Mission 1 is active: Recover the Personal Log.
Can a promotional game for Lord of the Rings be TOO successful?
My Precious
In my universe, this ring marks one of the most memorable projects from my game design career: the work I did connected to The Lord of the Rings Online, originally developed by Turbine, Inc.
When Turbine was preparing to launch Mines of Moria, the game’s first major expansion, I was part of the team hired to create a suite of casual online games to help promote the release. The idea was to build more than just a marketing site. We created a gathering place for players, an online hub where fans of the MMO could connect, chat, compete, and spend a little more time inside the world they already loved.
The Games
The project included three separate games, each designed around a different race from Middle-earth: humans, dwarves, and hobbits. Each game had its own style, its own personality, and its own leaderboard where players competed for high scores.
My role included helping concept the overall project, along with working as both a game designer and artist across multiple games. It was one of those rare projects where fan culture, game design, visual storytelling, and promotional strategy all collided in the best possible way.
Almost TOO Successful
The promotion was a huge success. In fact, it worked almost too well.
After Mines of Moria launched, the promotional site and games were taken down, since the campaign had officially ended. The players were not happy. They had gotten used to having that space, that community. They were gathering there, chatting there, competing there, and, without us fully realizing it at first, they had turned a temporary promotional experience into part of their daily connection to the game.
The backlash was noticeable enough that there were even discussions about connecting our casual games more directly into the main Lord of the Rings Online game experience permanently. In the end, Turbine decided not to move forward with that additional development.
Still, that reaction told us something important.
We hadn’t just made a few promotional games. We had built a small corner of Middle-earth that players actually wanted to return to.
And honestly, for someone who grew up dreaming about making games, getting to leave even a tiny footprint in Tolkien’s universe was its own kind of magic.
Over the years, I had the pleasure of working on several LEGO themes and digital projects. We helped put Bionicle to bed, kicked off its spiritual replacement, Hero Factory, and sent a bunch of LEGO ninjas spinning.
LEGO
Of all the creative worlds I’ve had the chance to work in, LEGO is one of the easiest to explain.
It’s LEGO.
That one word already does a lot of heavy lifting.
During my game design career, I had the opportunity to work on several LEGO-related digital projects across different franchises and eras. Some of them were tied to major launches. Some supported existing product lines. Some lived online for a while, did their job, entertained kids, and then disappeared into the mysterious black hole of old promotional web games.
I was there as LEGO closed the book on Bionicle, helped introduce Hero Factory, supported the launch of Galaxy Squad, and worked during the early rise of Ninjago.
Most of my work in the LEGO universe involved creating small online games and interactive experiences connected to larger brand campaigns. These were not massive console titles. They were focused, fast-moving, highly branded digital experiences designed to extend the world of the toys and give kids another way to play.
One of the projects I still have a glimpse of is Battle Bug, a game created for the Galaxy Squad franchise. Galaxy Squad may not be the LEGO theme most people remember first, but it had everything a kid could want: space heroes, alien insects, vehicles, weapons, bright colors, and just enough chaos to make it fun.
In other words, it was very much speaking my language.
Working with LEGO was a reminder that play is serious business. Every button, animation, character, sound, and interaction had to feel like it belonged inside that world. The games had to be simple enough to understand quickly, but interesting enough to keep someone playing. They had to serve the brand, support the story, and still feel like actual fun.
That balance is harder than it looks.
A lot of those projects came from an era of the web that was never built to last forever. Flash games, campaign microsites, limited-time promotions, and launch experiences would appear, burn brightly, and then vanish when the next product line arrived.
So no, I don’t have a giant archive of everything I worked on.
But I do have the odd little honor of knowing that, for a while, I helped build digital playgrounds inside one of the most iconic creative brands in the world.
And honestly, if your job description ever includes “make something fun for LEGO,” you are probably doing okay.
I didn’t make movies for Universal Pictures. I helped turn a few of them into tiny games.
Universal Pictures: Movie Worlds, Tiny Games
With a minor in radio, television, and film, leaning heavily toward the film side, getting to work on promotional games for Universal Pictures was still pretty exciting.
