About me: My name is Josh Buck and I use the computer to make art. I was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA and lived in New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut until my family moved to Thessaloniki, Greece when I was 6. Then on to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for 5 years, then to Vienna, Austria, then back to New Hampshire, then to Nicosia, Cyprus where I graduated from high school with a concentration in being a third culture kid. Not military, my parents are recently retired educators.

When I was 10 and living in Malaysia, my father came home with a carboard box overflowing with wires and a boxy beige device that turned out to be a used Commodore Vic 20 computer. That baby had 5K of RAM and a sweet tape drive that you could load from and save things to when it didn't endlessly hang and blink at you. I only had one game for it and went through the motions of typing in hundreds of lines of code from magazines that seldom produced anything functional but I was hooked. The next year I graduated to a shiny new (read matte beige) but immitation Apple II+. This wasn't even a real clone, it was an unnamed (literally) clone of a clone based on the Pineapple Apple II+ clone that was popular in South East Asia. It had a top that came off. You could see things inside. I played around with Apple II's (IIe, IIc, IIgs) until the end of 9th grade and then didn't touch a computer for over 5 years (skateboarding, art, girls). I was never interested in the Mac because they lacked games and couldn't be opened. Why would you make a computer you can't open?

When I was in college I played guitar in a progressive/punk/alternative band, painted houses, brewed beer, painted portraits and still lifes with oil paints and made sculptures out of wood, fiberglass and roofing paper, eventually landing a BFA degree with a concentration in oil painting. The bike rack on the roof of my 1983 diesel VW Rabbit made it hard to attach the pizza delivery sign so I decided on graduate school. After grad school at the Savannah College of Art & Design school I worked in Boston at Stainless Steel Studios for 7 years then did contract work for other game companies in the Boston area for 2 additional years. I started designing and building furniture, got heavily involved in making music with my computer, and started looking for a way to bridge the gap between the digital and intangible world of computer graphics and the dirty work of welding, building and trying to make things "go to 11." I'm still working on that.

I was the 8th employee at Stainless Steel Studios in Boston, a small startup in late 1998 when I started. We went on to make some popular games, hell-bent on developing and maintaining our own IP. We closed in 2005 with approximately 65 employees due to a contract dispute with the worst publisher I've had the displeasure of working with. Midway closed many a good studio that year, all in the name of rampant capitalism.

My wife and I met in 1990 but didn't become an item until 1993 and didn't get married until 2001. Our awesome daughter Jesse was born in 2003 and our maniacal son Elias in 2005. After Stainless closed I made the job-search-rounds but couldn't bring myself to bring the kids to another one of the large cities where game companies like to set up shop. In 2006 I had the opportunity to come and develop the now nationally acclaimed Game Art & Animation curriculum at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. To be honest, the program was a disaster when I got here but I can confidently say that due to some unusually hard work on the part of my peers and our students we now have one of the best Game Development programs in the country. Our students are talented, motivated and ready to take on the industry.

I still contribute to the AAA game industry and love to take on contract work. Along with teaching full time and maintaining the Game Art curriculum at Champlain College I'm also Creative Director at Hoozinga Inc., a recent startup with some peers and two of our talented graduates.

You can get in touch with me at josh@cgartistry.com.