Remembering Kory Heath

Wednesday, November 20, 2024   (updated 3 hours later)

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Tagged: kory heath, zendo, werewolf, blockhouse, iphone

We learned yesterday that we lost game designer Kory Heath.

Sad news—my dear friend and collaborator, Kory Heath, after enduring years of chronic pain and depression, ended his life. He was a genius, also funny, kind, patient. I'm so grateful we could spend so many years, laughs, and tears together, and that he knew he was deeply loved by all of his friends. --@cooperjohn.bsky.social, Nov 19

A table with groups of colored plastic pyramids. Each group is marked with a black stone or a white stone. Photo by Andrew Petrarca, BGG

Kory's best-known game was Zendo, a deduction challenge game and an absolute masterpiece of elegant design.

In the above image, what rule distinguishes white-marked groupings from black-marked groupings?

In this example, each group is two or three pyramids, not necessarily touching. Only the pyramids matter for the rule. The stones just mark whether the rule fits the group or not. Answer in BGG link.

A screenshot of a green grid with a purple block. A screenshot of a Werewolf game, with nine tiny avatars on the setup screen. Blockhouse and Werewolf.

But Kory was wildly active. He did an early iPhone sliding-block puzzler called Blockhouse, and an iPhone implementation of Werewolf. Look at all our baby faces playing Werewolf... That was a non-networked implementation! You passed the phone around. (Online mobile games were hard in 2009.)

Both games are long gone from the app store, of course. (Keeping an iPhone game running for fifteen years is even harder.)

His final work was The Gang, in collaboration with John Cooper. I know nothing about it; I didn't even know it was out. That's on me. I lost touch.

I wrote last night that I knew Kory when I lived near him and John and Andy Looney in the late 1990s. This memory turns out to somewhat confused. Kory moved to the DC area around 1999 or 2000; by that time I had moved (back) to Pittsburgh. But I visited DC regularly in those years, and we all went to the same gaming conventions. So I saw "the gang" regularly. Kory was always in the middle of it.

Kory was great. I don't want to go on because other folks have said it better. But genuinely a genius, creative, a nice guy. Just entirely nice.

I ran into Kory at GDC, it might have been 2016 or 2017. He was working on some kind of mobile game idea. At the time, I might have been too. We were both excited about each others' work.

I don't know what happened to that. I wish he'd had more success and better health and less pain. He could have had a lot of stuff left in him.

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