Some planets in ToddWorld are built from massive worlds.
This one is built from movie promotions, strange deadlines, digital tie-ins, and the occasional reminder that not every game project needs to become a treasured cultural artifact to still be part of the journey.
You Thneed it
One of the movies I helped promote was "The Lorax". The game was a pretty standard match 3 puzzle game with a few surprises thrown in and my role? This time, not art. I was the lead developer for the game, with a little side quest of game design.
Yes, somehow the guy who grew up drawing, writing songs, and dreaming about making games eventually became the lead developer on a game about colorful tiles, Truffula trees, and environmental life lessons.
Match-three games look simple from the outside, but they require a lot of careful systems thinking. The rules need to be instantly understandable. The feedback has to feel satisfying. The board has to behave. The player should always feel like the game is easy to pick up, even if a lot is happening behind the curtain.
That was the real challenge: making something small, polished, and playable that still felt connected to the spirit of the film.
Land of the Lost
I also worked on a promotional game for Land of the Lost, the Will Ferrell comedy based on the classic television series.
My role on that project focused on the visual side. I handled art, 3D modeling, and animation, helping create the look and movement of the game experience.
That kind of project sits right in the strange middle ground between design, entertainment, and problem-solving. You are not making the movie. You are not making a full console game. You are building a small interactive doorway into the larger world of the film.
It has to feel familiar enough to belong, but simple enough to work as a quick online experience.
What This Planet Represents
The Universal Pictures projects are a good reminder that game design often asks you to cover a lot of different bases.
Sometimes you are a designer. Sometimes you are a developer. Sometimes you are building game logic. Sometimes you are modeling assets. Sometimes you are making a strange little promotional game for a movie and hoping the whole thing holds together when thousands of people click “play.”
That was the world I worked in for years: quick timelines, long work weeks, recognizable brands, shifting roles, and creative problems that had to be solved with whatever tools, time, and budget were available.
I got to work on official Star Wars games, and somehow the biggest enemy was the reference material.
Star Wars: The Concept Art Strikes Back
Some projects are just jobs.
This was not one of them.
One of the first projects I worked on after joining a casual game development company was a suite of online promotional games for Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith.
Star Wars. Baby!
For a kid who grew up dreaming about making games and loving galaxies far, far away, getting to work on an official Star Wars project felt completely unreal. I was not making the movie, obviously. I was not sitting next to George Lucas debating Jedi lore. But I was working on games connected to a brand-new Star Wars film, and that was more than enough to make the younger version of me lose his mind a little.
The suite included several games, but the one with the best story was a top-down 2D scrolling shooter where you flew Obi-Wan’s Jedi starfighter across the surface of Utapau, blasting droids and fighting your way toward a final boss battle.
There was just one tiny complication.
We had not seen the movie. I'm not even sure it was officially "done" yet.
A few people were allowed to review the script under extremely controlled conditions, but I was not one of them. My job was to work from the materials we had, which mostly meant concept art, limited reference, and a lot of educated guessing.
We knew the game needed to build toward a big boss fight. We had droids. We had super battle droids. We had the rolling destroyer droids. But we needed something bigger to end the level.
Then we saw a piece of concept art showing Obi-Wan riding Boga while being chased by a massive crab droid.
Perfect.
Boss battle.
Done.
So we built the game around this huge mechanical monster chasing the player down, because based on the concept art, that made complete sense.
Then... the movie came out.
And the crab droids were roughly the size of a pit bull.
Clone troopers were jumping on their backs.
So yes, somewhere between early concept art and final film, our terrifying boss monster had apparently been demoted to aggressive space terrier.
Becoming Star Wars Lore
The suite also included a Jedi Training game, which was basically a Star Wars-flavored version of Simon, the classic color pattern memory game. For that project, I handled 3D modeling, rigging, and animation.
There was also a tower-matching game built around Jedi crystals, and that one came with a small but ridiculous honor.
