Don Daglow memorializes those we lost in the game industry

24.12.2023 - 16:55 / venturebeat.com / Alan Wake / Alex Casey

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As Don Daglow noticed friends and former colleagues passing away, he felt they should be remembered. And so he started keeping a log of game industry professionals who passed away.

He calls the page In Memoriam: Games industry people who have passed away. And it now has more than 700 names, with the numbers hitting the dozens every passing year. It’s one of the cultural artifacts of a young industry that is now becoming older, and the page is not unlike other artistic industries that honor their dead in some way.

At the top of the page, Daglow put the lines from John Donne’s poem from 1624, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Anyone’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

To that poem, Daglow added, “Never let them be forgotten.”

It’s a lot of work to do this, and during this time of year people remember to send more messages of those who have died to Daglow (he takes reports at ddaglow at gmail dot com). He has help from contributors such as Devin Monnens and Andrew Armstrong, who a few years back did a lot of work compiling names for the IGDA and The Internet Archive Memorial. Because he relies on friends and relatives to send in names, Daglow is certain that he is missing a lot of people. After all, the game industry has grown to something like 300,000 people worldwide.

As far as who to include, Daglow includes anyone who worked professionally at a game publisher or developer or as a games journalist. He has also included voice actors, motion capture performers etc. That means this week he added James McCaffery, an actor who died on December 17. McCaffery played Max Payne in the Max Payne trilogy from Remedy Entertainment. He was also the voice of Thomas Zane in Alan Wake, and the voice of Alex Casey in Alan Wake 2.

Daglow is a fitting person to do this work. He learns about people who have passed at reunions for companies like Intellivision.

His games have generated more than $1 billion across his career. Daglow has worked on games since 1980 to the present day, often in leadership or creative positions. He worked on pioneering games across multiple genres such as Neverwinter Nights in 1991, Intellivision World Series Baseball (1983), Stronghold (1993) and Utopia (1991). He has also written novels and Indie Games: From Dream to Delivery. He also serves as an adviser to GamesBeat events.

“This is my project, and certainly the theme is about saving game history before it’s lost,” Daglow said in an interview with GamesBeat.

And he is a senior director of industry relations at The Strong National