Tribute to Gary Teter

It is with a heavy heart that Paizo announces the passing of longtime software developer Gary Teter. Gary was a pioneer in the development of the Paizo website and its core behind-the-scenes software systems that have helped to deliver Pathfinder and Starfinder products for more than 20 years. He was integral in the creation of our subscription programs, forums, and more–all at a time when such technology didn’t exist.

Our hearts go out to his family and friends during this difficult time.

We’ve asked the Paizo team to share their thoughts below, and we encourage members of the community to do the same.

Thanks again for all your hard work to make Paizo the success it is today, Gary. You will be missed.

-Erik, Jim, Lisa, Maggie, Mike, Rei, and Vic

Gary Teter came to Paizo way back in 2004 at a pivotal point in the company’s history. We started off as a magazine company, and the process of inputting subscriptions and renewals was eating up the small profit that magazines made back then, so we decided to try to do it through a website. But this was in 2004, and there just weren’t any website options you could purchase, so we considered building it ourselves, which was a daunting task.

Gary was brought in as we were struggling to figure out what to do. He brought vision and hard work to the table, and lo and behold, we launched paizo.com and brought subscriptions online. Once the magazines went away, that same subscription service morphed into one of the financial backbones of the company. I’m not sure Paizo would be here today if Gary hadn’t started working for us. Since then, he kept the machine going for twenty years!

Gary also brought a sense of humor to Paizo. Remember “Talk Like a Pirate Day,” when Gary made it so everything you posted turned into pirate language? Or the secret Smurf thing where your avatar changed into a Smurf whenever you mentioned them in a post? That was Gary.

I loved working with Gary during those early years of paizo.com. The website was a blank page, and we could dream about what we wanted it to be. Some things were instant successes, like side carts. Others were left on the cutting room floor (I’m looking at you, Paizooties). But through it all, Gary had a love for the customer and did his best to make their experience on paizo.com a great one. He would spend late nights trying to shave off shipping costs just to save folks a little more money.

Gary will be missed at Paizo.

Lisa Stevens
CEO

Gary Teter was never among the most well-known employees at Paizo, but if you’ve ever interacted with paizo.com in any way, you’ve felt his influence. And if you’ve ever noticed some feature here that no other website has, Gary almost certainly played a major role in creating it.

Gary was Paizo’s third-longest tenured employee, after Erik Mona and James Jacobs. Paizo’s original webmaster, Rob Head, hired Gary in March 2004, while Paizo was still just publishing magazines.

When we hired him, paizo.com was mainly a collection of static pages, one for each of our magazines, plus a sidebar for brief news updates. You could subscribe, purchase back issues, and not much else. Twenty years ago, Gary was working furiously on changing that, adding message boards in August, and launching a real web store offering thousands of gaming products in November. While the site has evolved over the years, the paizo.com you know today is still built on the foundations Gary and Rob created two decades ago.

But as important as Gary’s contributions to the website were, his role in shaping the paizo.com community was in many ways even more impactful. With the launch of the message boards, Gary took on the role of “PostMonster General,” acting not just as the community’s first moderator, but helping to set the tone for all interactions on paizo.com.

Gary was serious about his work and always interested in the ways that evolving technology could be used, from the utterly confusing construction that is ents and loaves to using a chatbot to turn an ordinary deck of cards into a mystery game to play with his son.

Gary strongly believed in doing things the right way with a customer-first attitude. Whenever I would approach him with a complicated idea that I thought our customers would appreciate, he would explain the inherent difficulties that kept every other website from doing it, and then he’d figure out how to make it happen, and he’d usually do it quickly and do it well.

Gary also always approached things with humor. He once demonstrated a new feature in our back-end software to our sales manager, who flippantly complained that it had one flaw: not enough pancake bunnies (referencing a then-current meme involving a Japanese rabbit known for balancing baked goods on its head). So Gary added “Pancake Bunny Mode” to the tool, in which lines of animated rabbits loaded up with syrupy goodness marched across the screen—a feature that you could toggle on or off… unless you were the sales manager, in which case there was no off switch.

Gary was occasionally courted by companies that offered him much more money that Paizo ever could, but he genuinely loved paizo.com and the paizo.com community, and he told me several times over the years that he never wanted to work anywhere other than Paizo for the rest of his life. Gary’s contributions to Paizo were foundational and crucial, and I’m greatly saddened that he won’t be here to help guide paizo.com into its third decade.

Vic Wertz,
Chief Technical Officer (Retired)

I remember the change that crept through Paizo after Gary came aboard so many years ago. From over in the editorial department, his influence was subtle at first, but then Smurfs started showing up on the message boards. To me, those little blue gremlins were probably the most visual (and unexpected) of the manifestations of the glory that was Gary. But beyond the boards and the machinery of the virtual world, Gary was someone I always felt welcome to chat with, be it a happenstance greeting in a breakroom that developed into a full-on conversation, a discussion at a work gathering about the intersection of internet and gamer culture, sharing quirky cat-themed anecdotes, or just some good old reminiscing about the early days of Paizo. His presence in the very early Paizo chat rooms was always welcome and comforting, as was his sense of humor. He put humanity into Paizo’s infrastructure in ways I expect I’ll still be discovering, marveling at, and appreciating for years to come. I’ll miss you, my friend.

