Aesthetics: The colors and bright lights of an innocence lost then recaptured, the Arcade is home, but the machines are old and worn- he can never go back, not really, the blood on his hands stains buttons and while his teeth are blunted and he is muzzled there are people who remember what he used to be, razor-sharp and deadly, motor oil and rich, well-worn leather flying a flag of loyalty. There’s no cross on the bend outside of town where the bike crashed, but something died out there that day. The physical injuries are minimal, now, but his mind has never quite been the same- maybe the peppy chiptunes are as much a prison as gunfire and rumbling engines. Maybe he’ll never know.

HISTORY

Bostonian transplant when he and his sister were ten, they were present in town and old enough to remember what happened to Duncan Farley, only a year after their arrival. He had his own theories about what happened, but he was a child- he never spoke or acted on them.

Fell in with a rougher crowd in his late teens and early 20s, familial loyalty to a local biker gang led to Tilt becoming a runner and mechanic at only 15, initially just to get himself out of the trailer park they’d moved into.

He flourished in the art of violence and misleading others, and from 19 to 27, he was a prominent member of the gang, regularly running drugs and guns and building an impressive rap sheet until a bike accident late one night on a twisted, rain-slicked backroad nearly took his life.

After a couple years of recovery, largely only supported by his twin sister, after their single father’s death, Tilt found himself capable enough to reintegrate into society- but no longer the ferocious young man he had once been. He took a job at the Fun Palace as the mechanic, somewhere he adored from his youth, and put his general technical skills to good use keeping everything running- so well that when the owner retired when Tilt was 29, he was offered the opportunity to take over and buy the place out.

He spends most of his time now at the Fun Palace, and has a near-encyclopedic knowledge about arcade machines from the 80s to present day, and despite still requiring the presence of a carer in his day-to-day because of periodic seizures, Tilt Ward has quickly become a well-loved member of the boardwalk’s ‘regulars’.

Incredibly jovial with a kind word for everyone, Tilt is also a regular handyman, willing to use his technical and mechanical knowledge to fix things up for others, like cameras, TVs, Cars, and old equipment.

He doesn't talk much about his past as a biker, as many of those memories were lost in his accident, including much of the way he used to pressure, extort, and threaten the people of Greenview in the name of his former crew.

He has an open door policy for the young folks around town to come by the Ward place for anything- dinner, a couch to crash on, or a listening ear, and with his memory issues and general inability to really muster up judgement, many college students tend to take him up on this.