Making of the Map Maker
Updated: Sep 1
Since leaving the corporate world in late 2025, I’ve had a lot of reflection time to look back at my affinity for maps. I believe it started way back in my early teens when I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons, specifically the 1st edition Player's Handbook. This one book introduced the core framework, game mechanics, and fantasy elements that would shape the Role-Playing Game (RPG) genre.
I remember countless hours over the mid-1980s rolling dice, creating characters, and fighting monsters in vast dungeon labyrinths, castles, and battlefields. I think this was the exact timeframe when I started to do whole-brain thinking. I had to visualize, in my head, fantastical encounters with monsters and my guild by incorporating spell distance, weather conditions, topography, etc., toward beating these enemies. I still play D&D today, although not as much as I would like to, unfortunately.
Now, as kids, we remember key times in our lives that we would never forget. I had one such encounter that would shape my entire world: seeing a Commodore 64 in a Caldor department store in the early 1980s. I will never forget that blue screen with the blinking cursor and the “Ready” command prompt. It was at that moment that I became fascinated with all things computer and the technology behind it. I will save my Commodore love affair for another blog post, but I specifically remember two games that fascinated me with regards to maps.
The 1st is called Ultima, specifically Ultima 3: Exodus. This C-64 game took the fundamentals of D&D and applied them to a vast map-driven RPG. I remember how walking on the map would be dangerous because it would only show you a little part of it at a time, and monsters could be roaming near you, ready to attack. It was a constant adventure where interacting on the map was the key element of the game. It is this concept that still drives my passion for maps today. Putting information on a map helps to regulate or visualize risk and reward. The real estate site Zillow does this well when they tell you how the local schools are when you look at a home. You are doing a risk/reward analysis of how far you want to live to and from that school.
The 2nd C64 game was called Curse of the Azure Bonds. This was a licensed Advanced Dungeons & Dragons video game that really began to push the graphical potential of maps in games. Like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings novels, the maps seem to weave their way into the fabric of the story itself. In fact, the maps were somehow pulling me into the game or novel. Looking back now, when I create a new story or journey map, it still has the same effect of pulling me into a world waiting to be discovered.
Fast forward to around the year 2000, when the PC market was booming. Microsoft and their Office Business application suite were leading the way. Connecting computers for business purposes was becoming more straightforward, and email systems were becoming the norm. While working at a company called Provenir, they utilized a visual decision engine-like workflow product to access the top 3 credit bureaus and conduct risk analysis for major banks. One day, I came across an extension product for MS-Office called MapPoint. MapPoint was a CD-ROM based add-on that enabled users to visually overlay business analytics onto actual Zip-code geolocations within the United States.
Game Over!
This was another one of those career defining moments.
I would leave Provenir and go on to help found a start-up called Cubistix in 2001. Cubistix would, in futility, try to convince the world that mobile devices soon would have key applications that revolve around maps and how the data is layered onto them. Again, I’ll save that amazing story for a future post.
Fast forward to around 2010, I had been collaborating with Merck for several years as an enterprise visualist and solution architect, and I continued to pursue my passion for maps and visual storytelling through cartography. As the technology seemed to quicken, there was an ever-growing need to clearly articulate the value and story of these investments globally. New IT support models, enterprise capabilities, utility modernization, and merger integration were just a handful of foundational activities that would lead up to a transformational platform model from 2005-2019.
Please see my Mapping the World of Merck post for how this story continues....
Update: I used Gemini Notebook to help create this amazing infographic solely from this blog as a source and my prompting.
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