What path did you take to your current career? Would you describe it as "routine" or an unorthodox way to break into the industry? What even is the "routine" route to a career in game development, if such a path exists?
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
Game devs: What was your break into the industry?
- Thread starter aglioeoglio
- Start date
0. Got born, very important, highly recommend you do this first.
1. Started playing video games.
2. Started making mods for Warcraft 3, Starcraft, Oblivion during primary / high school.
3. Went to get Software Engineering bachelor's degree.
4. Went to get Information Systems master's degree.
5. Applied at all studios I could find across Europe, and DICE called back.
6. 5 AAA games and 6 E3 / Gamescom events later, a bit older, not a lot wiser, hair somewhat grayer, here we are.
1. Started playing video games.
2. Started making mods for Warcraft 3, Starcraft, Oblivion during primary / high school.
3. Went to get Software Engineering bachelor's degree.
4. Went to get Information Systems master's degree.
5. Applied at all studios I could find across Europe, and DICE called back.
6. 5 AAA games and 6 E3 / Gamescom events later, a bit older, not a lot wiser, hair somewhat grayer, here we are.
I had an Information Systems major in college that got me into an internship into a local VR comany that used Unity as an engine. In addition I was also a programmer in the video game design at my university were we made small projects and did game jams.
After university I got another internship at one of the only AAA game studios in the state. After my time there, I got a full time job at another AAA studio out of state where I'm at now. A rather conventional career path honestly.
After university I got another internship at one of the only AAA game studios in the state. After my time there, I got a full time job at another AAA studio out of state where I'm at now. A rather conventional career path honestly.
A lot of game devs aren't going to respond to this thread I would think since people would know that they are ones.. :)
Never worked in the gaming industry but did film for 20yrs and realtime apps now for 3yrs. I would imagine it's the same as I get a LOT of gaming companies asking me to apply.
Basically -- in my last year in college (1999) I made a ray-traced volumetric cloud plugin for Maya 1.0 and it got published to the Computer Graphics World edition 1999 (August) and was also published in the Texturing & Modeling: A Procedural Approach. Once you are in the industry though, you'll take priority over other candidates that don't have the experience. Of course, I'm speaking from a rendering/graphics programmer perspective.
Never worked in the gaming industry but did film for 20yrs and realtime apps now for 3yrs. I would imagine it's the same as I get a LOT of gaming companies asking me to apply.
Basically -- in my last year in college (1999) I made a ray-traced volumetric cloud plugin for Maya 1.0 and it got published to the Computer Graphics World edition 1999 (August) and was also published in the Texturing & Modeling: A Procedural Approach. Once you are in the industry though, you'll take priority over other candidates that don't have the experience. Of course, I'm speaking from a rendering/graphics programmer perspective.
I was in my graduation year in my "Music & Sound Design" program at ISART Digital Paris, a veteran narrative designer friend was starting pre-production on a new game and asked me to demo a track for it, and I got the gig.
It's clearly not routine, especially in my field where sound design is a very crowded entry field, and being a freelance composer is an even harder role to get any opportunities.
It's clearly not routine, especially in my field where sound design is a very crowded entry field, and being a freelance composer is an even harder role to get any opportunities.
I joined the co-op (paid internship) program through my university and got a years worth of experience at a big game/app developer. This coupled with doing a decent amount of independent development efforts in Unity in my free time during my school years helped me get a job at a game studio once I graduated.
OP
OP
- Went to 3d animation school for 2 years
- Couldn't get a job
- worked in a store selling phones for a year
- Applied as a VFX artist at a new local branch of a big international mobile game developer
- Didn't get in
- 6 months later applied again at the same place as an animator
- Got in!
- 5 years, 2 major projects, multiple cancelled projects, 2 kids, etc etc etc later, office gets shut down by overseas bosses
- All jobs in the area dissappear
- Question if its even possible to continue in the industry
- 6 months later land a job at an indie dev, working remote from home
- 3 and a half years later and still loving it
TLDR: went to school and then got lucky, 8 years so far in the industry and still enjoy every day at work
- Couldn't get a job
- worked in a store selling phones for a year
- Applied as a VFX artist at a new local branch of a big international mobile game developer
- Didn't get in
- 6 months later applied again at the same place as an animator
- Got in!
- 5 years, 2 major projects, multiple cancelled projects, 2 kids, etc etc etc later, office gets shut down by overseas bosses
- All jobs in the area dissappear
- Question if its even possible to continue in the industry
- 6 months later land a job at an indie dev, working remote from home
- 3 and a half years later and still loving it
TLDR: went to school and then got lucky, 8 years so far in the industry and still enjoy every day at work
I didn't go to normal school growing up. I grew up right outside of NASA, and in kindergarten they identified me and a few other kids from the district and moved us to a magnet program run by NASA and University of Houston. We were allowed to take classes on science and art of our choosing and in the 4th grade I took a class on game development and computer programming. Mind you, prior to this, I was already a die hard Sega fanboy since getting the Sega Master System and Genesis and Game Gear and Sega CD prior.
The class was focused on hypercard, and I wound up making a myst clone:
That class blew my mind, and from that point on, game development and graphics programming has been my primary passion in life. Immediately following that class, my dad put an old PC in my bedroom and installed QBasic on it, and I started playing with it. About a year or two after that, my dad surprised me with a copy of Visual Basic 6 one christmas, and I took to that very hard. This was around 1997 or so.
