The John Sock Kowalski
Meet Sock, my partner in crime, my fiancee, fellow artist and my ultimate safe space.
To be totally truthful not everything on my website is made by my hand. John is also an artist and has contributed many artworks to Nina Haigh Creative and I hope he will continue to do so. Perhaps I can coax him to create even more!
Sock has a peculiar gift being both an artist but also having the analytical brain of an engineer. This allows him a range of creativity that is unique.
What feels like a lifetime ago he used to be a video game programmer for Backbone Entertainment and later Digital Eclipse. His specialty was sound and working on retro game compilations, but later moved onto work different things and eventually whole projects on his own.
Here are some titles he has worked on.
Eventually Digital Eclipse downsized and Sock was left to explore new things. His journey with porting Donkey Kong to a vintage “hobby” computer called a CoCo3 would be a creative and programming outlet that would change his life later on.
Sock eventually started working for a company that created hardware that controlled machinery for injection mold wind turbine blades. Starting repairing damaged motherboards and eventually designing them. This would also be knowledge gained that would also shape his future.
After working for this company for some time John needed a creative outlet. He took his Donkey Kong Port to the Coco3 over a decade prior and started playing with his source code and changing things. This led him to create Donkey Kong Remixed for the Tandy Coco3. His reimagined version of Donkey Kong had new levels and gameplay. This version was released to to coco community to enjoy, but Sock still wasn’t satisfied.
John pulled on all his acquired knowledge from his different career paths and added in a lot of his creative genius and managed to accomplish a few things that were not really feasible. He designed some hardware, a small daughter board, that you could plug into an original Donkey Kong Arcade cabinet board to play all his new levels. Donkey Kong Remix took the competitive Donkey Kong playing and the classic arcade collectors communities by storm. They couldn't get enough of it!
From this new game Sock gave life to many new ideas from trainer hardware, to a Christmas and Halloween inspired version of DK Remix to DK Junior Remix and trainer. Sock even worked with a small team to help create MR Video, a DK specific video capture hardware and later on his own designed Mr Video Jamma.
Sock is very much a person who can not stay idle. A person who has many passions and his love for art overlaps and compliments mine.
Sock is inspired by the great impressionist painters. He also has a love for abstract and pop art and like myself has a deep love for blacklight art.
I have watched him create his unique style of painting with neon colors in a way that the artwork does not look neon. These paintings are special because they have three different looks, one in daylight, one under black lights and sometimes also in darkness. Sock loves using glow in the dark paint and powders to truly give his work a unique and unexpected easter egg surprise feel.
My beloved Sock truly is a fascinating person whom I treasure beyond words and I hope that eventually you will too.
With love,
Willow
