WRITING
From long, ponderous prose set in far away fantasy lands to compelling literary reportage to sardonic media reviews to technical writing to straight journalism, I continue to write for purpose and pleasure. Here are a few examples.
Joe Granato IV is a multidisciplinary creative. By day, he is a proud father, a professional videographer, filmmaker, and documentarian; by night, an enthusiastic programmer, musician, writer and entrepreneur. In addition to his creative work, he is a teacher and mentor. He has formally taught game development, music production, and filmmaking for eighteen years. After 10 years as Senior Videographer and instructor at Ringling College of Art and Design, he helped launch the M-Game brand as Product Manager at inMusic, helped guide the rebrand as Director for Content Development at Roger Williams University, and as Developer Relations Manager, helped launch the sandbox RPG game Project Frontier for the Epic Games veterans at Omni Creator Products. He is Founder and Director of The New 8-bit Heroes, a media production company, game publisher and developer of the NESmaker development tools, and now runs a studio called Bitmask Games, where he teaches young minds how to create video games for classic systems.
News: Keynote Speaker for the DreamWorks Tech-Con 2022
Talking nerdy tech with the team at DreamWorks Animation
Every year, the team at DreamWorks Animation hosts an expo event to coincide with National Engineers' Week that highlights the innovations that went into digital media of yesteryear. This year, I was invited to be the keynote speaker for the event. Although the complications of COVID didn't allow for their team to get the full experience of my in-person theatrics, it was fantastic to virtually share my enthusiasm and passion with a team of creatives that have been integral in shaping the last thirty years of pop culture, and are most recently responsible for some of my kids' favorite entertainment.
Featured Project: Mystic Searches (game/novel/comic)
About Mystic Searches
The initial drafts of Mystic Searches came in 1988, when I was only 8 years old, in the form of ideas for a video game that would play on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Those simple colored pencil sketches were lost to time. Rediscovering those concepts as an adult in a box of childhood keepsakes hidden in my parents' Central New York home was the impetus to bring new life to the fantasy tale that I'd abandoned in my youth.
At first, the idea to realize the ambitions of a version of myself that hadn't yet graduated elementary school was a bit of a novelty. But as I started to view the ideas through the lens of 30 years of creative maturation, it became obvious that this forgotten project was foundational in all of the creative things I've done since. So, after spending the better part of a decade crafting lore that could only be suggested within the limitations of an 8-bit game, Mystic Searches has unexpectedly become my creative focus, and has led to production of a mulitdeliverable, transmedia experience. I have directed a large team of artists and programmers virtually and in person out of our Sarasota studios to bring this sprawling adventure to life in all of its many forms. And yes, that includes (as originally intended by my 8-year-old self) a hardware playable cartridge for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