The years of 1997-2000 were hands down my most formative years as a computer scientist. My dad and I joined a PC Users club in Houston, Texas after going to a LAN party they threw one february, the place was called HAL-PC. They offered Special Interest Groups on saturdays where you could go and meet like minded people and have informal lectures. I started going every weekend specifically for the Gaming SIG where I became heavily involved in the inner workings of the club.
It was around that time I attended a C++ programming SIG, I remember I was still a little boy. I sat in the class and they held a lecture and all of it went over my head, but I sat quietly and listened. At HAL-PC, it was a tradition that people bring things they didn't want or need anymore and would donate them to the group so anybody could take them home if they could use them. Some dude had brought in a bunch of books on C programming, so I asked if I could have them. In front of the whole room, the guy running the SIG, asked me who I was and why I was in the SIG since I was so young, and I told him how I wanted to make video games and needed to learn C and C++. The room laughed at me, and told me that making games was too hard for me, and I'd burn out before I could learn enough. This was back before easy to use game engines really existed. I told them how I made games in Visual Basic and they told me that wasn't "real programming." So they didn't give me those books. My dad was with me and he walked me out of the room and was trying to console me, thinking I was crushed. But I wasn't, that room lit a fire under me and I told my dad on that day that I was going to prove them wrong, and was determined to not listen to them.
A great thing wound up coming from that day, though -- one of the people in the room was a NASA engineer and he thought the way they laughed at me was fucked up. He was also into video games, and thought someone young wanting to get into gamedev was awesome. So, for the next several months, every saturday, he and I would meet at HAL-PC in the gaming SIG and he taught me C along with the basics of graphics programming. His two advices -- Learn OpenGL, and Learn SDL. This was like late 1998, SDL was brand new. He told me to learn SDL because it'd be the future, and to this very day I use SDL2 every single day I write code. Over the course of about 2 years, we remade Ultima I, II, and III in SDL:
(the game selector on the bottom is a docker-style bar we made in SDL because OSX aqua had just come out, haha)
Now, at the exact same time, in 1997, I was also joining the earliest gatherings of what would become the Sonic Hacking Community and Sega Genesis Demoscene. 1997 was basically the start of that entire circle, and I am one of the foundational and longest tenured members of that group. Back then, I didn't know much about low level programming or anything like that, but i knew Sega, and I knew sonic, and I loved both and loved to talk about them. One of the dudes who was around back then were people like Simon Thomley of Sonic Mania fame, who was much older than most of the rest of the scene. Stealth was already a computer scientist, and really dragged the scene along with major discoveries. Being so young and into programming, I got into this stuff mainly to try and keep up with learning what people like Stealth and Nemesis were finding. Sometime around early 1998, thanks to my mentor at HAL-PC, I won a copy of Visual Studio 97 in a coding competition, and that came with a bunch of memory editors and visual debuggers. That got me all into understanding how memory worked, which played right along into Sonic hacking. Between 1998 and 1999, I taught myself binary, hexadecimal, and ultimately m68000 microprocessor assembly and started playing around with Rom Hacking and Save State editing. A big part of early sonic hacking was changing graphics, which had to be done in bytecode as no community tools existed. And that really solidified to me how graphics worked, as I was doing this right alongside the time I was learning OpenGL and SDL.
Finally, in late 1999, I got a Sega Dreamcast. Being on the internet frequently with the Dreamcast, and hanging around Dreamcast circles, in late 2000 I learned that it was very easy to write and run Dreamcast programs on retail hardware. So I started to look into it all, and this was when Marcus Comsdedt had just released information about how to run code on a stock DC. I started following and playing around in that demoscene heavily and, for the first time ever, managed to write and run programs on a real video game console, after having worked from that goal since taking that hypercard class as a kid.
Of course, I kept it up after all that. Following that was highschool, where I kept honing my craft, then college where I did comp sci, then afterwards where I worked at various companies until I formed my own company about 4 years ago. Owning your own company is like a time honored tradition in my family -- my great grandpa owned his company, my grandpa owned his, my dad owned his, and now I own mine. All of them have been in completely unrelated fields, too, haha.
So pretty much my own path through it all, but probably a very unique one. I felt like this was what I wanted to do since I was in grade school and worked at it pretty much my whole life. I don't consider it a job, really, I consider it more like a craft, something I take pride in doing and want to do well. Part of that is also never feeling like I'm where I want to be, because there's always more to learn, more to do, etc.
The class was focused on hypercard, and I wound up making a myst clone:
That class blew my mind, and from that point on, game development and graphics programming has been my primary passion in life. Immediately following that class, my dad put an old PC in my bedroom and installed QBasic on it, and I started playing with it. About a year or two after that, my dad surprised me with a copy of Visual Basic 6 one christmas, and I took to that very hard. This was around 1997 or so.
The years of 1997-2000 were hands down my most formative years as a computer scientist. My dad and I joined a PC Users club in Houston, Texas after going to a LAN party they threw one february, the place was called HAL-PC. They offered Special Interest Groups on saturdays where you could go and meet like minded people and have informal lectures. I started going every weekend specifically for the Gaming SIG where I became heavily involved in the inner workings of the club.
