By any conventional definition, Jon Burton has lived at least three careers: first, a multi-hyphenate founder-programmer-director at Traveller's Tales, best known as the scrappy studio behind a wide variety of licensed movie-games; second, a producer and director of films, primarily in the inescapable Lego mondo-franchise; and, now, a burgeoning YouTuber with nearly a hundred-thousand subscribers to his channel, Gamehut. And while it might seem like a wild leap to some, to hear Burton tell it, it's a natural outgrowth of his existing hobbies, which now includes remastering his old games.
"I was one of the first wave of people making video games, and I'm getting older, and I want to fiddle with stuff," he says. "At first, I just wanted to document all my old games, since all this physical media is going to be lost to time. I wanted to look back on the programming choices I made, and maybe exhibit some prototypes. I didn't do any promotion of the channel or anything. It was for my own entertainment, which is one of the best reasons to do things, if you ask me."
During the early days of Traveller's Tales - or "TT," as he refers to it - Burton was the studio's sole programmer, a role that he relished far more than his mundane managerial duties. After some early titles, TT worked with Sony on a string of licensed Disney games in the mid-to-late '90s, starting with Toy Story, one of the first to launch alongside its parent film - usually, the game would come six to nine months later. When the side-scrolling platformer racked up millions of sales - despite its now-infamous difficulty curve - TT discovered that timing was indeed everything. "We had found our business model, and people started to emulate it," recalls Burton. "For the next 10 years, we were on seven-month deadlines."