About me

I’m Gon.

I make games, build worlds, and occasionally hide things where people aren’t supposed to find them.

I’ve spent most of my life turning ideas into experiences. Some became games, some became companies, and quite a few are still sitting in a folder waiting for their turn.

Here are a few things that happened along the way.

1985
Peru
I was born in Peru.
Childhood
Italy
I spent my early childhood in Italy and had two very reasonable career ambitions: becoming an investigator and a magician.
Neither happened. Sort of.
1992
Player One
My first console was a Super Nintendo. My first game was Donkey Kong Country.
There was no going back.
1996
Peru, again
At 11, I moved from Italy to Peru, where I spent the rest of my childhood and teenage years.
1998
Hey! Listen!
I discovered The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
It became my favorite game for more than two decades, which is an unreasonable amount of pressure to put on a Nintendo 64 cartridge.
2002
Stories, stages & spells
I fell in love with writing, acting, and singing. I won a writing contest by creating an ending for a story by Italian writer Alberto Bevilacqua, and later performed in Pinocchio in Peru in front of around 3,000 people.
Around the same time, I discovered Magic: The Gathering. Ravnica would eventually turn deck building into another long-term obsession.
Apparently I needed more hobbies.
2006
Another world
At 21, World of Warcraft introduced me to MMORPGs.
I became fascinated not only by playing them, but by the strange communities, systems, and economies living inside them.
2007
Accidental entrepreneur
Buying digital game credit in Latin America wasn't particularly easy, so I started selling prepaid cards for popular online games.
It lasted about a year.
I had accidentally started my first business.
2008
Game Master
I became a Game Master for an MMORPG company serving Latin America.
For the first time, I was on the other side of the game, dealing with players, communities, economies, and all the chaos that comes with them.
2009
NexoGame
At 24, I founded my first proper company.
NexoGame provided services for online games across Latin America. I managed Game Masters, communities, virtual economies, and eventually represented in Latin America an MMORPG developed by HanbitSoft in South Korea.
I stayed in that world for about eight years.
2013
Back to something physical
After years in online gaming, I was burning out. Toxic communities were part of it. So were the 3 a.m. calls to deal with security breaches, exploits, duplicated items, and servers that absolutely had to stay alive.
I wanted to return to something simpler and more permanent.
I liked the idea of games being a little like books: they sit quietly on a shelf, unchanged. You can discover one today, come back years later, and find the same game waiting for you, even though you might be a completely different person.
Then I discovered Small World, Coup, Sheriff of Nottingham, and a whole industry I barely knew existed.
2014–2015
Learning the ropes
I started trying to understand how board games actually got made.
One of the people who helped me most was Jamey Stegmaier. He was incredibly open and communicative with me, sharing the kind of practical knowledge about publishing and the industry that, at the time, you couldn't simply find by searching online.
He became one of my most important mentors.
2016
ThunderGryph
Eventually, learning about making games wasn't enough. I wanted to make them.
At 31, I founded ThunderGryph Games.
At first, “Founder & CEO” mostly meant doing whatever nobody else was there to do.
Publishing, production, crowdfunding, creative direction, art direction, spreadsheets... lots of spreadsheets.
2018 → 2024
The Gryph grows
ThunderGryph started growing, sometimes by 30% in a year, sometimes by more than 200%.
The team grew, the games became more ambitious, and my job slowly shifted from doing a bit of everything to spending more time on what I cared about most: the games themselves.
2024
Teaching games
I started teaching Game Design to university design students.
We go from “I have an idea for a game” all the way to actually designing it, developing it, self-publishing it, or finding a place in the board game or video game industry.
Basically, a more organized version of what took me twenty years to figure out.
2025
Room 46
I discovered Blue Prince.
For more than two decades, Ocarina of Time had been my favorite game. I genuinely thought nothing would ever replace it.
Then this strange house full of rooms, puzzles, secrets, and things hiding behind other things somehow did.
New favorite game ever. It only took 27 years.
2026
A new chapter
In July, ThunderGryph became part of Awaken Realms.
After almost ten years as its founder and CEO, I became a Game Director at Awaken Realms.
Today, I oversee ThunderGryph's releases and try to make sure that whatever we create still carries the identity we spent a decade building.
The nice part?
I get to spend more time making games again.