Today we’d like to introduce you to Richard Grillotti.
Hi Richard, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I was born in Long Island, New York in 1972. It was a special time to grow up, before the internet was part of every household and long before smartphones were conceived of. My childhood was filled with hands-on creativity; action figures, bikes, Legos, comics, drawing with friends, and exploring the outdoors. I’m grateful to have been raised in those simpler times. It’s clear to me why nostalgia of the culture of the ’70’s and ’80’s has such appeal. I feel fortunate that those analog roots ground me and have stayed with me through everything, but haven’t limited my ability to also play and create in the digital, connected world, and do my best to bring some of that simplicity into it.
When video game arcades started popping up in the late ’70s, I was able to experience that early golden age of video games firsthand. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Joust, Robotron 2084, Dig Dug, Time Pilot; Video games were fun and amazing, and I couldn’t wait to dive back into those glowing screens.
My parents were kind and progressive enough to buy my sister and I an Atari 2600 in 1980, and I completely fell in love with the raw bloops, bleeps and buzzing sounds, and the colorful, blocky pixels. These were state-of-the-art home computer graphics at the time. I didn’t think of them as “pixel art” back then. That warm, fuzzy minimal aesthetic became part of the fabric of my psyche and a core part of my visual language decades later.
I also found a love of something completely non-digital in those early years that I don’t think I would have come about if I was born 20+ years later, after the internet started becoming a part of daily life — sending and receiving real physical letters and postcards in the mail.
My family moved to Florida when I was a teenager. I felt very alone in this foreign town and culturally different school system. I missed my good friends back in New York terribly. To stay connected, we enjoyed mailing letters and drawings to each other regularly. Email, video calls, and online gaming would have made staying in touch much easier, but physical mail and expensive, infrequent long distance phone calls were our only options.
As the years progressed, the joy of this letter writing stuck with me. I found I wanted to be in touch with many people in this way when given the chance, and this love for sending and receiving mail grew into a postcard + sticker collage art series I call Postcard Remixes, a long-running project I started playing around with in 2000 and still do to this day. I’ve posted a sampling of these at instagram.com/postcardremix, but I plan to make an art book out of these in time.
During my undergraduate college years, I studied Fine Art at Florida State University, and it was there I met Miles Tilmann. We became close friends and eventually moved to Chicago a few years after graduation. While still in Florida, I landed a job doing web design at an advertising agency in Tallahassee Florida directly after getting my Bachelors of Fine Arts degree. After 2 years of overworking an unsatisfying corporate job, I was seeing I was on a path to a life I didn’t want for myself. With a mix of frustration, burnout, courage and excitement, and feeling confident enough in my design abilities, I left to form my own web design company with another close friend and thus embarked on a lifetime of being my own boss.
We wanted to use our art and design sensibilities and experience to bring better looking graphic design to the world wide web in around 1998, which at the time was just starting to evolve out of its basic and awkward looking beginnings. We kept this company alive for a couple of good and educational years but running into creative and personality differences, we ended it. I had been getting more into fine art photography while seeking design work for hire, and I started my own independent design company. I also began to create my Postcard Remixes around this time, and found a renewed interest for sending them and care packages to friends.
I moved to Chicago to catch up to Miles who had already made the move from Florida, seeking a city with more art, music and culture than central Florida had to offer. Soon after I arrived I met some people, got involved in the local art community and I was invited to participate in making art for a Chicago art and fashion show. Without being given any guidelines or limitations, somehow the idea came to me to try to draw some pixel art models for it, as low resolution as I could, like the old Atari 2600 games I used to play.
I had never worked in pixels before, but when I tried, something clicked. I found an extremely minimal character style that still managed to look sexy. I was amazed at how a few well-placed blocks of color could suggest an entire personality. My original love for the classic gaming consoles and arcade cabinets was being stirred.
Miles saw what I was doing and having become fairly skilled at coding interactive presentations, he suggested that he could make them move on-screen. I animated in Photoshop, he made them respond to keypresses, and suddenly we had something… a character walking around that we could control. We realized we could actually make a video game of our own, and we absolutely wanted to.
We both shared a deep love of classic 8-bit and arcade games and a great nostalgia for those simpler childhood times. Instead of following trends in 3D graphics, we imagined a world where 3D polygons never happened and sprite-based pixel games just kept evolving. In 2006, we officially formed our indie game studio, Pixeljam. We teamed up with local chiptune gameboy musician Mark DeNardo to fill out the audio piece of the puzzle. Our first breakout title, Gamma Bros, was a finalist in the Independent Games Festival, and we suddenly found ourselves part of a thriving indie games scene we hadn’t known existed.
From there, Pixeljam grew. We kept on making free high quality web games that we were excited about ourselves and wanted to exist. We figured if we were excited about them, other nostalgic retro game enthusiasts would be as well. Our next major release was our very 8-bit dinosaur multiplayer racing game Dino Run, which wound up becoming wildly popular, but since we released it as a free game, we didn’t profit from it, aside from accepting donations for the “hats pack.” (Yes, in Dino Run you could put various little hats on your pixel velociraptor). While not financially a good move for us to release this large game for free, Dino Run’s success led to successful partnerships with Comedy Central and Adult Swim, who we made original games with for many years.
Over time we returned to making our own original premium titles for PC, Mac and mobile. We figured out, more or less, how to stay afloat in the ever changing gaming industry. We’ve made around 30+ titles to date, including getting the opportunity to collaborate with artists like James Kochalka, Jeffrey Nielson, Datassette, and others, and we continue to produce titles we are excited about.