We needed names for a few Jedi characters in the game, so we got to make up our own Jedi names.
Those names had to be approved by Lucasfilm’s official Star Wars lore master.
Which means, in the most technical and deeply nerdy sense possible, we contributed something to Star Wars canon.
Probably.
Maybe.
And for a kid who once dreamed about making games in galaxies far, far away, close enough was more than enough.
After building games for imaginary worlds, I got to help create one inspired by the real one.
National Geographic: GeoDash
One of the projects I worked on for National Geographic was a game called GeoDash, a 2D platformer built around exploration, wildlife, and different biomes from around the world.
In the game, you played as a robot traveling through natural environments, discovering new areas and overcoming obstacles along the way. The fun twist was that the robot could transform to take on traits inspired by different animals.
Change into a gray rhino-inspired form, and you gained the strength to break through barriers.
Switch to a cheetah-inspired form, and suddenly you had the speed to move faster and jump farther.
Each animal form gave the player a different ability, turning real-world animal traits into gameplay mechanics. That was the part I liked most. The educational content was not just pasted on top of the game. It helped shape how the game worked.
We also included animal facts between levels, giving players small moments to learn more about wildlife as they moved through the experience.
It was a cute game with a simple goal: make learning about nature, animals, and the world a little more fun.
At the time, I just thought I was helping build another game.
Looking back, a game about turning curiosity into learning may have been doing a little foreshadowing.
If anything you discovered in my universe caught your interest and you’d like to keep up with more recent developments, follow me on your platform of choice below.
Normal is boring. We don't do "normal" around here.
Who am I?
I’ve been called a lot of things over the years: artist, musician, magician, creative director, game designer, developer, author, teacher, husband, dad.
And while they're all true, none of them tell the whole story.
I’ve been drawing and making things for as long as I can remember. According to my mom, it started about the time I could hold a crayon. At age 8, I was going door-to-door selling tiny comicbooks I'd drawn. Twenty-five cents apiece, please.
The fact the one of them was named "The Wizard of Od" seems pretty on the nose for me.
I wrote my first song when I was ten, and somewhere along the way I realized I didn’t see the world quite the same way most people did.
Understanding, years later, that I was on the autism spectrum gave me better language for that difference. It helped explain the way I notice patterns, chase ideas, focus deeply, and build worlds in my head before trying to make them real.
That difference has shaped almost every part of my life.
It pushed me toward art, music, technology, storytelling, games, design, and eventually teaching. I’ve spent most of my life chasing ideas, building strange little worlds, and trying to turn “what if?” into something real.
A Charmed Life
I’m lucky. There’s no honest way around that.
I’ve had the chance to create work for companies and brands like LEGO, Lucasfilm, Universal Pictures, National Geographic, Dragon Ball Z, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Michael Jordan’s Restaurant. I’ve also had the incredible experience of working with a few of my childhood heroes, including Eddie Van Halen, David Copperfield, and game designer Scott Adams.
That list still feels strange to write.
From the outside, it probably sounds like a charmed life, and in many ways, it has been. But I don’t think it was only luck.
I kept following curiosity. I kept learning the next tool. I kept saying yes to projects that scared me a little. I kept trying to be useful, creative, dependable, and better than I was the day before. That approach worked, most days.
Luck may open a door. Curiosity is what keeps you walking through them.
Drawn to Technology
I’ve always been drawn to what’s next.
I got my first home computer when I was eight. It was a classic, a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1. Within the year I was programming my own video games in BASIC. A decade or two later, I was staying up all night building websites when the internet still felt like uncharted wilderness. Since then, I’ve built games, virtual spaces, interactive experiences, music projects, digital worlds, and experiments that probably made perfect sense in my head before they made sense anywhere else.
That pattern has never really stopped.
New technology has always pulled me in, not because it’s shiny, but because it changes what’s possible. The tools keep changing, but the question stays the same:
What can we make with this?
That’s what led me into design, web design, game design, virtual reality, and now artificial intelligence. I’m interested in technology when it helps people create, connect, imagine, understand, or solve something that mattered five minutes ago and will matter even more tomorrow.
