Parker's Portfolio

Parker Johnson is a writer & developer from small town Gowrie, Iowa, currently based in Iowa City. He is open to freelance entertainment writing, specializing in game guides with bylines at IGN, Kotaku, and Fanbyte. You can find some of his work below.

Iowa logo

Pictured: me at Shakespeare in the Park in New York City, summer 2022.

My Writing

I currently operate my own business with other former editors and contributors from Hard Drive, Palette Swap! I absolutely love working on this, and have gotten experience in so many fields because of it!

I've created Reels for our Instagram page, written unique comedy articles and sincere feature pieces, and done writing and voiceover for long form YouTube videos.

I've been writing guides for three years, at various places around the internet. Currently, much of my work is with IGN and Kotaku.

Some of my best work includes the Walkthrough for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the complete IGN guide to The Rogue Prince of Persia, and my starter guide for Doctor Strange in Marvel Rivals.

For around a year and a half, I served as the Editorial Operations Manager for video game satire site Hard Drive. I spearheaded development of new content types like our listicles, non-satirical reviews, & SEO-oriented guides content. As a part of this role, I’ve written everything from reviews of new indies, how likely I could beat the Hades characters in 1-on-1 basketball, and timely dunks on dumb companies, in addition to guiding the site’s freelance writers to do the same.

I also organized the company’s social media strategies after the departure of the site’s co-founder, including managing the popular Twitter account and experimenting with short form video on platforms like TikTok.

I have also written many fiction pieces and plays, though I mostly consider myself a playwright. Below is some of my best work:

SHARP: A one act drama about a piano prodigy pushing herself to be the best at all costs.

SPACE FORCE: A 4-page satirical short story about Ted Cruz I wrote after the announcement of the new military branch.

THE FOOSBALL CHAMPIONSHIP OF THE WHOLE ENTIRE UNIVERSE: A 10-minute comedy about two kids competing in foosball at their grandma’s house. Adapted from the short story of the same name by Simon Rich from his collection Spoiled Brats.

My Development

I’ve been coding since my sophomore year of high school, where I was a part of our robotics team, taking on the position of programming lead. Then, at the University of Iowa, I decided to minor in Informatics. I’ve gotten to learn a lot more about software development through this. Below, you’ll see some of the projects I’m most proud of. In spring 2022, using C# in Visual Studio, I built a NBA graphical analysis app, giving users a GUI to choose teams and players to observe and compare the stats of.


In fall 2022, I built a VR home run derby using Unity and C# in Visual Studio. I spent this semester in a class focused on developing virtual environments made for virtual reality. We spent one third of the class on Unity basics, another third on C# programming, and the final third on VR-specific concepts and developing this final project.


In spring 2023, I created this small interactive town using the engine GB Studio. The town features characters with small references to stories from one of the collections (Dubliners, in particular) that we focused on during the literature class I made this for. You can play the game in your browser by pressing the photo of the title screen, on either desktop or mobile.

A Game Boy title screen that reads: Dubliners. Press Start.

thanks for coming :)