Jon Machin remains relatively enigmatic to me.
All I know is that he's a graphic designer who, from what I can gather, appears to have worked at SCEE/Studio Liverpool in some capacity, and potentially with Codemasters as well? Not entirely sure. I haven't yet found a reliable way to get a hold of him to either pick his brain or simply thank him for his work and the point of impact it created that changed the trajectory of my life.
Everyone talks about (and rightly so!) The Designers Republic's work on the original PS1 WipEout trilogy. And all of that is incredible, obviously. To the point that I think I'm kinda sick of talking about it. Unfortunately, Ian Anderson turned out to be the worst kind of NFT idiot, unsurprisingly. Oh well. What else is new.
In like, I want to say early 2006, my family was about to go on a big long multi-state road trip. I'd been saving my lawnmowing money for a while, and our first stop upon leaving the house was at a local Electronics Boutique, so I could buy a PSP, a car charger, and a game or two. I missed out on the GBA entirely, so I was going from a grape GameBoy Color to what was essentially a portable PS1. It was staggering. I bought Need For Speed Most Wanted 5-1-0, out of my love for the Xbox and 360 versions of NSFMW. Unfortunately 5-1-0 is a huge mess, but I still have a strange fondness for it.
The other game I bought was WipEout Pure.
I had never seen anything like that before.
Just the menus, UI, packaging artwork, in-game branding and worldbuilding via adobe illustrator files, it felt like a hard reset.
A few years ago I stumbled across the Behance portfolio of Jon Machin, and I finally had a name I could point to for the seed that was planted in my brain all those years ago. I've now been doing design work professionally for eleven years, and the exact moment I realized that 1. that was a trade that existed, and 2. that you could do that for video games, was the first time I booted up WipEout Pure on my shiny new pre-owned PSP.
One day I'll find a way to talk about how Rez changed my life, etc. etc., but for now, just . . . Just look at this.