For me, “be better” has never meant chasing perfection. It means staying curious enough to keep growing.
Why Am I a Teacher?
People have asked me why I left a creative career working on national brands, games, films, and interactive projects to become a teacher.
Honestly, twenty-something me would have asked the same question, probably with three exclamation points.
The answer is simple.
Teaching means more.
I still love making things. I still love design, music, games, stories, and technology. But helping students discover what they can make? Watching them grow from “I don’t know how” to “look what I built”? Helping them see the world differently and realize they can shape it instead of just move through it?
That matters in a different way.
A game launch is exciting. A movie promo is exciting. Seeing a student find confidence in their own ideas sticks with you.
Teaching lets me use everything I’ve learned, not just to create one more project, but to help other people become more creative, more thoughtful, and more willing to try.
That feels like work worth doing.
Family
Sure, I’ve had a charmed life, but the clearest proof of that is my family.
My wife, Danie, has somehow managed to put up with my endless ideas, creative detours, late-night projects, and whatever new thing I’ve decided I absolutely need to learn this week. That probably deserves some kind of award.
We have two incredible kids, who are technically not kids anymore.
We also have more cats and dogs than any reasonable household should probably admit to.
They are the heart of my universe. Everything else orbits around that.
How do you get over a million streams of original songs heard around the world? I can’t give you a formula. But I can give you my story.
Starting Young
My musical journey started early. When I was eight, I would sit at the piano and try to play songs I heard in movies and TV shows. By the time I was ten, I was writing my own songs.
I kept writing through high school, although most of it stayed pretty private; well, more accurately, extremely private. After graduation, I recorded a five-song EP of original songs I wrote called "Charades", including one songI wrote and dedicated to my wife. I loved writing songs. I loved the puzzle of melody, lyrics, emotion, and structure.
I hated the sound of my own voice.
Sadly, my music career didn't lead to world tours, fame or fortune.
The Silence
After college, music slowly faded into the background. I didn’t stop loving it. I just stopped making it a major part of my life. I chased a career, built a family, worked on creative projects, and did all the normal life stuff that quietly fills the rooms where your old dreams used to live.
Ironically, while a span of my career had me working with music artists like Eddie Van Halen, Steven Curtis Chapman and the country band Alabama it wasn't from the aspect of songwriting.
I still composed music for games from time to time, but that wasn’t the same as writing songs. Not really. Instrumental music scratched one creative itch, but lyrics were different. Songs were stories. Tiny emotional machines. Three-minute worlds.
Then, in 2023, I discovered Synthesizer V. It was a program that allowed you to create AI-assisted vocals using a keyboard and a digital voice. For someone who loved writing songs but never loved singing them, that was enough to make me curious.
So, after a 30-year pause, I wrote a song.
Music and AI
Synthesizer V was not text-to-music songwriting. It was slow. It was tedious. It was oddly technical. First, I had to play every note on the keyboard. Then I had to enter every word, breaking down every syllable, and make detailed adjustments to phrasing, tone, vibrato, and expression. That first song took me about a month to write, arrange, and record. But when it was finished, something clicked. For the first time in a very long time, I created a song that I wrote, shaped, and produced, without needing my own voice to be the thing standing between the song and the listener.
That changed everything. So I wrote another song. Then another. And then the door I thought had closed years earlier quietly opened back up.
Creating a Virtual Artist
Synthesizer V works through voice packs. You purchase a digital voice, then use that voice almost like an instrument. The voice I started with was female and leaned naturally toward pop music. When it came time to release the songs through a distributor, I needed an artist name. Releasing them under my own name didn’t feel right because the songs were clearly being performed by a female voice.
So I created a virtual artist.
I didn’t overthink it. This whole thing was still an experiment, and I already had a character who fit the idea perfectly. Years earlier, I had written a science fiction book called Deep Blue. One of the characters in that story was an advanced synthetic intelligence named Syndi, short for Synthetic Digital Intelligence.
