Mickey looks downward as if their attention is occupied by something out of frame, bearded, brown-skinned, long black hair partially tied back, lips slightly open. Behind him is a window with open wooden shutters and a yellow wall with a small framed photograph, too small to make out. photo by hannahkeliza
new beings • pidzn club • linkedin

Hello : ) My name is Mickey Sanchez. I'm a jazzy queerdo just being emo and enjoying life. I spend the vast majority of my time making video games these days. I have a game company with my biz partner Brendan called New Beings. You can see the timeline of our work on our site.

My current main personal project is a very gamey game I've been working on since August 2022 called Order Automatica. It's a single player auto battler about compulsion. I plan to release it commerically when it's done, but I've been putting out regular releases you can play in the browser to get feedback. I've also been writing devlogs about the process. Check those links to see who else has helped me out.

I'm pretty proud of these two small jam games I made solo in 2023: First Contact Department and Possibility Space. You can play them both for free in a web browser, and both take less that 15 minutes to complete.

I taught Intro To Game Development at the Pacific Northwest College Of Art and Game Level Design and Game Design & Development at Portland Community College through 2021. Prior to that, I led a couple game-related workshops: Storytelling and Game Design With Twine and Planning Strategies For Game Development.

In June 2020 I released a video game that I wrote, co-programmed, and composed-for called Robot Island. It is a game about empathy, isolation, and unmet needs where you play as a robot flight attendant on a space ship. I made the game with friends under the studio name New Beings. I was interviewed about this game and pidzn club (see below) on the Talking To Ghosts podcast.

I received a RACC professional development grant in 2019 to attend Train Jam where I created a Bruce Lee dating simulator called Warm Marble. In 2020, I was accepted into the Glitch Power Levelling Program, a professional development program for creative leadership in the games industry (this was cancelled due to covid, but at least they accepted me amirite?). I was invited to do a talk for the Portland Indie Game Squad about my games in August 2020, and I created a video piece called Talking About Personal Stuffs: A Video Zine Talk By Mickey for the occasion.

I was commisioned in the winter of 2020 to create a piece called Hemoglobin Count 2077 for the East Portland Arts and Literary Festival online zine, Caring For Our Shared Futures.

In 2018, me and my collaborators, Lu Yim, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Yun Chiu, received a grant from the Precipice Fund (Portland Institute For Contemporary Art) to create pidzn club, an online publication and curatorial project featuring artists creating within the virtual and physical Asian Diaspora. We produced a group art show in August 2019. We also received a RACC Project Grant to continue our work in 2020. We used this to produce another group show in 2021, and to add more projects to our online publication.

In 2010, I got my M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU, where I mainly studied the history of performance art and did a few o.k. performances of my own. I currently live on the traditional lands of Cowlitz, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Clackamas and many other tribes, which is presently known as Portland, OR, with my partner Hannah Krafcik.