Meet Ryan Von Minus

 

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ryan Von Minus a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Ryan, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

I definitely developed and learned resilience from several sources. The first thing that comes to mind are my grandparents. I was very close with my fathers parents, all of them Holocaust survivors, resistance fighters, and immigrants, They quite literally lived many lives, fought for what they needed to survive, and restarted several times in different parts of the world. This was a basis of the culture of my family, I learned very early that if you don’t give up, you can win even against the most pessimistic odds. This lesson or mentality has allowed me to dream big, and continue to pursue my creative career in the face of a lot of failure, toxic people and loss.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

A young person rolls thier electric scooter into a cramped bodega, a speaker strapped to the back. The neon lights that line the speaker flood the aisles, casting a garish glow over the tiny market. The deep bass of reggaeton rattles the wine bottles on the shelves as the air fills with the an over-the-top, erotic moan-laden version of FANTI ELRIMIXDELRIMIX. venturing ever deeper into the chaos of the crowded store. The scooters driver maneuvers through the onlooking crowd, some smiling and nodding in admiration, others just bewildered, thrown off by the disruption of their usual routine and the strange energy of this invasion into their consumer-driven flow. The young person is Damage City.

Damage City could be a response to the corporate exploitation of an entire generation of artists. At the very least, it’s two disgruntled artists trying to make cool video games. We create games for us and the people who get it, not for everyone. We don’t aim to please the masses; we aim to connect with the ones who understand, and I think that’s what makes us happy to make. After working for so many years, making others visions come true, this was a big realization.

Who’s our audience? Honestly, it’s probably 17-year-old us. I grew up in the DIY punk/emo scene in Philadelphia during the late 90s and early 2000s—listening to bands like At The Drive-In, Refused, Sunny Day Real Estate, and knowing the Konami code better than my own phone number. I watched Robocop, Jason Goes to Hell, and the Aliens trilogy on repeat until the tapes wore out. I was a bit late to the game, but I eventually played in a band, recorded a ton of songs, and even made records for other people. Then, at some point, I just wasn’t having fun anymore. I thought I had fallen out of love with music and video games.

Meanwhile, halfway across the world, Sheldon Vella—my partner in Damage City—was having a similar experience. He grew up in the graffiti and extreme music scene, later building a career making art for big-name companies and rockstars. That’s where we crossed paths. We were both burnt out, both wondering: Why do I hate what I thought I loved? Turns out, we didn’t hate music, video games, or drawing—we just hated making stuff for people we didn’t respect, under conditions that sucked. It was the industry itself that had soured us.

And we weren’t the only ones. In the AAA game world, tons of people felt the same way—miserable, stuck, and fed up. So we said, “Eff it”. Let’s take everything we’ve learned, all that frustration, and turn it into something we could love again. And maybe, just maybe, we could create a space for others who’ve been through the same thing—a place where people can come, get lost, and enjoy the stuff we love too.

Starting Damage City was a decade-long process. It took a lot of help along the way, and I learned that success often hinges on one thing: honesty. Be real with people, offer solutions, and they’ll overlook your mistakes. That’s been our approach from the start.

Right now, we have two games in development. We have one called “Low Life” that I can share, the other, we’re deep in the prototype phase of, which, in its tragic yet humorous way, will take aim at the ideals and culture of Wall Street and the global corporate mindset. And we’re doing it all with hamsters and cheese. Because Damage City.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Echoing the initial question, resilience has been the most important. This always necessary and sometimes elusive, but, the ability to continue to make things and put one foot in front of the other has been the most important thing. Following through on projects even if deformed and imperfect from their conception is so rad, because it shows the world you make stuff and dont just talk about it and it’ll build you up mentally. Which brings me to the equal partner of resilience, mental health. Without being kind to yourself and prioritizing your mental health, you will not have anything to give a project, team, or family…your mind and lens through which you see life its the engine that drives creativity and work ethic. You can have genius strokes of luck when trying to push through depression, anxiety or dark moments, but it’s not sustainable. Neglecting yourself will stifle you in the end; and bursts of creativity are often short lived.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

We are always looking for rad ideas and people. Our business model revolves around democratizing game development and pairing artist that ordinarily wouldn’t be involved with game dev. In my humble opinion, video games are the pinnacle of story telling. Guiding a diverse pool of talented minds and active artists that have an interest in telling their story through games or interactive media makes really good stuff. I mean, I have worked in games off and on, but I am a music producer that has spent years working on corporate projects for the NFL, record labels and beauty products and big records, Sheldon is a visual artist that has worked for Marvel, Nickelodeon and Netflix. Our adjacent careers have given us tons of fuel to make great ideas, the same goes for productive artists that love games.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Concept, Artwork by Damage City Games, Sheldon Vella, Ryan von Minus

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