About

Greetings, one and all. My name’s Kirk; I’m a musician and writer based in San Francisco. I compose, teach, perform and love music a whole ton, and I write about and play a whole bunch of videogames, too.

Here’s my full bio, which I try to keep updated:

Kirk Hamilton is a writer and musician in San Francisco. He is the SF Features Editor for Gawker Media’s gaming blog Kotaku and has written about music, games and culture for a variety of publications including Edge, Joystiq, Kill Screen Magazine, Acoustic Guitar, and Paste Magazine, where he served as Games Editor. He is a saxophonist, composer, songwriter, and jazz educator and performs regularly in support of his first solo album, “The Exited Door.” He can be found online at kirkhamilton.com and on Twitter @kirkhamilton. Email him at Kirk [at] KirkHamilton [dot] com.

So, that’s the short version. Here’s the longer story:

Music

First and foremost I’m a saxophonist and woodwind player, though I play a lot of other instruments as well. I also do a lot of arranging and orchestrating, and love to work with other people on their music. I guess that makes me a “producer” or something. I grew up in Bloomington, Indiana, where in high school I was lucky enough to take jazz classes on campus at Indiana University. The highlight of that time was definitely studying jazz improvisation with the legendary David Baker.

After high school I attended the wonderful/intense Frost School of Music at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, where I got my degree in Studio Music and Jazz performance.  I now gig around the SF Bay Area and have been lucky enough to play some pretty spectacular shows over the years both with my own groups and alongside a lot of music legends. Once I got to play “Where the Boys Are” with Connie Francis at the Castro Theatre, which I believe is the actual Ultimate San Francisco Gig of All Time.

I spent 2008 writing, recording, and producing my first solo CD, titled “The Exited Door,“which I released in 2009. It’s a party, and features over 20 of my very favorite friends and musicians. I am currently performing shows in support of that music, as well as working on a second album and a number of groovy new projects including the theatrical radio variety show “915 Cayuga,” for which I am the musical director.

Writing

I’ve been a writer all my life, from the ridiculous action-adventure novels I’d write when I was twelve to the newsletter I wrote in High School detailing the rad adventures of me and my band-geek friends. I love videogames as well – I grew up as a diehard PC gamer and finally came to consoles around the PS2 generation. As a result, I fell into game writing pretty naturally – I’d discovered the “Brainy Blogosphere” in about 2007 and instantly fell in love: here were people who wrote and thought about games the same way I did!

I read, lurked, commented, and emailed with a lot of my favorite writers (each of whom is featured over on the sidebar), and finally in late 2009 I started up the gaming blog Gamer Melodico with three friends. I ran the site and worked my ass off for a year, putting up a ton of posts and figuring out how, exactly, I wanted to write about games. During that time I made friends with a whole lot of fantastic people while starting to freelance for Paste Magazine and Joystiq. I also got some stuff published at Kotaku, and generally became more and more present on the scene.

After that, I took over for Jason Killingsworth as Games Editor at Paste and ran the gaming site there for a while, and had a freakin blast doing it. A short time later I was given the chance to join the team at Kotaku as a full-time features editor, and that’s where I am now.

I’ve had more fun than I know what to do with over the past few years, and feel like I somehow stumbled upon the actual most fun thing to write about in the whole world. I love the conversation so much—I’m a tireless advocate of the artistic merits of games, and I will seriously talk to you about them until the sun comes up. My contact info is all over this blog and I’m a really easy guy to get ahold of.

(I will, however, offer the caveat that I’m 100% exhausted with the snark and negativity that creeps its way into games writing and the communities surrounding games, so if you’re bringing that, I don’t have space for you.)

Some of my favorite games include Grim Fandango, Far Cry 2, Portal, No One Lives Forever, Half-Life 2, Rock Band, Final Fantasy Tactics A2, Morrowind, Warcraft 2, The Secret of Monkey Island, and doubtless a whole bunch that I’m forgetting.

So yeah, that’s pretty much it! Feel free to drop me a line or follow me on Twitter or on Facebook, because Twitter and Facebook are awesome.