I lost a friend this week.
It’s weird how hard it hit me. We were colleagues really,
and distant ones at that, but in this solitary line of work you form unlikely bonds
with people you might not ordinarily have met. And so it was with Gustavo
Cuadrado.
I first met Gus maybe four years ago in Madrid, but we’d
been working together on and off before that. He was the designer of the Batman
Miniature Game, before I ever even came on board with Knight Models, and he was
my principle contact with the company. We always found it funny that his spoken
English wasn’t great, and my Spanish was terrible, and we both found it easier
to email each other than talk face-to-face. That’s language barriers for you.
But when I flew out to meet the Knight Models team for the first time, we hit
it off. It didn’t matter that sometimes we talked at cross purposes, or I said
something stupid while trying to order food at a restaurant, or he completely misunderstood me when I tried to explain an idea for Line of Sight rules. When the fluent
English speakers had gone home, it was Gus who came out for drinks with me at a
local bar or at the hotel so that I didn’t feel lonely in a strange land.
Sounds daft maybe, but it mattered to me.
The other weird thing was that he was a fan of mine. This
is a client who’d already risen from freelance designer himself to a senior
role at Knight Models. He helped run things in the studio, and between us Jose
(the owner of Knight), Gus and me would thrash out all sorts of ideas for new
releases and crazy games. I think some of those games might never see the light
of day, because they were very much Gus’ babies, and that’s such a crying shame
because man, they were out-of-this-world ideas, full of ambition and love for
the hobby. But this is a guy who’s about the same age as me, and he was already
doing great work in the industry. He stopped being a fan and became a peer.
We’d bounce ideas off each other, correct each other’s mistakes. He knew his
stuff.
Gus had real integrity, and humility. He wasn’t in this
for any kind of fame or glory. He was in it for the love. He didn’t care if his
name was in a book or not. When we worked on Harry Potter in the early days, I
flew over to help with a bunch of promo videos. He was behind the camera
feeding me lines while I sat there in a wizard’s robe doing interviews and
playing games (getting all the rules wrong). He designed the game, but he
wanted me to be ‘the face’ of it, maybe because he didn’t think his English was
up to it, but really because he didn’t care for the spotlight – he literally
only cared that people played his games and had a good time doing so.
Just over a year ago, I went back to Spain to talk about
future freelance projects. In a quiet moment, Gus took me aside and told me the
news, that he’d been diagnosed with cancer and was about to start his treatment
the very next day. He was practical and pragmatic in his outlook, as he always
was about everything. He was due to get married and go on honeymoon just one
month later. Talk about timing. The wedding went ahead as planned. Gus’s wife
is a treasure – that’s love, right? I can’t imagine what she must be going
through if someone like me, a British guy who only met Gus four times, is
literally crying at the loss.
One year. That’s all it took to go from diagnosis, to
chemotherapy, to realising the treatment wasn’t working.
He got in touch with me a fortnight ago to tell me he was
dying. He’d come off the treatment so he could stop feeling sick, and maybe
just have some peace in his final weeks. And all he wanted to do was talk about
games. He was fascinated by my latest rules. He was reading new rulebooks on
his sickbed instead of novels or magazines. He was absolutely dedicated to the
hobby industry right to the end.
Less than two weeks later, I get a message from Knight
Models with the worst possible news, asking if I could write an obituary for
social media. It’s not because I knew him the best, or loved him the most, but
because I’m their words guy now that Gus is gone. That hit hard. I shed a few
tears and then had to write some words on behalf of all these guys who were his
friends, who’d known him for years, and worked with him every day.
My thoughts are with those guys right now, because they
have to carry on, and do so with the legacy that Gus left behind. When you play
BMG or DCUMG in particular, you can really see Gustavo’s own design style and
ethos, because he threw himself into his work with real passion. Now the torch
is passed on, and it’s our job to continue what Gus started. I find it weird to
talk about that – distilling this tragedy into ‘the job’. But at the same time
he was completely devoted to this crazy industry, and the best way we have to
keep his memory alive is to keep his games alive.
Right now it feels raw, and I don’t even know where to
start. So I think I’m just going to step away, and think about Gustavo, the
man, not the games designer. About what a great dude he was, and how he was
taken way too soon.
Adios
amigo mio, te envío un fuerte abrazo y mis pensamientos estan con tus seres
queridos.
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| Gustavo on the far left; our first meeting. Rest in peace, buddy. |