Syndi already had a name, a backstory, and a place in my imagination. I simply gave her a voice.
She became my first virtual artist, singing songs I had written but could never quite bring to life on my own.
Heard Around the World
Once Syndi existed, the project kept growing. I created ToddWorld Records as my own small label, partly because Syndi needed a home for her music, and partly because the idea opened up a much bigger creative playground. If I could create one virtual artist, I could create others. Different voices. Different genres. Different stories.
The more I wrote, the more I realized how much I had missed songwriting. Each song became a puzzle. What is this really about? What should the chorus say that the verse only hints at? Where does the melody lift? Where does the emotion turn? How do you make a listener feel something without overexplaining it?
That may sound strange, but to me, songwriting has always felt like solving something.
Over the next two years, I kept writing, producing, releasing, and watching the numbers slowly grow. Syndi’s songs were being played in places I had never been: Brazil, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Ukraine, and more. A song written in a room in Memphis could end up in someone’s headphones on the other side of the world.
That still feels unreal.
Before the end of the second year, my songs had passed more than one million streams across YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. Syndi has now been featured on music sites, played on radio stations, covered in an online magazine, performed in two virtual concerts, released more than 75 original songs, and even appeared on vinyl. She's got an international fan club.
To say she has surpassed my original music career would be a criminal understatement.
She took the little dream I left sitting on a shelf and launched it into orbit. And she began just as a test.
So, where do we go now?
Introducing Wyatt Mercer
After two years of writing mostly pop songs for a female virtual artist, I started running into song ideas that didn’t quite fit Syndi.
Some songs needed a different voice. Some needed more dust on the road, more country storytelling, more quiet regret, more front-porch honesty. They needed to be sung by a guy.
So ToddWorld Records signed its second virtual artist: country singer Wyatt Mercer.
One of the first songs I wrote for Wyatt was based on a letter I wrote to my youngest daughter, Katie, shortly after we brought her home from the hospital. The song is called “‘Til Then.”
Wyatt is still at the beginning of his journey. None of his songs have gone viral. None have blown up overnight. But I believe in them.
They are good songs. And sometimes that has to be enough reason to keep going.
Why AI?
I know the question is coming.
“Todd, you play music. You write songs. You can technically sing. Why use AI?”
The honest answer is simple.
I love songwriting far more than I love the sound of my own voice.
AI gave me a way back into music. It let me produce songs at a level I could never afford through traditional studio recording, while still giving me time to write, revise, shape, and push each song until it felt right.
I still write the lyrics. I still shape the melodies. I still make the creative decisions. I still play instruments when the song needs it, and sometimes I use my own rough demos to guide the AI toward the feeling, rhythm, or structure I want.
For me, this is not about pressing a button and flooding the world with disposable noise.
It is about using the tools available to make my songs as strong as I can make them.
It is about getting the music out of my head and into the world.
And after years of silence, that means a lot.
Subspace relay is online. Use this station to send me a message, a question, an idea, or just to say "Hi".
Currently, I work at the #1 school in the universe.
Okay, fine. My universe.
Lausanne Collegiate School
Officially, Lausanne Collegiate School has been ranked the #1 K-12 school in Tennessee.
Go Lynx!
My career in education started in Texas and eventually brought me to Memphis, Tennessee, where I now teach design, art, and creative problem-solving at Lausanne Collegiate School.
Lausanne is a pretty remarkable place. It is a private, PK-12 International Baccalaureate World School with a genuinely global community. Students come to Lausanne from around the world, which means the classroom is rarely just one perspective, one background, or one way of thinking.
That matters.
The IB approach fits the way I believe learning should work. It is not about memorizing information just long enough to survive a test. It is about asking better questions, thinking critically, solving real problems, and understanding that the world is bigger, more complicated, and more connected than whatever happens to be directly in front of you.
That is exactly the kind of learning I want my students to experience.
What I Teach
I teach high school students in grades 9-12, mostly in classes built around design, visual communication, creativity, and problem-solving.
