Rising Stars: Meet Jonathan Jennings

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jonathan Jennings.

Jonathan, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I’ve been a gamer all my life some of my earliest memories include a controller in my hand and playing an NES, I knew the ins and outs of Super Mario before I could even read.

Videogames were my big brother’s thing and when I was very young, I’d sit there and watch him play streetfighter and a few other games for like an hour or so every day, and watching him do all these awesome things absolutely captured me and as I got older, I started to develop a love and appreciation for games beyond my older brother.

As a teenager, I couldn’t get enough of them either I’d read gaming magazines, watch G4TV (which was a 24-hour videogames channel for a while), talk to people all over the world on gaming forums. Really I met and consumed as much game content as I could and yet I didn’t realize making games was a career option until I was about to graduate from high school and a college recruiter came by to demo a game someone made in the program.

Right away, I asked my mom if we could check out the college campus in Pomona and I was sold as soon as we walked into the computer lab.

Four years later, I had earned my degree in Game & Simulation programming, I went from never seeing a line of code in my life to having made a few simple games. I had sent out over 300 hundred resumes, failed 10 interviews that took me from my hometown of Fontana, CA to Santa Monica, Marina Del Rey, Downtown LA, and more and ultimately earned my first job as a Jr. Game programmer at a game studio called Sabertooth Interactive in Venice, CA.

Games and my journey with games lead me to LA.

It’s been over 10 years since then and I’ve worked on over 22 published games and apps that have been on websites, phones, computers., Virtual Reality headsets. Some of them have been played and downloaded over a million times, some just a couple of hundred. I’m working on my own Virtual Reality Game game project called Galactic Bar Fight right now and my full-time job I work on animation software built using games technology at a company called Mindshow where one of our animated music videos have reached over 5 million downloads in less than two months.

For a kid who just was just obsessed with Mario and let that obsession carry me, it’s brought me to great places and allowed me to have many memorable and awesome experiences all over the LA area.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The road has definitely had its challenges. I was never good at math which is a big part of game programming, I didn’t know any programmers growing up, black game programmers are like .1% of the game industry and I definitely entered some spaces where a black programmer was not expected or I might even say appreciated.

Being a black programmer played partially into the 300 resumes I sent and some of my first game interview screw-ups. Some I legitimately didn’t know enough for the job and others felt more like a condemnation of me and my skin and less about my lack of skill and experience.

Once I got the job, I had to prove my worth too as anyone does but there’s definitely a different level of pressure when you’re black in those spaces and balancing the people around you so proud of you for what you are accomplishing while still trying to put your head down and balance in front of people expecting you to fail.

On top of that, game development is hard work, my first job, I worked an average of 13 hours a week for my very first career position, we worked 70+ hour weeks for months and had I not been consumed with being in the space I would have probably quit with such an intense work load.

On top of that, anyone working on entertainment and passionate about it will tell you that hearing from fans can be a blessing and a curse, sometimes people will tell you how your work has made their day, touched their soul, established a core memory and other times you will hear how if God hand-selected the worst person for the job he couldn’t have done any worse with any other human being in the history of the world than you.

I always try to appreciate a quote I read once that says, “Remember why you started ” because as you become stronger, more skilled, more talented and release larger projects that receive more attention and criticism, it’s easy to lose sense of the spark and drive you had when just the idea of living your passion was enough for you.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’m a software engineer who specializes in interactive experiences. I’ve built games, educational experiences, Virtual reality art galleries, training simulations, virtual showrooms, digital puppet shows, and currently at Mindshow, I am a piece of the amazing team that builds a tool to develop animated tv shows cheaper and faster than traditional animation technologies…

Some of the things I am most proud of contributing to and creating are:

Draculaura Here for life -Music video (2022)
Supersonic Rhyme Chamber (2021) – VR Game
Galactic bar Fight (2021) – VR game
RelayCars Magic Leap – app (2018)
Ghost Busters VR: Now Hiring Android /iOS – game (2016)
Flavor Monster Ios / Android app – game (2013)
Animal Planet Wildlans : 2012

I think the thing that sets me apart from others is my passion for making stuff in general. I’ve had to do everything from placing a virtual button appropriately in a cars dashboard VR to working on a system to make different kinds of guns as a Game Designer In Galactic Bar Fight and I try to approach each challenge with the same energy and attention to detail.

Whether it’s for fun or a more serious business application, I want people who experience my work to feel good and enjoy whatever they are experiencing.

Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
In the next 5-10 years, I feel like Mixed Reality (Wearing glasses that create virtual objects in your physical space) will absolutely blow up. Some of my favorite work so far has been on the Magic Leap and it is so cool to make something virtual that can sit on your couch or run around your kitchen table. In my first mixed reality prototype I made a little tech demo for my 10 year old niece and in this prototype, she could use a controller and a pair of Magic Leap glasses to walk a bear character up and down her hallway (WITH COLLISION against the walls and floor) and to me even a small experience like that which allows you to see something digital in your real space is amazing.

You could have a digital theater performance happen in your living room (Hamilton your coffee table anybody?), you could expand a virtual screen the size of your wall to watch a big fight or game. You could study for an upcoming medical exam and meticulously deconstruct a virtual skeleton in order to observe human muscular systems or watch as a virtual representation of the building of the pyramid of Giza happens at your kitchen counter while you wash dishes.

Plenty of small prototypes of this type of stuff exists today so while it may sound like I am just sharing my dreams this tech and its capabilities are very real and people in my space are working to figure out how to create these experiences right now.

I love the virtual reality space but I think once Mixed Reality glasses become more affordable it will really change how we choose to experience content and see how virtual content merges with our real world in the future.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.behance.net/Jonathanj
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/JonnyJ17
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/mariopot789/videos
• Other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5uyUoyiklY