It was around that time I attended a C++ programming SIG, I remember I was still a little boy. I sat in the class and they held a lecture and all of it went over my head, but I sat quietly and listened. At HAL-PC, it was a tradition that people bring things they didn't want or need anymore and would donate them to the group so anybody could take them home if they could use them. Some dude had brought in a bunch of books on C programming, so I asked if I could have them. In front of the whole room, the guy running the SIG, asked me who I was and why I was in the SIG since I was so young, and I told him how I wanted to make video games and needed to learn C and C++. The room laughed at me, and told me that making games was too hard for me, and I'd burn out before I could learn enough. This was back before easy to use game engines really existed. I told them how I made games in Visual Basic and they told me that wasn't "real programming." So they didn't give me those books. My dad was with me and he walked me out of the room and was trying to console me, thinking I was crushed. But I wasn't, that room lit a fire under me and I told my dad on that day that I was going to prove them wrong, and was determined to not listen to them.
A great thing wound up coming from that day, though -- one of the people in the room was a NASA engineer and he thought the way they laughed at me was fucked up. He was also into video games, and thought someone young wanting to get into gamedev was awesome. So, for the next several months, every saturday, he and I would meet at HAL-PC in the gaming SIG and he taught me C along with the basics of graphics programming. His two advices -- Learn OpenGL, and Learn SDL. This was like late 1998, SDL was brand new. He told me to learn SDL because it'd be the future, and to this very day I use SDL2 every single day I write code. Over the course of about 2 years, we remade Ultima I, II, and III in SDL:
(the game selector on the bottom is a docker-style bar we made in SDL because OSX aqua had just come out, haha)
Now, at the exact same time, in 1997, I was also joining the earliest gatherings of what would become the Sonic Hacking Community and Sega Genesis Demoscene. 1997 was basically the start of that entire circle, and I am one of the foundational and longest tenured members of that group. Back then, I didn't know much about low level programming or anything like that, but i knew Sega, and I knew sonic, and I loved both and loved to talk about them. One of the dudes who was around back then were people like Simon Thomley of Sonic Mania fame, who was much older than most of the rest of the scene. Stealth was already a computer scientist, and really dragged the scene along with major discoveries. Being so young and into programming, I got into this stuff mainly to try and keep up with learning what people like Stealth and Nemesis were finding. Sometime around early 1998, thanks to my mentor at HAL-PC, I won a copy of Visual Studio 97 in a coding competition, and that came with a bunch of memory editors and visual debuggers. That got me all into understanding how memory worked, which played right along into Sonic hacking. Between 1998 and 1999, I taught myself binary, hexadecimal, and ultimately m68000 microprocessor assembly and started playing around with Rom Hacking and Save State editing. A big part of early sonic hacking was changing graphics, which had to be done in bytecode as no community tools existed. And that really solidified to me how graphics worked, as I was doing this right alongside the time I was learning OpenGL and SDL.
Finally, in late 1999, I got a Sega Dreamcast. Being on the internet frequently with the Dreamcast, and hanging around Dreamcast circles, in late 2000 I learned that it was very easy to write and run Dreamcast programs on retail hardware. So I started to look into it all, and this was when Marcus Comsdedt had just released information about how to run code on a stock DC. I started following and playing around in that demoscene heavily and, for the first time ever, managed to write and run programs on a real video game console, after having worked from that goal since taking that hypercard class as a kid.
Of course, I kept it up after all that. Following that was highschool, where I kept honing my craft, then college where I did comp sci, then afterwards where I worked at various companies until I formed my own company about 4 years ago. Owning your own company is like a time honored tradition in my family -- my great grandpa owned his company, my grandpa owned his, my dad owned his, and now I own mine. All of them have been in completely unrelated fields, too, haha.
So pretty much my own path through it all, but probably a very unique one. I felt like this was what I wanted to do since I was in grade school and worked at it pretty much my whole life. I don't consider it a job, really, I consider it more like a craft, something I take pride in doing and want to do well. Part of that is also never feeling like I'm where I want to be, because there's always more to learn, more to do, etc.
Hmm...
- Played games. A lot. Had my heart set in writing about them.
- Knocked out a fanzine (pre-internet) with some friends.
- Fanzine appeared in the Face magazine - very trendy in the 90's!
- That somehow led to a job in TV reviewing games. Was not great at it to be honest but that's a whole other story.
- That opened the door to games retail.
- That opened the door to a QA position at Sony.
- Which led to a game design position at Sony and I've been doing this for 20+ years now.
- Played games. A lot. Had my heart set in writing about them.
- Knocked out a fanzine (pre-internet) with some friends.
- Fanzine appeared in the Face magazine - very trendy in the 90's!
- That somehow led to a job in TV reviewing games. Was not great at it to be honest but that's a whole other story.
- That opened the door to games retail.
- That opened the door to a QA position at Sony.
- Which led to a game design position at Sony and I've been doing this for 20+ years now.
I'm not sure there is any orthodox path into the industry. Mine went something like this.
1. I fell in love with videogames as a medium. Developed my passion to become a developer.
2. I figured out what type of video game developer I'd like to become. I was always into art. I chose character art.
3. I learned absolutely everything I could about videogames and thier development outside of an academic environment.
4. *CRUCIAL* I focused my entire life on becoming a game developer. I left myself no other option. It was do or die.
5. I got accepted to SCAD. I majored in game development and interactivity.
6. I went above and beyond at school. Surrounded myself with other ambitious students. We didn't wait on a professor or curriculum to tell us what to do.
7. We got permission to do a senior project outside of the scope of other senior portfolio classes. We did everything we could to set ourselves apart from the pack.
8. I went to the game developer's conference my senior year. I had to work at it to be able to afford to go. I knew it would be critical networking that I'd need.
9. I met with a developer at a studio I wanted to work at. We hit it off and he said he'd try to help get my resume on top of the stack.