My courses include Multimedia Design, Photography, Advanced Photography, and Problem Solving and Collaborating with AI. Across all of them, the goal is not simply for students to make something that looks good.
The goal is for students to understand WHY it works.
Good design is never just decoration. It is a decision-making process. It is research, experimentation, reflection, revision, feedback, and purpose. Whether students are designing a poster, shooting a portrait, building a multimedia project, or exploring how AI can support creative work, I want them to learn how to think through their choices and defend them with a good reason.
A good “why” matters.
Lausanne Design Agency
I also help oversee the Lausanne Design Agency, or LDA, a small student-run design agency made up of a hand-picked group of student creatives.
LDA gives students a chance to work on real design projects for real clients. Some of those projects serve the school community. Others reach beyond campus, including work for local organizations and even clients outside the country.
That kind of experience changes things.
Students begin to understand that design is not just an assignment. It is communication. It is service. It is problem-solving under real constraints, for real people, with real expectations.
That is where the classroom starts to feel less like practice and more like a launchpad.
Why It Matters
Teaching lets me bring together almost every part of my creative life: design, technology, photography, games, storytelling, music, problem-solving, and whatever strange new tool wanders over the horizon next.
But the real work is not just teaching students how to use tools.
The real work is helping them see themselves as capable creators.
I want students to leave my classroom more curious, more confident, and more willing to try. I want them to understand that creativity is not some rare gift handed out to a lucky few. It is a way of thinking. A way of noticing. A way of approaching problems before the rest of the world has figured out there is a problem.
That is why this planet exists in ToddWorld.
Because teaching is not separate from the rest of my creative universe.
It may be the part that matters most.
For a guy who didn’t even know what “kamehameha” meant, I somehow managed to spend a surprising amount of time in the Dragon Ball universe.
Dot Com Dragon Ball
Back in the glorious dot-com days, I worked for a web design company that was hired by FUNimation to create the official U.S. Dragon Ball Z website.
Thankfully, FUNimation provided us with a mountain of VHS tapes for research, which meant part of my job was suddenly watching Dragon Ball Z and trying to understand why everyone was yelling, glowing, transforming, and occasionally taking three episodes to finish one fight.
There are worse assignments.
We ended up designing and building what, at the time, was a pretty unusual website. It was an all-Flash experience that dynamically rebuilt itself around each visitor’s personal preferences, including their favorite character from the show.
For the late 1990s / early 2000s web, that was not exactly normal.
The site won a few awards, and it was notable enough that we were invited to speak at a developer group in Dallas about how we created it.
Dragon Ball Z Official Website for FUNimation
That site also caught the attention of Score Entertainment, the company behind the Dragon Ball Z Collectible Card Game.
When it came time for them to create the official website for the card game, guess who they called?
Yep.
Somehow, the guy who had once needed a VHS crash course in Saiyan culture was now helping create the official website for a second Dragon Ball Z property.
Dragon Ball Z Collectible Card Game for Score Entertainment
The bigger surprise came a little later, after the dot-com bubble had burst and I accepted a position as Interactive Creative Director at Score Entertainment.
While I was there, I oversaw websites for baseball cards, football cards, and several collectible card game properties, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Yu Yu Hakusho, and, yes, more Dragon Ball.
I even had the opportunity to help with the design of the Dragon Ball GT Collectible Card Game.
So no, I didn’t start as a Dragon Ball expert.
But somewhere between VHS tapes, Flash websites, collectible cards, and a Dragon Ball Themed Humvee, Dragon Ball became one of those unexpected creative worlds I kept getting pulled back into.
I may not have known what “kamehameha” meant when it started.
But by the end, I had definitely helped launch a few of them into the internet.
People say, “Never meet your idols.”
I told mine what to wear.
Eddie Van Halen and the Wolfgang Guitar
While working as Creative Director at Peavey Electronics, I had the opportunity to meet and work with some truly remarkable people: Steven Curtis Chapman, “Snake” Sabo from Skid Row, Jeff Cook from Alabama, and guitar legend Eddie Van Halen.
Growing up, Eddie was one of my idols.
