Nicholas Fortugno

Born in the Bronx, New York, Fortugno was raised primarily in Yonkers, New York, where he attended Gorton High School. Fortugno earned Bachelor of Arts in English and Philosophy from the State University of New York at Purchase in 1997. Between 2000 and 2002, he attended the City University of New York as a doctoral student in English Literature, and then Hunter College as a Master's student, with a concentration on post-war American novels.[6]

In 2003, Fortugno teamed with Katie Salen and Frank Lantz to design the Big Urban Game (BUG) for the University of Minnesota's Design Celebration.[26] The BUG consisted of a race between three teams, each of which attempted to move a 25-foot high inflatable game piece past a series of checkpoints set through the Twin Cities.

Fortugno, Salen, and Lantz later collaborated again to make Slow Games, a two-page spread of games for Metropolis Magazine's 25th Anniversary issue in April 2006.[27][28]

Later that year, Fortugno was one of five founders (including Greg Trefry, Catherine Herdlick, Mattia Romeo, and Seung-Taek "Peter" Lee) of Come Out & Play (CO&P), the world's first street game festival. The first CO&P ran in New York City from September 22 to 24.[29] With Trefry and Romeo, Fortugno designed the street game Insider;[30] Fortugno also ran his original existential horror LARP entitled Ghost Engines in the Sky.[31] The following year, Amsterdam hosted the CO&P as part of the PICNIC Festival in 2007. CO&P returned to NYC June 6 to 8, 2008.[32]

In Come Out & Play 2010 in NYC, Nick Fortugno partnered with Samuel Strick to create Humanoid Asteroids.[33] Humanoid Asteroids has run in New York City, the following CO&P in San Francisco, and at IndieCade in Los Angeles. Humanoid Asteroids has also been covered by the game news blog Kotaku.[34]

As part of Gamelab, Fortugno has designed several non-digital games for the Game Developers Conference, including: Alphabet City, Confquest, Leviathan, Pantheon, and Supercollider. He was also involved in the design process of the Mighty Beanz collectible card game and the X-Pod Face-Off board game.

While attending SUNY Purchase in the mid-1990s, Fortugno began his Seasons of Darkness LARP, which ran for several years and was reported on in Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman and Daniel Mackay's The Fantasy Role-Playing Game.[35]

In addition to Seasons of Darkness and CO&P's Ghost Engines in the Sky, Fortugno has created a multitude of additional LARPs, including A Measure for Marriage, a live-action role-playing game modeled after a Shakespearean comedy designed to facilitate a friend's marriage proposal.[36][37] Fortugno also created No Meaner Name Than Diplomacy, an upstairs/downstairs LARP performed at Gen Con.

Fortugno has written a number of articles on game design and interactive narrative, including educational games,[38] live-action roleplaying games,[36] game usability,[39] and interactive narrative in console games such as Shadow of the Colossus.[40] Fortugno also hosts and writes for the games blog Critical Smack!, in which Fortugno plays and live-blogs his critical reactions to the games he plays in approximately hour-long sessions.[5]

• Playmatics, LLC
• Critical Smack!
• Rebel Monkey, Inc.
• CampFu
• Rebel Monkey raises $1M Investment
• More details on Rebel Monkey project as it hires CTO
• IMGDC: Nick Fortugno On The Rise Of The Casual MMO
• New York Times article featuring Fortugno—Video Games Are Their Major, So Don't Call Them Slackers
• A 2006 Gamasutra podcast featuring Fortugno—GDC Radio Presents - Gamasutra Podcast on Gamer Demographics, Part 2
• Learning to Play to Learn, by Fortugno and Eric Zimmerman
• Fortugno's reflections on A Measure for Marriage
• Game Usability: Advancing the User Experience, a collection of essay on game usability containing "The Strange Case of the Casual Gamer", an essay by Fortugno about designing casual games.
• Well-Played 1.0, an academic work on games containing "Losing Your Grip: Futility and Dramatic Necessity in Shadow of the Colossus", Fortugno's essay on interactive narrative in that game.