10. I talked to every dev I could. And applied at every studio I could.
11. Finally got a call back from the studio that that dev put in a word for me at.
12. Got my foot int he door and Internshipped my ass off as an environment artist. Made sure I was an asset to the team and a good person to work with.
13. Made friends with the devs at the studio. Worked my ass off more. Got my contract extended.
14. Continued to work my ass off and did a character art test in the evenings at the studio I was already working at.
15. Worked my ass off more (notice a pattern here?) and finally got hired on as a character art contractor.
16. Kept at it until I was hired on full time as a full fledged dev.
I have been at it now 13 years. I've had the honor of working on some of the biggest releases that the industry has produced in that time. I've had high highs in my career and some low lows too. I've been through Divorce. I lost a child with my ex fiance and that relationship fell apart. I've lost loved ones and family in that time. I Developed Alcoholism and recovered from it. I've been sober 7 years now. I'm now happy and healthy. I've remarried and learned how to ride the waves of the industry and of life.
When I said you'd have to focus your whole life on making it happen I meant it. And you'll have to keep that up for as long as you do it. You'll have to keep it up when your games are winning industry awards and you'll have to keep it up when youtubers are shredding your hard work. You'll have to keep it up when life is good and when life decides it's your turn for a beating. You'll have to keep it up when you think you can't possibly go on, and you'll have to keep it up when you KNOW you can't. Ultimately that's the choice you make when you start out. Will you do whatever it takes to make this art happen no matter what?
I chose this life because of what happened way back there on step one. I fell in love with it and I wanted to be a part of it. You figure out your steps and you'll be able to do the same.
1. I fell in love with videogames as a medium. Developed my passion to become a developer.
2. I figured out what type of video game developer I'd like to become. I was always into art. I chose character art.
3. I learned absolutely everything I could about videogames and thier development outside of an academic environment.
4. *CRUCIAL* I focused my entire life on becoming a game developer. I left myself no other option. It was do or die.
5. I got accepted to SCAD. I majored in game development and interactivity.
6. I went above and beyond at school. Surrounded myself with other ambitious students. We didn't wait on a professor or curriculum to tell us what to do.
7. We got permission to do a senior project outside of the scope of other senior portfolio classes. We did everything we could to set ourselves apart from the pack.
8. I went to the game developer's conference my senior year. I had to work at it to be able to afford to go. I knew it would be critical networking that I'd need.
9. I met with a developer at a studio I wanted to work at. We hit it off and he said he'd try to help get my resume on top of the stack.
10. I talked to every dev I could. And applied at every studio I could.
11. Finally got a call back from the studio that that dev put in a word for me at.
12. Got my foot int he door and Internshipped my ass off as an environment artist. Made sure I was an asset to the team and a good person to work with.
13. Made friends with the devs at the studio. Worked my ass off more. Got my contract extended.
14. Continued to work my ass off and did a character art test in the evenings at the studio I was already working at.
15. Worked my ass off more (notice a pattern here?) and finally got hired on as a character art contractor.
16. Kept at it until I was hired on full time as a full fledged dev.
I have been at it now 13 years. I've had the honor of working on some of the biggest releases that the industry has produced in that time. I've had high highs in my career and some low lows too. I've been through Divorce. I lost a child with my ex fiance and that relationship fell apart. I've lost loved ones and family in that time. I Developed Alcoholism and recovered from it. I've been sober 7 years now. I'm now happy and healthy. I've remarried and learned how to ride the waves of the industry and of life.
When I said you'd have to focus your whole life on making it happen I meant it. And you'll have to keep that up for as long as you do it. You'll have to keep it up when your games are winning industry awards and you'll have to keep it up when youtubers are shredding your hard work. You'll have to keep it up when life is good and when life decides it's your turn for a beating. You'll have to keep it up when you think you can't possibly go on, and you'll have to keep it up when you KNOW you can't. Ultimately that's the choice you make when you start out. Will you do whatever it takes to make this art happen no matter what?
I chose this life because of what happened way back there on step one. I fell in love with it and I wanted to be a part of it. You figure out your steps and you'll be able to do the same.
This sounds so cocky and arrogant to say I know, but seriously, it's like how professional athletes start out doing it when they are young and devote their whole life to it. Doing game development, especially low level engine programming and graphics development, is hard as hell.
EDIT: Just to clarify, anybody can do this. I'm serious, there is no innate gift to being a game developer. Screw anybody who tries to tell other people that they can't, that it's not possible. Seriously, if there are young people reading this right now interested in programming, you CAN do it. It's just a mountain of work. But you DO get over the mountain one day. There was a moment when everything *clicked* for me, all at once, and it was a pretty amazing moment. I can still remember extreme frustration for years at not knowing how to do what I wanted to do.
Went to a University for Computer Science.
Graduated and applied to game companies for about a year and a half before getting hired.
During that time, worked on my own programming projects. I wasn't until I had something functional that I can show people that anybody responded.
My advice for anybody who wants to get into programming, you need to programming something! Strange but true. And not just stuff from classes either . Something that is fully functional and that you can easily talk about.
Graduated and applied to game companies for about a year and a half before getting hired.
During that time, worked on my own programming projects. I wasn't until I had something functional that I can show people that anybody responded.
My advice for anybody who wants to get into programming, you need to programming something! Strange but true. And not just stuff from classes either . Something that is fully functional and that you can easily talk about.