“Jump.” “Panama.” “Eruption.”
Could I play “Eruption” on guitar? Absolutely not.
Could I play a flawless version on a tennis racket in my bedroom?
Without question. Never missed a note.
So when Eddie transitioned from Music Man to Peavey, and I had the chance to work on the launch campaign for his new EVH Wolfgang guitar, named after his son, it was one of those moments where life suddenly felt very strange in the best possible way.
The campaign was designed as a top-secret teaser leading up to the big reveal at the annual NAMM Show in California.
For several months, we ran cryptic magazine ads in music trade publications. Each ad hinted that something big was coming, but never said exactly what. Using the shape of the Wolfgang guitar as the hidden clue, we created black-and-white “investigative” images of Egyptian hieroglyphics, crop designs, and even a reshaped Stonehenge.
It was part mystery, part marketing campaign, part rock-and-roll conspiracy board.
We even placed a photographed business card in the corner of some of the ads with a phone number on it. That number led to an answering machine where people could leave messages if they thought they knew what the campaign was about.
And it worked.
Hype started building. People called in with theories. The messages piled up. Nobody had it right.
Everything was going exactly as planned. It was perfect.
Until Eddie gave an interview to Guitar Magazine one month before NAMM and just announced the whole thing himself.
So much for top secret.
While the interview did ruin the big reveal ad, the campaign worked. It even won Peavey its first-ever ADDY Award for advertising, which made the whole thing even more special.
Later, while working on the follow-up campaign for the Wolfgang, my phone rang one morning.
It was Eddie.
The photoshoot for the campaign was scheduled that day, but it had to happen in California instead of Mississippi, where Peavey was headquartered. Eddie asked if there was anything special he needed to wear for the shoot.
I thought about it for a second.
Since the campaign centered around the Wolfgang tattoo Eddie had on his shoulder, I told him:
“A worn pair of jeans and any shirt that doesn’t have sleeves.”
The call ended.
And then it hit me.
I just told Eddie Van Halen what to wear.
I once begged one of my childhood heroes to let me work for free.
Adventureland XL
This one starts way back. And I mean waaaay back.
When I was eight years old, my family got our first home computer: the technological marvel known as the TRS-80 Model I from Radio Shack.
At the time, it felt like the future had landed in our house and taken over a desk, cassette tape drive and all.
We were very early adopters, but there was one tiny problem with owning a home computer in those days. There was not exactly a giant library of games waiting to be downloaded. There was no Steam. No app store. No endless glowing buffet of distractions.
We had a Space Invaders knockoff. And for a while, that was about it.
Then we discovered the Scott Adams Adventure games.
These were old-school text adventure games, the kind where you typed a verb and a noun to move through the world. “Go north.” “Get lamp.” “Open door.” Simple commands, but somehow they opened up entire worlds.
Games like "The Count", "Voodoo Castle", and "Adventureland" kept me sitting at the computer for hours. They felt like interactive books with puzzles hiding inside them, and they were probably the first games that made me realize a person could build a world out of words, rules, logic, and imagination.
Those games are a big part of why I wanted to become a game designer in the first place.
Flash forward a few decades.
By then, I had actually become a game designer and developer. One day, I stumbled across a Yahoo Group about retro games, because yes, Yahoo Groups were a thing.
While reading through the posts, I noticed someone named Scott Adams.
Now, “Scott” and “Adams” are not exactly rare names. There is the Dilbert Scott Adams. I even grew up with a neighbor named Scott Adams. But this Scott Adams was talking about old text adventure games, and when he mentioned working on a new version of Adventureland, there was no doubt.
It was him. THE Scott Adams.
The guy whose games helped point eight-year-old me toward an entire creative career.
Reaching Out to a Legend
So I emailed him.
I tried to sound calm, professional, and perfectly normal.
What I basically said was: “You are the reason I got into games, and if you are making a new game, I would do anything to help.”
In hindsight, that may have landed somewhere between enthusiastic and mildly alarming.
He politely thanked me and said he had it covered.
