The Most Obsessive Person I Know
push to talk #30 // jason killingsworth lost his job, then got really into dark souls and built a world-class luxury book publisher
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I first connected with Jason Killingsworth over a shared obsession with the iPhone game Super Hexagon. I loved the game but sucked at it.
Jason, on the other hand, was the world’s #2 ranked player.
The only person above Jason on the Super Hexagon global leaderboards was the game’s creator, Terry Cavanagh.1 But Jason is obsessive. He kept playing, and trying. And eventually he did it. He became the world’s best Super Hexagon player.2
That’s just who Jason is. He takes nothing lightly. He obsesses. If he does anything, he’s gonna do it harder than any reasonable person would.
A few years ago, Jason started a luxury book publishing imprint called Tune & Fairweather. Many of the books T&F publishes are original works of criticism and analysis about games in the Dark Souls series. If you’re a reasonable person, you might assume that’s an impossibly niche business. And you’d be wrong.
Tune & Fairweather is generating millions in annual sales and has a rapidly growing cult following that appreciates Killingsworth’s near-mad attention to detail and quality. The books he publishes are beyond lavish, made using ridiculously high-quality materials. And the price tag bears the proof. The latest T&F book about Elden Ring costs over $275 for the most affordable edition. T&F collectors are buying in droves. They know these books are worth it.
If that sounds absurd, read on. My interview with Jason Killingsworth is below.
But first, this week’s spiciest news links.
Scuttlebutt and Slackery
The week’s most-shared, oft-Slacked, and spiciest games industry news links.
500 World of Warcraft Team Members Unionize - This announcement from the WoW team marks the second time the CWA has helped form a large-scale games industry union not limited to QA workers. I’m curious to see the details of the agreement they wind up negotiating with Microsoft—though I suspect they’ll focus mainly on layoff protections. WoW is an aging game, so it makes sense for people working on it to seek some kind of guarantees for what happens if MS decides to downsize its investment in it. (The Verge)
SAG-AFTRA Calls Strike Against Major Game Studios - This is not the first strike of video game VAs in recent years, but it’s kind of a weird one, because it only affects 10 specific production-focused subsidiaries associated with major companies including Activision, EA, and Insomniac. The beef is about the use of AI, though details are a little hard to come by. (Deadline)
Tim Sweeney Picks Yet Another Fight With Mobile Platforms - Nobody has ever been as mad as Tim Sweeney is about 30% platform fees on iOS and Android. This week he pulled Fortnite from the Samsung Galaxy Store and announced plans to support alternative storefronts. My take on this is that he’s gonna eventually win just because he’s comically tenacious and there’s infinite regulatory appetite for beating up the platforms. (Epic Games)
No Man’s Sky Gets Its Biggest Update Yet - Many are still surprised to learn that No Man’s Sky has likely grossed over a quarter of a billion dollars on Steam alone. But it makes sense, once you understand their strategy for proving their haters wrong and endlessly shipping improvements. Still, this most recent patch is huge even by the Hello Games team’s standards. New planet types, improved lighting, water and cloud effects, better draw distances, and more content make it feel (once again) like a new game. This is how you make a perennial seller. (Morphologis on YouTube)
The Most Obsessive Person I Know
Since its founding in 2019, Tune & Fairweather has become best-known for publishing outrageously ornate books about games from Dark Souls and Elden Ring creators FromSoftware.3
These are wildly popular books. A 2022 T&F release, Soul Arts, raised more than €1.8 million on Kickstarter. A great deal of the appeal for these books is the obvious high quality of the materials, due almost entirely to T&F founder Jason Killingsworth’s obsession with making books using the fanciest stuff he can get his hands on.
He refuses to use normal paper, and instead flies to Sweden to get a particular blend of paper stock he likes. He then insists upon working with a particular Italian book-binder who uses the exact grain of leather he wants. If you ask, Killingsworth will explain to you exactly why the spot-UV varnish on his books’ slipcase interior is absolutely necessary.
The result is a collection of books that cost upwards of $200, and which his collectors are more than happy to pay for.
The idea driving the business, Killingsworth says, was “What if Tune & Fairweather charged a price where fans could serve as the financier of those expensive high-end print finishes? I believed they would do so in order to have a collectible that echoed their own love of the game. A tangible object to encapsulate the game’s spirit. A kind of Aladdin genie lamp—a treasure that seemed so divine that if you ran your hands over it, the spirit of the game’s very creator might snake out from between the pages to greet you.”
He has always been like this.
Obsessive From Birth
As a kid, Killingsworth says, “I was broody, obsessive and incapable of doing anything halfway.”
As a 12 year old, Killingsworth got hooked on guitar and effectively locked himself in his room until he could play every song from Metallica’s Black Album. When tasked with summarizing the plot of The Count of Monte Cristo as part of a summer reading assignment, he got lost in the book and wound up turning in a 40-page handwritten treatise that covered every notable event in the book.
Looking back, Killingsworth says he probably pushed away potential girlfriends with his natural penchant for “intensity that bordered on desperation.”