I started posting to GAF around 2001, which led to writing news posts and reviews for sites like Gaming-Age and GameDAILY and doing community things like the NeoGAF Video Game Release List. Graduated college with an English Studies degree and a salaried news editor position at Shacknews thanks to my GAF / NeoGAF experiences. Four years later, picked up by a developer looking to expand its community efforts -- in the nine years since, I've expanded to running entire teams and projects, founded multiple startups, got my Project Management Professional certification, written three books, and also still do the whole vgReleaseList.com thing alongside my industry gig.
It still doesn't feel real, by the by.
It still doesn't feel real, by the by.
Had a friend that worked at Sega during the Dreamcast launch as a tester.
Had another friend who started working in customer support over at Electronic Arts around 2000.
Interviewed at both Sega and EA through my friends in December 2000. After the Sega interview, my friend was super excited and told me to hold back for a few weeks, that I was a surefire hire...
Interviewed at EA shortly after, didn't go as well. I was in college at the time and the customer service manager at the time made it known that he didn't want me in college while working there.
Then Sega made the announcement that they were going to go the publisher route and that pretty much killed my chances of working there. I was crushed, as the Dreamcast really got me back into gaming hardcore. A few weeks after that, EA finally called back and hired me on for tech support. From there, I bounced around as a tester, game master, assistant designer, producer, and all the way back to Test Lead at a company in Vegas.
Had another friend who started working in customer support over at Electronic Arts around 2000.
Interviewed at both Sega and EA through my friends in December 2000. After the Sega interview, my friend was super excited and told me to hold back for a few weeks, that I was a surefire hire...
Interviewed at EA shortly after, didn't go as well. I was in college at the time and the customer service manager at the time made it known that he didn't want me in college while working there.
Then Sega made the announcement that they were going to go the publisher route and that pretty much killed my chances of working there. I was crushed, as the Dreamcast really got me back into gaming hardcore. A few weeks after that, EA finally called back and hired me on for tech support. From there, I bounced around as a tester, game master, assistant designer, producer, and all the way back to Test Lead at a company in Vegas.
Last edited:
Most boring story ever. I always loved art, creating things etc. Started modding games on my mac when i was a little kid, pixel art RPGs. Realised it was an actual job when I was applying to university. Got into a games program at a university, finished half of it before I managed to get a job as a 3D-artist at what is now Ubisoft Massive and skipped out. Been making games ever since, a rather large pile of them by now :)
Got a job in QA, worked hard for 9 months and got a job as a Designer, worked up from there. It's not easy but if you're prepared to learn, network, show willing etc it's possible. It was helped by the fact that most of the dept couldn't organise themselves to get into work on time and when they did just looked at porn all day.
- Played a shitload of games from age 4 onwards and just never stopped I guess? Making games was the ONLY thing I wanted to do. From pre-double-digits, when an adult asked child-me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I said I wanted to make video games. That never changed.
- Did a videogames-related computing degree at university. It wasn't great and I didn't get great results, but it provided me with some development fundamentals and I was enthusiastic as hell.
- Got a job at an MMO developer in their support department, planning to work and create game/level design portfolio in my spare time.
- Failed probation at that job! Shiiiiiit
- Landed a job as an short-term emergency QA tester at another mid-size game developer nearby, VERY luckily, because a very wonderful friend I know who once worked there (you know who you are, you rule) gave me a recommendation. Saved my bacon. Crash course experience in a proper console studio on multiple platforms at once.
- Spoke to other team members while there, and managed to get a design interview for a different project. I do something right in it using my university work and the little I've managed to do since, and get a junior designer role!
The project I was hired to work on didn't come out, but I spent a few years there and ended up working closely with a number of people I'm still close to today (at least one of whom is on Era). I still hold those experiences dear, although I've also come to look back on those days as someone who was really green and naive about how shit worked, and I regret being a bit of a dick back then as well. Ah well.
These days, it's 12 years since that first design interview and I'm in large-scale AAA console/PC, with the same company for well over 5 years.
Further edit: I would consider my entry into the industry relatively orthadox, I suppose, if I had to agree that such a thing was truly definable. Someone moving from QA into design is (or was) a stereotypical path into the industry and that's what I did. But I did get help via a long-time friend who had got a job at that first mid-size developer, and I'm pretty keenly aware of that. Having friends "on the inside", as it were, is a huge help.
- Did a videogames-related computing degree at university. It wasn't great and I didn't get great results, but it provided me with some development fundamentals and I was enthusiastic as hell.
- Got a job at an MMO developer in their support department, planning to work and create game/level design portfolio in my spare time.
- Failed probation at that job! Shiiiiiit
- Landed a job as an short-term emergency QA tester at another mid-size game developer nearby, VERY luckily, because a very wonderful friend I know who once worked there (you know who you are, you rule) gave me a recommendation. Saved my bacon. Crash course experience in a proper console studio on multiple platforms at once.
- Spoke to other team members while there, and managed to get a design interview for a different project. I do something right in it using my university work and the little I've managed to do since, and get a junior designer role!
The project I was hired to work on didn't come out, but I spent a few years there and ended up working closely with a number of people I'm still close to today (at least one of whom is on Era). I still hold those experiences dear, although I've also come to look back on those days as someone who was really green and naive about how shit worked, and I regret being a bit of a dick back then as well. Ah well.
These days, it's 12 years since that first design interview and I'm in large-scale AAA console/PC, with the same company for well over 5 years.
