Jonathan Blow - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Blow was born in 1971 to middle class, Southern Californian parents, Blow says he started to “check out” from his parents as early as elementary school. His mother was an ex-nun who constantly reminded her son about the imminent coming of Jesus and would later disown Blow's older sister for coming out as a lesbian in the mid-80s. Blow's father worked all day as a defense contractor and would come home to be alone in his den, where children were not allowed. Blow would say in an interview with The Atlantic :

“Early on, I detected that there weren’t good examples at home, so I kind of had to figure things out on my own... I had to adopt a paradigm of self-sufficiency.”

Blow studied computer science and creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley and was president of the Computer Science Undergraduate Association for a semester. He left the university in 1993, a semester before he would have graduated. He worked in San Francisco in various tech jobs until forming a game design company with a friend from Berkeley at the age of 24. The business folded after 4 years, $100,000 in debt.