Joshua Brotherton is a Distributed User Support Specialist at the Duane G. Meyer Library on Missouri State University’s Springfield Campus. This is not his first time working for MSU. In fact, back when MSU was still Southwest Missouri State University, he was a student and he did similar work on campus. He did IT for Wells House in those days. After many years of working a variety of jobs, he finally returned to Missouri State in 2024.

Born on December 4, 1976 in Heidelberg, Germany into an Army family, Joshua lived the military child life for a very short time before his father changed career fields. Mostly, Joshua grew up in the area surrounding Kansas City, Missouri, but his life was itinerant even when his parents worked civilian jobs.

“I moved around a lot,” Joshua said. “I went to fourteen different schools before I graduated from high school.”

His family stayed in the Midwest. Besides Kansas City, he lived in Norborne, Missouri, North Platte, Nebraska, and De Moines, Iowa, in addition to other places. His dad worked for a fastener company that made nuts and bolts, starting out below the ground floor and working his way up until he was in charge of the whole operation. Joshua’s mother was a paralegal for a while as well as an insurance underwriter.

Growing up, Joshua thought he wanted to become a visual effects artist for movies. However, when he moved out of the house and enrolled at SMSU, he initially studied secondary education with a minor in theater. As mentioned before, he worked while he was in school and sometimes left school altogether for work. After 19 years, he graduated with roughly 200 credit hours. His degree is in creative writing and he has a minor in theater.

Over the years, he worked for Blockbuster Video, Paul Mueller Company, did IT for Aurora Public Schools, was employed at Drury University, ran a home business as a 3D Printer, and he also made video games.

For 5 years, he worked for a studio called Black Lantern Games, which doesn’t exist anymore. He produced 25 video games during his tenure, many of which were Nintendo DS games. Major properties which he remembers working on include lots of work for Nickelodeon such as Dora The Explorer games and its spinoff property following the adventures of Dora’s cousin, Diego. Joshua also worked on Wonder Pets! games and several Disney games. 

In his free time, Joshua likes to play retro role-playing games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, but he does not play sports games or shooter games. He collects retro gaming paraphernalia for fun.

“I have almost all of the game systems that have ever been released,” he said. “And I have a large retro consul game collection. I have old Nintendo and super Nintendo and SEGA and stuff like that.”

He co-wrote a role-playing game called Eldaraenth and published the handbook on Amazon. It’s a live-action role playing (LARP) game.

“I ran a LARP in Springfield for twenty years,” Joshua said. “You would be hard-pressed to find someone who’s on my level of nerddom.”

He has also been running DND games since 1988. Additionally, Joshua makes YouTube videos about video games. The gaming world is so big to him, in fact, that he named his daughter Aria after the “Aria Di Mezzo Carattere” from the soundtrack of Final Fantasy VI.

Joshua and his wife, Stephanie, have been married since July 10, 1999 and they have two children together. Stephanie is a speech and debate teacher for Springfield Public Schools and she also graduated from Missouri State University. However, they didn’t meet in college. They’ve known each other a long time.

“We’ve been together since we were 17,” he said. “Originally, [we] met in second grade. I moved around a lot, and when I came back, her mom made her invite me to her birthday party.”

They started dating soon after her birthday party.

Their other child, a son, is named Parker…after Peter Parker of Spider-Man fame. Comic books are one of Joshua’s other loves. At this point, he pretty much only buys Spider-Man comic books, but there was a time when comic books in general were a major part of his budget. In the 90s, he spent pretty much all of his money on comic books, until he had a girlfriend, and then he spent all of his money on her.

Joshua is also into wrestling. He watches it, but has never played it.

“Wrestling is basically a comic book in live action form,” he said.

And lastly, he’s really into horror films. His favorites are 80s slasher films like Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Halloween. For him, these films are more fun than they are scary.

“One of the things I like about the old school slasher films is kills are very fast. It’s on screen for a minute and then it’s gone,” he said. “Modern slasher films want to drag it out and make you feel the bones breaking.”

Fun fact, Joshua has made a film. It wasn’t as a VFX artist and it wasn’t a horror movie, but he was an actor in a safety video and he starred alongside his wife. His picture for this article is from that film.

“It is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever made,” Joshua recalls. “I’m playing the priest. My wife is playing the wife of a man who gets buried by farm machinery. I play the priest who comforts her and her children while they try to pull him out and then he dies at the end.”

He has no idea what the name of this movie is. It was distributed at a conference for people who dug holes for a living.

When asked if his wife is a nerd, he says no. When asked if she agrees with that characterization, his answer changes slightly.

“She would probably say that she is a little bit nerdy,” he said. “But she’s not a nerd nerd.”