Further edit: I would consider my entry into the industry relatively orthadox, I suppose, if I had to agree that such a thing was truly definable. Someone moving from QA into design is (or was) a stereotypical path into the industry and that's what I did. But I did get help via a long-time friend who had got a job at that first mid-size developer, and I'm pretty keenly aware of that. Having friends "on the inside", as it were, is a huge help.
Last edited:
Became a top Mortal Kombat 9 tournament player
Met the developers at tournaments
Decided to move to Chicago to play MK9 with the local scene
Jokingly asked a NRS employee for a job since I'd be in town
They said yes, I took the job
I would not consider this routine lol
Met the developers at tournaments
Decided to move to Chicago to play MK9 with the local scene
Jokingly asked a NRS employee for a job since I'd be in town
They said yes, I took the job
I would not consider this routine lol
Played lots of games and tinkered with level editors and programming as a kid.
Studied software engineering but couldn't afford to finish my education (B.Eng) so I dropped out.
Selected and flown out to a community event at EA in Burnaby in 2011 and the CD on that project (who I chatted with over the 3 day event) was nice enough to write me a recommendation letter when I was applying at another major AAA studio that was just opening up in my home city. Got that job: it was an internal QC development tester. I sat next to teams making maps for a single player campaign and logged all their bugs, basically.
Then I worked my ass off to ship our first game!
Still here 7+ years and many games shipped later but I've since been a Senior LD and now I'm a GD. I will always respect my QC roots though.
Even though I took the QC route I'd not recommend it to most because my studio situation was very unique. We were roughly 150 people at the time so internal mobility was much easier if you worked hard and knew the right people to talk with about career advancement.
Studied software engineering but couldn't afford to finish my education (B.Eng) so I dropped out.
Selected and flown out to a community event at EA in Burnaby in 2011 and the CD on that project (who I chatted with over the 3 day event) was nice enough to write me a recommendation letter when I was applying at another major AAA studio that was just opening up in my home city. Got that job: it was an internal QC development tester. I sat next to teams making maps for a single player campaign and logged all their bugs, basically.
Then I worked my ass off to ship our first game!
Still here 7+ years and many games shipped later but I've since been a Senior LD and now I'm a GD. I will always respect my QC roots though.
Even though I took the QC route I'd not recommend it to most because my studio situation was very unique. We were roughly 150 people at the time so internal mobility was much easier if you worked hard and knew the right people to talk with about career advancement.
I loved that story, this is inspirational for landing a job in ANY field. Way to go!
-Did several paid interships as part of my coop program in University (multimedia-computer science)
-My last internship was EA. Was told they didn't take part timers, only full timers
-Told myself "oh well", went for it and got my remaining credits as evening classes that I went to after work.
-Stayed there as a full time employee and then hopped on to other companies throughout the years as a technical artist.
-My last internship was EA. Was told they didn't take part timers, only full timers
-Told myself "oh well", went for it and got my remaining credits as evening classes that I went to after work.
-Stayed there as a full time employee and then hopped on to other companies throughout the years as a technical artist.
- Went to school for game programming
- Made a bunch of games while at school, both in and out of classes
- Teamed up with some incredibly talented folks at school and worked on the PS4 to build a small concept-game mostly from scratch (engine/tools/art/ect)
- Showed that game off like mad at GDC until we met some wonderful folks from SMS and kicked off the process that got me an internship, later full-time spot.
More than anything I credit going to a tech school where I got a lot of tools to just build things constantly, and then pouring absolutely gigantic amounts of time into trying to make cool things, especially things that seemed especially daunting.
- Made a bunch of games while at school, both in and out of classes
- Teamed up with some incredibly talented folks at school and worked on the PS4 to build a small concept-game mostly from scratch (engine/tools/art/ect)
- Showed that game off like mad at GDC until we met some wonderful folks from SMS and kicked off the process that got me an internship, later full-time spot.
More than anything I credit going to a tech school where I got a lot of tools to just build things constantly, and then pouring absolutely gigantic amounts of time into trying to make cool things, especially things that seemed especially daunting.
Let's see:
- Spent most of my childhood wanting to be an (academic) physicist and working towards that.
- Also spent my entire childhood playing video games across Mac, PC and Nintendo consoles. Games were always a part of my life from my earliest memories but I never identified as a "gamer" publicly.
- Went to undergrad and double majored in physics and math. Ticked all the boxes to get into a top physics PhD program but at the last minute decided to apply for Philosophy of Science PhD programs instead.
- Spent almost two years Notre Dame's Philosophy PhD program before deciding that I wasn't passionate about the subject matter day-to-day to make the life of a humanities academic fulfilling to me. Loved parts of it but not enough of it and was getting pretty depressed as I had spent my entire life building towards a life in academia, which I was then contemplating walking away from.
- Decided to take a leave of absence to try computer science as I had discovered a love of programming in undergrad. Also decided I wanted to at least try combining that with game development. Went to USC as it felt like it had the best computer science program with a games specialization.
- Met a lot of great people in the master program at USC and luckily had a few game development offers as well as a contracting gig by the time I graduated.
Damn your life history is great, and it shows me how much I still have to grow up as a programmer.I didn't go to normal school growing up. I grew up right outside of NASA, and in kindergarten they identified me and a few other kids from the district and moved us to a magnet program run by NASA and University of Houston. We were allowed to take classes on science and art of our choosing and in the 4th grade I took a class on game development and computer programming. Mind you, prior to this, I was already a die hard Sega fanboy since getting the Sega Master System and Genesis and Game Gear and Sega CD prior.