James Jacobs
Creative Director

I first met Gary, like many who interacted with him, online. I first found my way to this community through the message boards, and Gary was the guy running the show back then. He had an interesting way of moderating conversations and keeping the community entertained and on point. It was this community and the people in it that led me to freelancing, and though it sounds weird for someone in the tech side of the company being responsible for a word jockey starting his career, that’s the case. Gary was not only fun to chat with, he was also supportive. In the way-back times, a few of us started a chat room that served as a somewhat real-time version of the message boards where regulars would hang out and keep up with each other. I was in that chat room all the time and so was Gary, who was the first Paizo staffer we asked to join. It was in that chat room where I really got to know Gary. From the Smurf “prank” to the odd threads and experiments that went way over my head, Gary was always up to something interesting, and I swear, half the time you could see the twinkle in his eye even through text. When I finally joined the company and moved out here, it was nice seeing a familiar face in the office that was outside of my immediate department. We even lived in the same apartment complex, so I’d see him around outside of work too. Gary was a delightfully strange man, with a head full of concepts, ideas, and plans that I couldn’t even fathom with my puny word-focused brain. So, thank you for all the education and entertainment. We’ll miss you, Gary!

Adam Daigle
Director of Game Development

Gary Teter was a passionate developer with a soft spot for retro hardware and clicky keyboards. When we were still in a physical office, it wasn't unusual to see Gary rolling by my window atop his Solowheel on his way home at the end of the day. Once we all started working remotely, Gary lamented the loss of the day-to-day impromptu conversations that would happen just by virtue of having desks near each other. Those conversations could be about anything from how we might solve a particular technical challenge to why we didn't have more (or any) pneumatic tubes in the office.

Professionally, Gary loved solving complex or tricky problems and took great delight in a satisfying solution. He made a lasting impact with his creativity and dedication to his work. I especially appreciated the sense of whimsy he injected into our daily conversations and many of the things he did. His depth of knowledge and creative ideas will be missed. He was a one-of-a-kind personality who will always be remembered at Paizo.

Rei Ko
Vice President of Technology

It's difficult to share memories of a coworker and feel like you did them justice. Working together is such a specific context that you can spend years with someone and never feel like you got the full picture of who they truly were. So I will resist the urge to lay out some sort of comprehensive, definitive statement on Gary Teter. I’m not qualified to do that. I will simply tell what I can, in the hopes that others will fill in the gaps in my telling to form a more complete picture.

Gary was a wizard. If you told him you needed something built, he would go read the book on that thing and come back having built it. He would build his own tooling so he could have exactly what he needed to get his job done. He would cast magic with code.

Gary was one of the most customer-oriented colleagues I've ever worked with. Regardless of the other factors in play, he was always deeply grateful to the people who purchased Paizo products—the people who enable so many of us at the company to do what we love for a living. Every feature he implemented had an eye towards surprising and delighting customers, as well as treating them fairly and honestly, whether they found out about it or not. It was a matter of personal principle. He couldn't not do that.

Gary believed that learning was a lifelong process. Twenty years into working on the code-base for Paizo, he was still researching new algorithms, frameworks, and techniques—either for use on the job or just for fun. He always had a handful of pet projects at home to work on after he'd signed off for the day: an audiophile amplifier here, a spectrum analyzer there. A few years prior to the pandemic he learned to ride an electric monowheel because, in his own words, "I just decided that I wanted to be the kind of person who could ride a wheel, mostly because it looked awesome, and I’ve always thought that sort of thing would be impossible for me, and that it was time I let go of preconceived notions about what I could and couldn’t do."

Gary was a trailblazer. If you needed to get 30 people from here to there across all manner of difficult terrain, he’d figure out the exact route to take. Perhaps someone else would have to arrange the provisions, and another person would need to load and balance the wagons, and a third person would keep the caravan together along the way. But the path itself? The guy with the machete hacking through the underbrush 50 yards ahead, shouting back, "It's this way!"? That was all Gary. It wasn't until I reached the end of this paragraph that I realized that there's another name for that person:

Gary was a Pathfinder. And now he's gone.

And Paizo is the lesser for it.

Brian Bauman
Software Architect

Gary was one of the first people I spoke to on my first day at Paizo, and I distinctly remember thinking, “Oh, right, I work in the TTRPG industry now. Of course I’ll be working next to a bespectacled, bearded ponytailed guy named Gary with an esoteric sense of humor.”

That was only my first impression, of course; over the next six years, he made countless others. He was an old-school geek who embodied the absolute best of classic weird online and programmer culture. He was the owner of a desk that resembled the Iron Throne if it had been built from 20 years of Paizo products. He was the guy in our weekly Zoom meetings who always had a wall of oscilloscopes or something that looked like a half-built robot on a workbench behind him somewhere. And, like others have said, he was an incredibly smart and talented coder who cared tremendously about his work and what it meant to the Pathfinder and Starfinder communities. It didn’t matter whether he was working on code to save customers money by shipping in as few packages as possible, an uncheatable die roller for the play-by-post boards, banishing spambots to an endless Sartre-esque digital labyrinth, or some shamelessly goofy forum feature; he approached every projects with the same level of deadly seriousness and took enormous pride in ensuring that it was done right, no matter how ridiculous it was.

It's hard to imagine a paizo.com without Gary and his contributions, and his passing will leave a tremendous void not only on Paizo’s tech team, but in the company as a whole. My heart goes out to his family and loved ones, and I am proud and grateful to have had the opportunity to work with him for as long as I did.

Andrew White
Digital Products Lead