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jake rodkin

@rodkin.online
4.8K followers 614 following 1K posts

Designer at Valve. Helped make Half-Life Alyx, Firewatch, The Walking Dead, Sam & Max, Tales of Monkey Island, Idle Thumbs 🐘 idlethumbs.social/@ja2ke 🕸️ rodkin.online Avatar by @michaelfirman.bsky.social

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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 28/09/2026
The entire “Reception” section on its Wikipedia page is this one excerpt blast.
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 28/09/2026
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 17/09/2026
Whoa what was your username back then? And Skyfox in 1997 was probably more trustworthy than any of our dried out brains.
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 25/08/2026
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 01/08/2026
The prophecy is fulfilled.
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 31/07/2026
This design was deemed too similar by the time the special editions and Tales of Monkey Island came around. The original Grog machine in chapter 5 of Tales was an upres of this exact design but was not approved. Had to make the stripe increasingly wacky until it was okay.
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 10/07/2026
Saw Raiders live performed by Seattle Symphony a couple weeks ago and it was awesome. The well of souls scene in particular was incredible. Would love to see JP performed live.
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 20/06/2026
Frodo: “SaaAaamm!”
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 10/06/2026
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 28/05/2026
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 03/05/2026
Defragger screen I made pretty quickly for Half-Life Alyx. I’m dubious of the contents of this dropdown menu but I guess nonsense is what one puts in a game texture.
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 03/05/2026
Haha thanks for listening! I ordered another one that was also broken … they’re both in my garage waiting for me to have a few days free with a lot of Pizza Hut-themed enthusiasm. Hasn’t happened yet but maybe some day!
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 27/04/2026
It’s good. Took this gross photo of my steam deck revealing my activities.
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 20/04/2026
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 20/04/2026
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 19/04/2026
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 17/04/2026
Sorry by “this” I mean his Disneyland outfit. Across ROTJ including the picture you posted, he’s got a more streamlined thing going. Still evoking Vader, for hopefully obvious thematic reasons, but less obviously than this parks/mando costume.
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 06/04/2026
Yeah, they go way back. People just didn’t get to see them until game engines were released as paid tools. And the id software heritage engines – aka the biggest engines we DID get to see – didn’t really have a complex art pipeline, just level editors.
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 23/03/2026
They burst out of a grave at this church in the mid-00s webcomic!
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 15/03/2026
🤷 I should have expected this.
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 22/02/2026
The mascot of Movies
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 14/02/2026
Checked in on him just the other day, he’s looking good
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 10/02/2026
all video games should start with the warning you used to get when buying any 3D model off turbosquid
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 09/02/2026
It’s really in this zone which is a good zone to be in imo
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 09/02/2026
Ten years ago today we shipped Firewatch. I say this every anniversary but it feels both like a lifetime ago and like it was yesterday. Thank you everyone who played it back then or played it today for the first time. Thank you to everyone on the team, I’m still so proud of what we made.
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 29/12/2025
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 27/12/2025
I can sit on it while using my tactical Q-tips (men’s ultimate multi-tool!)
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 01/12/2025
This might be a 240 vs 120 voltage thing. I don’t know that you’d want to leave a 240 volt string of lights out in the rain, but we don’t seem to mind doing it here. Though higher end cafe-style string lights here look more like your image, this is a normal US Christmas lights string setup:
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 26/11/2025
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 22/11/2025
Back in 2015 when the 360 was only ten years old, I started rebuilding blades in Unity for a timer-based trivia game, as part of an Idle Thumbs game jam. You’d dig through a giant blades interface for the answer. Like all jam games I’ve ever attempted, I didn’t finish, but had a couple fun evenings.
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 17/11/2025
That’s how we covered it on our podcast back when it came out www.idlethumbs.net/idlethumbs/e...
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 15/11/2025
To say I am consumed by the cast of Dispatch would be a true statement, and canon.
Character in an orange cat suit pouting a bottle of Jake Rodkin’s New Very Good Whiskey into a mug of office coffee.
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 14/11/2025
Nothing has felt better this decade than completing the BOTW tutorial and having this quest pop
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 31/10/2025
You must believe in the power of the mustache. A listener to my old podcast made this cross stitch and it’s been on my desk ever since.
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 23/09/2025
Glad to hear this isn’t true
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 23/08/2025
Up way too late encountering the end of Monkey Island 2 when I was around 11 years old.
Pixel art screenshot of a game in which a pirate is torturing another pirate using a voodoo doll. The pirate doing the torturing is glowing while the pirate being tortured is cowering in pain. They are in an underground industrial tunnel that looks like it’s from the early mid 20th century or slightly older, but not from “pirate times.”
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 11/08/2025
It’s always a surprise to see an old debug screen years and years later. This is not a fancy one but is what we saw when booting Tales of Monkey Island every day for the ~year it was in development.
The internal debug menu for Tales of Monkey Island. A grid of green buttons on a black background, listing the locations in the game. Prologue, Beach, Dock, De Singe’s Lab, Jungle, Voodoo Lady, Treasure Hunt, Finale, Menu, Credits.
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 26/07/2025
View from my old apartment
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 28/06/2025
Hoping it was
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 21/06/2025
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 27/05/2025
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 22/05/2025
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 18/05/2025
SFMOMA had an exhibit on Sea Ranch a few years ago and I really wanted to quietly add a photo of the Pacifica Taco Bell
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 18/04/2025
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 06/04/2025
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 16/03/2025
Here’s most of my surviving collection. Goes a couple layers deep back there.
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 12/03/2025
I think this list is accurate, though I’d trade the top two around based on mood. And shoutout to Last Rites for its incredible airplane fuselage interior.
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 09/03/2025
You love to see it. (I love to see it.)
A steam deck with custom Star Wars user interface being used to control animatronic droids.
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 26/02/2025
It was a different time
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jake rodkin @rodkin.online · 12/02/2025
I have “real” versions of a bunch of the books from Firewatch, that were put together by @gregmaletic.bsky.social for a heavily themed press event we did before the game came out. (The contents are just random books but the covers are real!)
Four hardcover books, three are on a shelf and one is being held in the foreground. The foreground book is “Steven’s Room” by Howard Crothers. The background books are The Patriots by Donald Anderson, Glory by Michelle MacManus, and The Birds of Wyoming. All four books are prop replicas of books from the video game “Firewatch.”
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