The class was focused on hypercard, and I wound up making a myst clone:
That class blew my mind, and from that point on, game development and graphics programming has been my primary passion in life. Immediately following that class, my dad put an old PC in my bedroom and installed QBasic on it, and I started playing with it. About a year or two after that, my dad surprised me with a copy of Visual Basic 6 one christmas, and I took to that very hard. This was around 1997 or so.
The years of 1997-2000 were hands down my most formative years as a computer scientist. My dad and I joined a PC Users club in Houston, Texas after going to a LAN party they threw one february, the place was called HAL-PC. They offered Special Interest Groups on saturdays where you could go and meet like minded people and have informal lectures. I started going every weekend specifically for the Gaming SIG where I became heavily involved in the inner workings of the club.
It was around that time I attended a C++ programming SIG, I remember I was still a little boy. I sat in the class and they held a lecture and all of it went over my head, but I sat quietly and listened. At HAL-PC, it was a tradition that people bring things they didn't want or need anymore and would donate them to the group so anybody could take them home if they could use them. Some dude had brought in a bunch of books on C programming, so I asked if I could have them. In front of the whole room, the guy running the SIG, asked me who I was and why I was in the SIG since I was so young, and I told him how I wanted to make video games and needed to learn C and C++. The room laughed at me, and told me that making games was too hard for me, and I'd burn out before I could learn enough. This was back before easy to use game engines really existed. I told them how I made games in Visual Basic and they told me that wasn't "real programming." So they didn't give me those books. My dad was with me and he walked me out of the room and was trying to console me, thinking I was crushed. But I wasn't, that room lit a fire under me and I told my dad on that day that I was going to prove them wrong, and was determined to not listen to them.
A great thing wound up coming from that day, though -- one of the people in the room was a NASA engineer and he thought the way they laughed at me was fucked up. He was also into video games, and thought someone young wanting to get into gamedev was awesome. So, for the next several months, every saturday, he and I would meet at HAL-PC in the gaming SIG and he taught me C along with the basics of graphics programming. His two advices -- Learn OpenGL, and Learn SDL. This was like late 1998, SDL was brand new. He told me to learn SDL because it'd be the future, and to this very day I use SDL2 every single day I write code. Over the course of about 2 years, we remade Ultima I, II, and III in SDL:
(the game selector on the bottom is a docker-style bar we made in SDL because OSX aqua had just come out, haha)
Now, at the exact same time, in 1997, I was also joining the earliest gatherings of what would become the Sonic Hacking Community and Sega Genesis Demoscene. 1997 was basically the start of that entire circle, and I am one of the foundational and longest tenured members of that group. Back then, I didn't know much about low level programming or anything like that, but i knew Sega, and I knew sonic, and I loved both and loved to talk about them. One of the dudes who was around back then were people like Simon Thomley of Sonic Mania fame, who was much older than most of the rest of the scene. Stealth was already a computer scientist, and really dragged the scene along with major discoveries. Being so young and into programming, I got into this stuff mainly to try and keep up with learning what people like Stealth and Nemesis were finding. Sometime around early 1998, thanks to my mentor at HAL-PC, I won a copy of Visual Studio 97 in a coding competition, and that came with a bunch of memory editors and visual debuggers. That got me all into understanding how memory worked, which played right along into Sonic hacking. Between 1998 and 1999, I taught myself binary, hexadecimal, and ultimately m68000 microprocessor assembly and started playing around with Rom Hacking and Save State editing. A big part of early sonic hacking was changing graphics, which had to be done in bytecode as no community tools existed. And that really solidified to me how graphics worked, as I was doing this right alongside the time I was learning OpenGL and SDL.
Finally, in late 1999, I got a Sega Dreamcast. Being on the internet frequently with the Dreamcast, and hanging around Dreamcast circles, in late 2000 I learned that it was very easy to write and run Dreamcast programs on retail hardware. So I started to look into it all, and this was when Marcus Comsdedt had just released information about how to run code on a stock DC. I started following and playing around in that demoscene heavily and, for the first time ever, managed to write and run programs on a real video game console, after having worked from that goal since taking that hypercard class as a kid.
Of course, I kept it up after all that. Following that was highschool, where I kept honing my craft, then college where I did comp sci, then afterwards where I worked at various companies until I formed my own company about 4 years ago. Owning your own company is like a time honored tradition in my family -- my great grandpa owned his company, my grandpa owned his, my dad owned his, and now I own mine. All of them have been in completely unrelated fields, too, haha.
So pretty much my own path through it all, but probably a very unique one. I felt like this was what I wanted to do since I was in grade school and worked at it pretty much my whole life. I don't consider it a job, really, I consider it more like a craft, something I take pride in doing and want to do well. Part of that is also never feeling like I'm where I want to be, because there's always more to learn, more to do, etc.
I wasn't much interested in game development until the 3D era began. Magazines like Next Generation went into detail with features like bilinear filtering and trilinear mipmapping, talking about how many polygons per second the new machines could pull off. Going from just a person who was passionate about games to knowing a bit about how the new generation of games would work really fascinated me, especially as I was just coming of age then (13 or 14?).
But what really pulled me into the fray was emulation. Once I saw zSNES and UltraHLE, I was amazed you could do something like this just with software. I could play Chrono Trigger or FF6 on my PC and disable/enable BG layers to see how tile-based games worked - simply amazing! When UltraHLE came out (shortly after OoT), it was truly mind blowing to see my favorite game of all time running on my Voodoo. I somehow immediately bought UltraHLE.com and started to post about ini hacks and eventually became the de-facto source for news on the emulator.
