Remembering Leif Johnson, the gaming industry's one and only cowboy poet

Jeremiah Leif Johnson, a writer and editor for a number of gaming and tech websites including IGN, Vice Motherboard, Macworld, and PC Gamer, died suddenly of a cardiovascular event last Saturday, May 17. He would have been 46 in June.

Leif started writing about games professionally in his 30s, at which point he had already lived at least two different, fascinating lives. In his youth in Texas he worked on a ranch and was not just a cowboy, but a cowboy poet. Leif attended the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering and traveled across the United States performing poetry readings and songs on guitar and mandolin.

Later he studied English and history at the University of Texas at Austin and completed a Master's degree in the history and philosophy of science and technology at the University of Chicago. In Chicago, where he lived for many years, Leif worked at an art gallery, handling promotions and gallery arrangements for works from contemporary artists like Shepard Fairey as well as vintage film lithographs.

I didn't know Leif during this era of his life, which you can read more about in his obituary. But he later shared anecdotes from his time in the art world that made me think his greatest strength in that role was somehow not his seemingly boundless knowledge of art and history, but his friendliness and warmth—his giddiness when given any chance to connect with someone and burrow deeply into any topic they shared a passion for.

Leif was my good friend. After he moved back to Goliad, Texas in 2014 to care for his family's ranch, he began writing for PC Gamer and a number of other publications as a freelancer. To help the words flow, he'd often write longhand with a fountain pen before typing up his work. Back then Leif and I only occasionally corresponded over email, but he was a regular on PC Gamer, reviewing RPGs and strategy games and covering Blizzard's World of Warcraft and other MMOs, which he played avidly. He wrote a version of PC Gamer's list of the best RPGs of all time that we've been working from ever since.

As Leif's editor, I particularly remember working with him on the feature "How Unreal Tournament mods created a wave of successful indie studios," which captured an important moment in PC gaming history. It was a story I wanted to see told well, so I turned to Leif. I'm pretty sure he missed his deadline, but the end result was worth it. Coincidentally I was just resharing it with the PC Gamer team and praising his work last Friday, the day before he died. I wish I'd texted him about it, too.

Leif and I became friends in 2018, a year after he wrote that story. He moved to San Francisco where I live to take a job at Macworld, where he mostly covered Apple's tech—though he couldn't stop writing about games whenever he could squeeze them in. Leif started a video series at Macworld that he dubbed Apple Arcade more than a year before Apple nicked the name for itself.

Leif loved San Francisco. During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when we all isolated in small social "bubbles," he was part of mine. We would go on hikes in the nearby hills and around parts of the city we'd never visited. By then he'd already gorged on the history of San Francisco and could point out landmarks and their backstories street-by-street. He was the best walking companion: always game to keep going, and never more than a minute or two from dropping another great bit of trivia that I now wish I could remember.

Even if you didn't know Leif, there's a good chance that his passion for games and his fastidious attention to detail has actually touched your life in a small way. While Leif was an excellent writer, he considered himself a better editor, and after being laid off from Macworld during the economic turbulence of Covid he ended up working as a copy editor for Apple, helping refine the kind of documentation we all take for granted when it's good and lose our minds over when it's confusing.

That work was a stepping stone to what I think it's safe to say was Leif's dream job: Games curation editor for Apple's App Store. He chose what games to feature on the store and wrote the short editor's choice recommendations for them, somehow finding a role that let him combine the relationship-building and curation he'd done at the art gallery with his passion for games. I like to think his time contributing to PC Gamer magazine helped him condense his thoughts into just a sentence or two, but that may be giving us a bit too much credit—long before writing for us he was a poet, after all.

A couple years ago I set out to write a book and asked Leif if he would be my editor. He immediately accepted the burden, because he was a deeply kind person and an even more generous friend. I'm not sure if he had the Chicago Manual of Style memorized from cover to cover, but if there's a single misplaced comma or capital letter in the entire manuscript, I probably screwed it up after he'd already done a pass. 2024 was a year full of fun texts from Leif, like:

"SO
A word on ellipses…"

In hindsight it's a funny reversal of the way our relationship started, but my memories of those early emails have all been replaced by the hikes we'd gone on, the movies we'd seen together, and the evenings Leif had spent at my apartment with other friends playing board games. His punctuality became a running joke: he always showed up first, even when he tried his best to be fashionably late.

When San Francisco's annual Noir City film festival came around every January, he was the friend I could count on to cram in as many screenings as we could stay awake for. And Leif was a great movie companion: He'd get so absorbed he couldn't help but vibrate with nervous energy or react with a little "oh nooo" when things went bad. Our record at last year's film fest was 11.

It was a privilege to call Leif Johnson my friend, and I'm just one of many people who will miss him greatly.