Tom van den Boogaart
The Dutch developer behind Bernband builds games the way he once built Lego: one funny, physics-bent piece snapped onto the next.
A single Lego brick. That’s what Tom van den Boogaart started creating with as a boy growing up in Gouda, a small city in the Netherlands. His parents’ divorce taught him about separation when he was young. With Legos he could make connections. One brick could be slotted on to the studs of the other—from there, an abundance of possible 3D shapes for him to mold.
“It’s pure chaos,” Boogaart said about his creative process. When he invents characters, Boogaart starts with a sphere; a head or a body. Then he gives it eyes, maybe a funny mouth, before he sees something: a duck, a gray alien, perhaps a housefly with bulging eyes. “I often play around with shapes till I’m like ‘lol this is ok’,” Boogaart said. He uses the same automatist techniques as the Surrealists.