I also explored other creative paths. In 2017, I attended the Digital Art and New Media MFA program at UC Santa Cruz. My thesis project, Resonant Waves, was an immersive, interactive sound and vibration installation exploring cymatics which is basically the visual patterns sound naturally makes which can be made visible when passing through a water dish resting on a speaker, or in sand vibrating on a metal plate. It was deeply satisfying to explore this phenomena and I continue to evolve this work today.
After grad school, I moved to Los Angeles, found a creative community, and began working at a live events production studio. When the pandemic hit, my event work paused, but Pixeljam came back to life. We released Nova Drift, which was our most successful game release so far, and also secured private investor funding to grow our team and produce a number of new games. We’re now working on our biggest title yet, Dino Run 2, and recently launched a new arcade-vector graphics inspired engine called V99 (V99.sys). Our first game created with it, Utopia Must Fall, was recently nominated for Excellence in Audio at the 2025 Independent Games Festival, bringing us full circle to where it all began with Gamma Bros in 2007.
And just recently, we released Cornhole Hero, a mobile game in the most minimal pixel art style we’ve done yet, a true homage to the Atari 2600, a return to our childhood roots in the best possible way.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It hasn’t always been smooth, and honestly, I’m glad it wasn’t. The challenges have shaped so much.
In the early days, I had so many creative directions pulling me at once; photography, animation, video, music, design, painting. I realized I needed to focus if I wanted to go deep and really make something meaningful. Choosing to devote myself to Pixeljam meant letting go of a lot of things I loved and would devote my time to. It was a difficult but necessary choice, and it gave me the creative clarity I hadn’t had before.
There were also financial struggles. We went full-time with Pixeljam before we had steady income. There were months where we didn’t know how we’d pay rent. Somehow, things always worked out, but not without effort and a bit of luck. I would still take on side jobs when possible, but at one point, I sold my entire childhood 1980’s Transformers collection on eBay, making around $8,000, which helped fund my part in the development of Dino Run. I appreciated the poetry of this, transforming what I loved in childhood into supporting what I loved in my adult life.
We’ve had times of growth, working with a full team of art and coding contractors, and harder times where we had to let our teams go and scale back to just the basics, two people and a dream to keep going. Sometimes we had to pause game development entirely to take on outside work. And that’s okay. It’s all part of the rhythm.
After releasing Last Horizon, Miles and I even took time apart to pursue other paths. He had a growing family with increasing expenses. I took the opportunity to go to grad school. Eventually, life and our timing lined up again, and we came back to Pixeljam renewed. The challenges are always coming at us, continued success is not guaranteed, but we still love our work and feel what we’re creating is valuable so we do our best to carry on.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
At Pixeljam, I specialize in minimal pixel art and animation, particularly in the visual style of classic arcade cabinet games, NES-era games and older systems like the Commodore 64, Intellivision and Atari 2600. I’ve always been fascinated by how few pixels it takes to create something expressive. I love working with color, simplicity, and the imagination of the viewer.
What sets our work apart is that we don’t really chase trends. We have to be excited about what we’re creating ourselves and believe in it for its own merit. Of course it’s important to pay attention to the changing gaming landscape but we don’t make games simply because that’s the genre that’s hot right now.
I’m very proud to have created a fun, positive, as low stress work environment as possible for both Miles and I and our team as well. Quality of life for everyone involved with Pixeljam is important to us.
One of our most satisfying moments at Pixeljam was releasing Utopia Must Fall using our own custom-built vector engine, V99.sys. It feels like we’ve tapped into the energy of classic arcade vector games like Tempest, Asteroids, Star Wars and Battlezone, while making something totally new. Getting nominated for Excellence in Audio at the IGF this year was a rewarding moment of recognition.
One of my most rewarding moments as a pixel artist was the first time I had my own art exhibition titled Low Res, with a variety of Fine Art prints and giclées of my favorite pixel art pieces.
And one of the most fulfilling moments with the Resonant Waves project, now called the Geometron, has been witnessing people’s minds get blown by what they were seeing, feeling, and influencing through frequency, vibration, and cymatics. I love making art that reveals the invisible and creating experiences that spark a sense of wonder in people and move them in subtle, even therapeutic ways.
What makes you happy?
One of the main ways is being able to spend my time on creative projects that are exciting to me, and whenever possible bringing joy to others. I feel happiest when I’m offering something of value from the heart. Whether it’s my time and attention or handmade postcard remix, I enjoy when people feel appreciated, uplifted, and inspired. I also love peak experiences, like tasting delicious food, playing with friends, time spent with kittens, seeing someone light up when they play one of our games or interact with something I’ve made. That’s all deeply rewarding.
More than anything though, I’m drawn to a more stable and consistent peace and contentment. Not just momentary highs, but a steadier, deeper, quieter kind of fulfillment. It often comes from being aware of where my attention is going and what I choose to give it to, when I have that choice. That includes noticing the kinds of thoughts that are spinning in my mind, and how I’m relating to others, and from what place inside myself. Our fundamental nature is peace and silence, content in itself, which is fairly clear to see and experience when we become aware of it and can relax into it.
I meditate regularly and have a deep interest in resting attention in our silent nature, which can do wonders for experiencing this great peace, including while engaged in daily life and activities. When I’m truly present, in a state of listening, I’m much more available and open to inspiration. That’s where my best ideas come from, and I’ve learned to trust them when they do.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://pixeljam.com
- Instagram: v99.sys
- Facebook: https://www.instagram.com/postcardremix
- LinkedIn: https://utopiamustfall.com
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/pixeljamgames
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Pixeljam
- Yelp: https://resonantwaves.org
- Soundcloud: https://pixeljam.com/dinorun
- Other: https://www.instagram.com/pixeljamgames
