Jon Pickens

Jon Pickens was born in Mishawaka, Indiana on August 12, 1954. In 1968, he was introduced to miniatures wargaming, and his parents bought him the Blitzkrieg wargame for Christmas that year. A couple of months later, Pickens responded to an ad in Popular Mechanics for a magazine titled Strategy & Tactics. He wrote in for a sample copy, and “spent the rest of the summer mowing lawns to get enough money to buy some wargames advertised in the magazine, and to get all the back issues.” {{cite web ==Career==

Pickens eventually applied for a job at TSR, taking both the designer and editor tests, and was hired as an editor. “They didn’t think much of the design work, probably because I wrote it in a few hours late at night, but the editing part was OK,” said Pickens. Pickens was known for often being a "go-to research guy" at TSR. For ''Aurora's Whole Realms Catalog'' (1992) he assisted J. Robert King's research by providing his own personal library. In preparing the campaign setting book Al-Qadim: Arabian Adventures (1992), Pickens provided Jeff Grubb with three boxes of reference and research material. While Pickens left the gaming industry in the early 2000s, his nephew, Robert DeHoff, remains in that field and acts as a playtester and writer for Catalyst Game Labs's BattleTech, Cosmic Patrol, and Leviathans game lines. ==References==