But more often, his obsessive nature opened doors for him. He got his first journalism job with while still in high school, after an obsession with the roots-rock band Vigilantes of Love led him to write countless essay-length deconstructions of their songs for an internet email list devoted to their music. The founders of Paste Magazine were superfans of the band, Killingsworth says, and offered him a job working for the Paste website. He later became the first full-time hire for the magazine when it launched.
What followed was a decade-long career in magazine publishing that ended abruptly when he was let go as part of wave of layoffs from his job as features editor for the glossy UK-based video game magazine, EDGE. But Killingsworth quickly bounced back, landing a creative job at Riot Games.4
Dark Souls and Darker Times
Between 2017 and 2019, though, Killingsworth went through a personal crisis that he describes in almost spiritual terms. He found himself wanting to write more—but a memoir project he pursued left him deeply unsatisfied and lost. “I didn’t feel proud of myself,” he says.
“I was writing hundreds of pages of recriminating prose putting my parents on blast,” says Killingsworth. “I was rewriting all the key events of my life to fit a narrative of lifelong undiagnosed depression and potential autism spectrum disorder. I was refashioning my entire personality around this sense of victimhood and it was making me a spiteful and disagreeable person that nobody wanted to be around. Family had already begun quietly unfollowing me on social media.” The project began to infect Killingsworth’s personal relationships, and he hit what he calls the lowest point in his life.
Gradually, Killingsworth pulled himself out of the hole. By 2019, he’d mostly abandoned the toxic memoir project and started pursuing something better—a long-percolating fantasy of starting his own book publisher.
In November of 2019, Killingsworth launched a Kickstarter campaign to publish a special hardback edition of his 2015 book, You Died: The Dark Souls Companion. It was a thrilling success, raising €126,346 and effectively launching the new publishing company, Tune & Fairweather.
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Just months later, in early 2020, Riot Games laid off many publishing employees at its Dublin headquarters, including Killingsworth. The layoff occurred on the same day the Irish government issued its first stay-at-home order in response to the outbreak of COVID-19. Killingsworth was unsettled, but saw it as an opportunity.
“Because I was effectively on ‘garden leave’ (as they call it in this part of the world where you’re in that limbo between employment and unemployment), I had lots of time to box up the You Died orders from that first successful Kickstarter campaign,” he says.
Now recovered from his low point, and with a renewed sense of purpose, Killingsworth and his family worked together at their kitchen table to launch the first Tune & Fairweather book. “My kids sorted stickers and art cards to go into boxes,” he says. “My wife folded boxes and then passed them to me to tape shut.”
This was how it began. In the four years since, Tune & Fairweather has published a novel by the Pulitzer-nominated author Charles McNair, a gorgeous urban exploration photography book, and half a dozen books celebrating FromSoftware titles like Bloodborne, Demon’s Souls, and Elden Ring.
Demand is high, and the business is growing. But for Killingsworth, the business is just an excuse to make beautiful books.
“For my personality,” says Killingsworth, “it's not enough to love works of art. I have to comprehensively understand why I love them. And the ultimate act of understanding is to build something that resembles the thing you love.”
Read the rest of the Push to Talk Q&A with Jason Killingsworth below:
PUSH TO TALK: I'd love to drill down into your relationship with Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls. Their legacy is obviously a key part of your story.
JASON KILLINGSWORTH: I’ve always found something deeply soothing about the ostensibly tedious repetition of trying to repeat something until it felt perfect. Whether it was practicing a guitar riff or signing my name hundreds of times in the margins of notebooks, seeing if I could get it looking just right. During my early 30s, shortly after moving back to Ireland where I had grown up, I discovered the game Demon’s Souls. It was frustrating and unyielding and demanded mechanical mastery as a prerequisite for progression. It required practice, repetition—yes, obsession. It didn’t seem eager to please. And I fell helmet over heels in love.
Serendipitously, after joining the editorial team of the UK games mag EDGE, FromSoftware released the follow-up to Demon’s Souls and I was able to bring my existing mastery to bear. That game, Dark Souls, would change the course of my life. I had the pleasure of interviewing the game’s creator multiple times during my EDGE tenure, chronicling his rise from gifted upstart game director to FromSoftware company president. Brings to mind the adage ‘luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.’
Dark Souls was a revelation. It was this work of art that I could never seem to exhaust. Like some kind of magical gum that never lost its flavor no matter how long or strenuously I chewed. I would write about it in the pages of EDGE any chance I got. And yet the itch of curiosity would resurface. It was an open loop that I kept trying to close so that I could move on. But there was always some new aspect of it that I felt compelled to dig into. Some new vein of gold would sparkle in my peripheral vision and there I was, swinging the pickaxe in a frenzy once more, searching for deeper layers of meaning.
I figured this was probably as good a sign as any that I should attempt a book-length project related to Dark Souls. I had two young children by this time, however, and progress was halting. Fortuitously, a journalist colleague I’d met during my time working at EDGE—Keza MacDonald—reached out and asked me to co-author a book about Dark Souls with her. So I folded the chapters I’d outlined for my own book about the game into that shared project. The accountability and encouragement of having a co-author was just what I needed. We completed the book and it was released by a small Scottish publisher in 2015.
