Meet Dave Kornfeld!
First off, I have to apologize to everyone who came to see me at the official HakJak Studios ‘Meet Dave Kornfeld’ Meet & Greet last week. There was a scheduling mix-up, dates got swapped, etc., and on the day people showed up I was at the tanning salon next door getting the soles of my feet ready for beach season. To make things right, Jed is offering each person $50 in JakBuks and a live pigeon (pigeon aliveness not guaranteed).
In lieu of a physical meetup, I’ve prepared a digital introduction which I think is better anyway. It would have taken forever to relate this to each person one by one.
I was born in New York City and grew up in a suburb about 40 miles north. NES junkie by age six, SEGA Genesis and Game Gear soon after. Throughout middle and high school I put bazillions of hours into N64 and PC games, at one point installing a rear-view mirror on my CRT monitor to react faster when my dad would manifest in my doorway livid that I was studying Half-Life physics instead of physics physics.
Then some time in my Junior year I quit. One of those moments when you realize something’s not right and the only way out is to change everything. Games had become all-consuming. So I started running. I taught myself guitar. Wrote saccharine power-pop anthems about being seventeen. In the months before graduation I interned at an indie metal label and started a satirical newspaper lampooning my school’s draconian parking rules.
At college I walked onto and quickly off of the crew team. I asked a girl out on a date whom ten years later I asked to marry (she said yes both times). The campus humor magazine became my main creative outlet. When I declared my major as Communication, an idea began to form that maybe I could write jokes for a living. Lending credence to this outlandish hypothesis were summer internships at Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Just as the ink dried on my diploma, I landed at The Onion where I held a few production management roles before becoming a staff writer. tl;dr, much headlines, much stories, three books. I left after a total of 11 years to join an experimental comedy startup, and when that fizzled out I plunged into freelance work. One month: executive speechwriting. The next: haunted house narrative design. After that: copywriting for a witty direct-to-consumer laxative brand. And so on.
It was fun, but honestly I was adrift. My career North Star had split into a cloud of asteroids each hurtling in a different direction. One day I had a random thought: “Do people actually…write…video games?” From prior experience, I could feel one of those change-everything moments coming on, the kind that led me away from games in the first place. Some furious Googling later and I had tickets to GDC. That led to coursework with The Narrative Department. A friend of a friend hooked me up with a tiny game writing gig, which led to another, which led to speaking at GDC the following year.
Since then I’ve had the privilege of writing for games such as Marvel SNAP, The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria, and Space Control, as well as a few of my own that I’ve released with wildly varying degrees of polish. I couldn’t be more amped to join the talented team at HakJak bringing the world of Pigeon Simulator to life. May our plumage always be mottled and our bowels forever loose.
Dave at a glance
Pen geek
Vegetarian
Wears cyborg-like knee brace to run
Has infant daughter who at the time of this writing (May 2023) can say “bubble.”
Retirement plan: design and build furniture in a kitted out barn stocked with locally sourced hardwood
