Technically Not Tech: South Street’s J1Studios to release first video game

In junior high school most students doodle or play hangman when not paying attention. Jason Richardson, on the other hand, wrote code.
“All during school I just wouldn’t pay attention to the teacher. It looked like I was taking notes but I was just writing code on graph paper,” he says. “I have a thing for creating.”
The 31-year-old founder of South Street-based J1 Studios spent his youth making board games, card games and video games and hasn’t let up since. Richardson is taking the hobbies of his youth and slowly building a geek media empire complete with anime-style comics, podcasts and video game development and will have a booth at the upcoming GameX expo.
But, if you ask Richardson, he’ll tell you it all started with an Apple II and a Zelda instruction manual.


“As a kid I was making games on an Apple II. I used to write code in BASIC,” he says.
Because the computers of the time lacked any sort of graphical interface, Richardson would� create the game’s “graphics” using ASCII art by plotting out the art on graph paper. He would then “publish” the games on 5�-inch floppy disks and sell them to friends and family.
Soon, he became so proficient, he included Easter eggs and sold a “Nintendo Power” -like gaming publication to help people beat his games and unlock the hidden codes.
He even packaged detailed instruction booklets with his creations.
“You can blame Zelda for that. When I first saw the Zelda instruction manual, I became obsessed with them,” says Richardson.

THE BIRTH OF J1 STUDIOS

After graduating high school in Delaware County, Richardson attended the Art Institute of Philadelphia where he met other artists and eventually, in 2007, decided to turn his obsession into a company.

“It’s a side project that’s slowly turning into a full time thing,” he says.
When it began, the studio only had three titles and a handful of people working on them. Now, the studio boasts nearly a dozen titles and is working on its first video game.
If J1 doesn’t create something in-house, the company will offer outside artists a chance to feature their work in exchange for a small percentage of ownership. When any web comic or podcast receives traffic or gets reviewed, Richardson says that all of the titles under J1 receive a bump, which benefits everyone.
“I take people that have a hard time getting out there and I just bring them over to me,” he says.
For now, the studio is looking to get back to its roots with the development of the Hero E.X., a video game featuring illustrations and characters that Richardson created in his youth. The title will be a side-scrolling fighting game, similar to Double Dragon.
The game is scheduled to be released on the PC and then, hopefully, to the Xbox Live Arcade.
“We want to do 2D video games that don’t look like a pile of pixels,” he says pointing to the recent success of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix as an example of the market’s desire for quality 2D titles.
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Every Monday, Technically Not Tech will feature people, projects, and businesses that are involved with Philly�s tech scene, but aren�t necessarily technology focused. See others here.