So naturally, I clarified.
I told him I did not even need to be paid. I would help for free. I just felt like, in some strange way, I owed him.
There was a long pause.
Possibly because he was considering whether to reply or contact authorities.
But eventually, I got through.
He told me he did not have a logo for the game yet.
That was all I needed.
I told him not to pay me, not to worry, and that if he did not like anything I created, he did not have to use it. I just wanted a chance to show him something.
So the design process began.
He liked what he saw, and eventually we arrived at the final logo for his new game, Adventureland XL. The design was a little retro, a little modern, and because the goal of the game involved trying to get home, we worked a small home plate shape into the negative space between the X and the L.
That tiny detail still makes me happy.
Things went well enough that when he later needed artwork for the actual game, he asked if I was interested. This time, he offered to pay me.
And that is how, decades after sitting at a TRS-80 typing commands into Adventureland, I got to work with one of the people who made me want to create games in the first place.
The original game was about trying to find your way home.
In a strange way, getting to work on Adventureland XL felt like I had.
The first time I met David Copperfield, the room was filled with stage smoke.
Of course it was.
David Copperfield: Behind the Curtain
Growing up, David Copperfield was one of my heroes.
I never missed his television specials. Once my family had a VHS recorder, I recorded them and watched them over and over again, trying to figure out how he made the impossible look so effortless.
I even dabbled in magic myself for a while, mostly for fun. But for me, the real magic was never just the trick. It was the storytelling. The music. The lighting. The way he could make a giant illusion feel personal and emotional.
A few years before I started working with him, Danie and I saw his show live in Fort Worth. At that point, it was the only time I had ever seen him perform in person.
The show was incredible.
I had no idea that, just a couple of years later, I would be working for him.
The first time I met David was backstage at the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway. The Martin Beck had its own magic history. Martin Beck had managed Houdini, and Houdini had performed there. HOUDINI!
So naturally, because the universe apparently enjoys theatrical staging, I met David in the Martin Beck greenroom, above the stage that was half-filled with smoke drifting up from the show that had just finished below.
He walked in wearing his black flying sweater and jeans, calmly held out his hand, and said, “Hi, I’m David.”
I was almost shaking.
I said, “Yeah, I know.”
Smooth.
For the next few years, I created and maintained David’s official website, ran the online community back when websites had message boards, designed the logo for his fan club, Magic Central, and helped with other design and web projects connected to his world.
One of the most surreal projects was photographing his secret magic warehouse in Nevada and turning it into an online 360-degree virtual tour.
That place was unbelievable.
It was filled with pieces of magic history, strange artifacts, legendary props, and objects with stories attached to them. Some of David’s own crew reportedly did not like going into the museum alone because there were rumors it was haunted.
Honestly, after seeing some of what was inside, I understood the concern.
I saw things there I will never forget, including objects connected to some of the most famous and haunting stories in magic history. It felt less like a warehouse and more like standing inside the hidden archive of wonder, danger, obsession, invention, and showmanship.
And somehow, my job was to help bring a small piece of that world online.
There were other surreal moments too.
The ToddWorld Logo and Questionable Decisions
One night, we were backstage after a show, just talking, and David noticed the logo for my own ToddWorld site. The little labortory/observatory. He said he could use it for a project he was working on.
And I said... no.
To David Copperfield.
About a logo.
Looking back, I am still not entirely sure what was wrong with me.
But that logo was mine. It represented this weird little creative universe I had been building, and even standing next to one of my childhood heroes, I knew I wanted to keep that piece of ToddWorld for myself.
The Real Magic
Working with David was one of those chapters that still feels slightly unreal, one might say "magical". I got to see behind the curtain, but it did not make the magic smaller. If anything, it made it stronger.
Because the most impossible part was not the stage smoke, the secret warehouse, or the illusions hiding behind the curtain.
It was the distance between the kid endlessly watching those specials on VHS and the adult standing backstage in a Broadway theater.
Somehow, that distance disappeared.
And for a brief moment, somehow, I was part of the story.