While the core of Venus Patrol is intentionally kept very slim, a number of people have been invaluable in bringing the site and its related initiatives to life during the long-haul between the end of the Kickstarter campaign and the launch itself. Below you’ll find a breakdown of all of the people involved in creating this initiative, updated quietly every time I think “oh man, I totally forgot to thank __________!”
Brandon Boyer: Brandon (yr humble narrator) is the founder and editor of Venus Patrol, as well as the chairman of the Independent Games Festival, co-founder of Austin’s independent game community JUEGOS RANCHEROS & its public arcade initiative THE TEXATRON, and also the person behind all of the stuff that we haven’t shown off yet.
Prior to Venus Patrol, he has acted as indie record label head, interactive developer, and contributer, writer & editor for various outlets including Edge magazine, Gamasutra, Offworld & Boing Boing. He can be found on Twitter vacillating wildly between getting people riled up about amazing art, music & games and leaving curious, cryptic, and sometimes totally indecipherable & very probably drunken messages about the massive empty abyss of the cold indifferent universe.
Cory Schmitz: Cory is the designer behind Venus Patrol and pretty much all of its related initiatives, as well as one of independent gaming culture’s most prolific and widely seen graphic designers, with a heavy art-direction role in Queasy Games’ PS3 & Vita musical platformer Sound Shapes, as well as logos & design for outfits like Tiger Style Games, Indie Game: The Movie, 17-Bit, Little–Eyes and GameCity. He is basically the best. I want Venus Patrol to succeed almost solely so I can keep giving him money to design pretty things. He is also on twitter.
Neil Thapen: Neil is an independent game developer and creator of Venus Patrol, the not-coincidentally-titled 2009 freeware dogfighting simulation game that would eventually serve as the titular inspiration for this very website. Venus Patrol (the game) totally independently overlapped with so much of the themes and aesthetics of what I wanted this website to convey, and he not only super graciously agreed to go along with the unprecedented idea of naming a website about videogames after a videogame, but also provided invaluable help in creating the assets for the initial site design. You should download and play Venus Patrol (the game) straight away, it’s unbelievably gorgeous.
Website backend & admin assistance: CSS conversion and implementation by Adam Robezzoli and Wiley Wiggins, initial WordPress template implementation by Ben McGraw, backend/admin help & general calmer-downers when things were super crazy broken and I was straight up freaking the hell out: Rami Ismail, Andreas Zecher, Matthew Wegner & Kevin Mahoney.
Kickstarter campaign assistance: Pendleton Ward, Scott C, James Kochalka, Keita Takahashi, Doug Wilson, Adam Saltsman, Robin Arnott, Jan Willem Nijman, Rami Ismail, Paul Veer, Jukio Kallio, Dose One, Craig Adams, C Andrew Rohrmann, Mathew Kumar, Devine Lu Linvega, Mikko Walamies, Baiyon, Phil Fish, Rich Vreeland & Andreas Zecher for providing the raw materials that sold the campaign.
Steph Thirion, Kris ‘greater culture sandwich’ Piotrowski, Richard Lemarchand, Craig Adams, Randy Smith, Raigan Burns & Mare Sheppard, Adam Saltsman, Alec Holowka, Andy Nealen, Mathew Kumar, Jon Mak & Jason DeGroot, David OReilly, Wiley Wiggins, Neil Thapen, Nosaj Thing, Daniel Pemberton and Lisanne Pajot & Jamie Swirsky for appearing in & otherwise helping create the Kickstarter video that to this day still makes some people inexplicably really angry on twitter.
The awesome folks of the Anderson Lane Pak Mail (tell them Brandon sent you!) for mailing assistance; David Kalina, George Royer, Jo Lammert, Wiley Wiggins, and Rachel Weil for helping sort & package all the physical goods, and especially my extremely patient roommates Dave & Michelle, who endured weeks of a sea of padded envelopes overflowing their mid-century modern living room, on top of my wild mood swings while I fought to keep from being buried alive by this thing.
… and you!