At some point after you wrote You Died you said to me that you found it really hard to get people—even those you know well in real life—to actually read books like this. Though you’ve successfully found readers online, it made me wonder about the place books have in our culture. What do you think books mean in the 21st century? And why do books feel so intimidating for people?
Books are demanding. They require focus and attention. Reading on the page is like chewing food, whereas audiobooks and podcasts feel more like drinking liquid through a straw. You have to be willing to say no to more immediately gratifying distractions when picking up a book, trusting that the long-term payoff is going to be worth the time investment. And let’s be real, not all books deliver that payoff.
My business strategy with T&F is to make an object so beautiful that, even if a collector, never opens the book or reads a single page, they have the aesthetic reward of owning a piece of art that radiates quality and care. If a picture is worth a thousand words, maybe a beautiful cover or debossed slipcase with silver foil is worth 120,000 words.
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It seems to me that there are not enough books about video games. Can you talk to me a little bit about the relationship between books and video games as you understand it?
There is an intimacy to print. You can possess the literary artefact, you can enjoy the touch and smell of it. (I love when people tell me they like the smell of one of our books, because I do too, I am a filthy page sniffer.) No matter how satisfyingly spongy the buttons on a PS5 or GameCube controller, video games are intangible. I thought a lot about this after watching the movie Her. Joaquin Phoenix’s character craved a physical experience of the AI female he had fallen in love with. I think the same is true with the FromSoftware games I love most passionately. I want some manifestation of them that feels incarnate. Like the Christian idea of Jesus being a touchable, incarnate version of God that people could have a human experience with.
I think a drop-dead gorgeous book about Bloodborne can feel like a way of holding and touching the spirit of Bloodborne. This need becomes greater, the more things veer towards the digital. Books have the ability to be heirlooms and souvenirs of our most-loved experiences in both the real and virtual domains. As my friend Chris Dahlen once said, “Nobody whose house was on fire ever ran inside to recover a thumb drive.” But your grandfather’s watch, your favorite book, a photo of your beloved from your honeymoon sitting on your desk, we would risk our lives for these totemic objects. They have soul. They are soulful.
One thing I admire about T&F is the almost over-the-top obsession with material quality. You often talk about particular paper types and binding styles with a sort of zealous look in your eye. Does that passion predate T&F's founding or is it something you've discovered along the way?
In the same way that a blind individual draws insight from patterns of braille beneath their fingers, even a reader with this sensory faculty intact will still glean additional layers of information from a luxury embossed paper stock. Quality has texture. Experience has texture. The wrinkles etched into a face. The grain running through a piece of wood. I have a mood board that I set up in 2017 that has photos of blood soaking through gauzy bandages, wrinkly faces, tree bark, etc. I quite literally want our readers to feel something when they pick up one of our books.
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When you think about future success for T&F, what does the dream outcome look like?
My life mantra is borrowed from Naval Ravikant. I want to play longterm games with longterm people. All of the most rewarding experiences in life come from deep focus over protracted periods of time. Compound interest.
I used to think of myself as just a writer. I joined Riot as a “senior writer” and left as a “creative director.” I’m very proud of that transition, and it continues to describe what I do today: spinning up world-class creative teams and tackling book projects that involve a truckload of shared passion.
T&F is a founder-led company and I admit to being miserly of creative control. I’ve heard Apple described as “Steve Jobs with ten-thousand lives.” That’s the beauty of a founder-led company. Tune & Fairweather is Jason Killingsworth with many extra lives in the sense that it’s my favorite artists, the subjects I find most engrossing, it’s everything I love and want to preserve in an exalted form. I’m not the author of every book in our catalogue but they’re all love letters from me, in a sense.
Success is getting to create beauty with other optimistic, open-hearted people, for many years to come. To see how far that compound interest can extend. To see how many lives these books might enrich. To just play iterated games–ideally, challenging ones–until the screen goes black.
That’s it for this week. I’m gonna go try to beat Jason’s high score in Super Hexagon.
I’ll see you in 2036.
If you haven’t played Terry’s games, you should. He also made VVVVVV and Dicey Dungeons.
In 2012 I wrote a silly feature story about the battle between Jason and Terry for WIRED, which you can read here.
Tune & Fairweather’s books about FromSoftware games are all “unofficial,” which I’ve seen raise some eyebrows. But the books all abide by copyright laws the same way any other work of art criticism would—by only including original assets. The actual content and designs of the books are created in collaboration with a team of artists, journalists, and content creators that T&F assembles for each project.
Jason is also the reason I got my first job in the games industry—in 2014 he took me to see a League of Legends esports event in Los Angeles, and the experience so impressed me that I applied to work at Riot Games.
Whattt this is so cool. I didn't realise you knew each other let alone this awesome story.
Hearing Jason talk about his love of everything Dark Souls is what got me into it, and I can't thank him enough for that.
This is nuts. Reminds me of the collectors editions of Warhammer Rulebooks. My friend bought one and all of the others envied him so much. But I'm not sure if I'd be able to feel the same about it now in my late 30s...