Thanks to my UltraHLE connection, I was able to procure a Z64 (N64 backup device) and AR Replay flashed with Caetla (PS1 modchip cartridge) by serving ads to the site and that truly began the development journey for me. I shockingly got my hands on the N64 and PS1 SDKs from the dark corners of EFNet IRC and started modifying PS1 and N64 homebrew samples from dev scene to run on actual hardware. In essence, I learned C on N64 and PS1 in High School and skipped most of my senior year to cut my teeth with real world conditions. It was probably the hardest way to learn programming, especially back then since the Internet was still new, but super rewarding because I could only count on myself and a few like-minded friends on IRC.
By the time I was 19, I had enough skills to get hired by an indie developer and begin professionally making games, skipping college in the process. Here we are almost 20 years later and I've been successfully running my own game dev shop for nearly 10 years.
But what really pulled me into the fray was emulation. Once I saw zSNES and UltraHLE, I was amazed you could do something like this just with software. I could play Chrono Trigger or FF6 on my PC and disable/enable BG layers to see how tile-based games worked - simply amazing! When UltraHLE came out (shortly after OoT), it was truly mind blowing to see my favorite game of all time running on my Voodoo. I somehow immediately bought UltraHLE.com and started to post about ini hacks and eventually became the de-facto source for news on the emulator.
Thanks to my UltraHLE connection, I was able to procure a Z64 (N64 backup device) and AR Replay flashed with Caetla (PS1 modchip cartridge) by serving ads to the site and that truly began the development journey for me. I shockingly got my hands on the N64 and PS1 SDKs from the dark corners of EFNet IRC and started modifying PS1 and N64 homebrew samples from dev scene to run on actual hardware. In essence, I learned C on N64 and PS1 in High School and skipped most of my senior year to cut my teeth with real world conditions. It was probably the hardest way to learn programming, especially back then since the Internet was still new, but super rewarding because I could only count on myself and a few like-minded friends on IRC.
By the time I was 19, I had enough skills to get hired by an indie developer and begin professionally making games, skipping college in the process. Here we are almost 20 years later and I've been successfully running my own game dev shop for nearly 10 years.
A regular at the bar I worked at was looking for a production assistant for the production team, said I'm good with people and I should apply.
Interviewed with the team and EP.
Got hired. 🤷♂️
Worked from the bottom to get to where I'm at.
Interviewed with the team and EP.
Got hired. 🤷♂️
Worked from the bottom to get to where I'm at.
As unnamed developer in step #9 I can vouch that he did, indeed, work his ass off.
My own path was pretty meandering.
-Started off with Doom and Duke Mods in the 90s
-Taught myself Lightwave and 3dsmax in High School
-Spent a lot of time bumming around Next-Gen online forums where some of the posters worked for a local company
-Went to School for 3d animation
-Got cajoled to apply to said local company by said forum contacts my freshman year.
-Interned on my college breaks and then got a full time position when I graduated.
I literally fell into most of it but times were pretty different back then. It was just stuff I was doing anyway and someone was like 'you should e-mail about a job' and so I did, and they were like 'cool'.
Thank you! It has been a long road. If you want it bad enough you can make it happen. Anyone can. It isn't about talent. It's about what you put in.
That HAL-PC place I talked about above, the LAN party I attended that got me to become a paying member, the very first thing I saw when I walked into the hall was a computer running Mario 64 through UltraHLE on a voodoo 2 IIRC. Emulation was still pretty new at the time, I had gotten into SNES emulation with SNES 97 in late 1997, so seeing an N64 emulation just weeks later was mind blowing. Prior to that LAN party, I would talk to my friends at school about computers and emulators and they would think I was speaking another language, so seeing people who were into that stuff IRL, especially in those days, pretty much convinced me to join on the spot.
It's funny how emulation is so tightly tied to my history.
Good to hear from you man! I wouldn't be doing this today if it weren't for you. That's one of the craziest things about this industry. The people you meet and the connections you make along the way are every bit as important as the hard work you put in.
-Took Film & Media in University
-Decided to take a Networking course
-Met an alumnus that was working in Mocap at a AAA studio
-Stayed in contact with Mocap guy and went to every possible networking event possible
-Applied for jobs on their site until I eventually landed an interview, did Freelance editing work and took a part-time job in the interim
-Landed the job and moved my whole life to a new city
I feel like a lot of getting into this industry is luck, but I'd say an equal measure is your ability to sell yourself and remain committed to your goals despite how tired you are of falling face down. It took a lot to get where I am now which is funny considering I just boiled it down to a few points.
-Decided to take a Networking course
-Met an alumnus that was working in Mocap at a AAA studio
-Stayed in contact with Mocap guy and went to every possible networking event possible
-Applied for jobs on their site until I eventually landed an interview, did Freelance editing work and took a part-time job in the interim
-Landed the job and moved my whole life to a new city
I feel like a lot of getting into this industry is luck, but I'd say an equal measure is your ability to sell yourself and remain committed to your goals despite how tired you are of falling face down. It took a lot to get where I am now which is funny considering I just boiled it down to a few points.
Lot's of "right time, right place" luck for me. I was always an avid gamer but never considered being in the industry. Not exactly a dev, but I work as a Producer at a publisher and work with dev teams to get games published.
- In college for unrelated major. Worked at a kiosk selling cellphones at the mall.
- Started in QA through a fellow salesman that got a job doing it because he knew someone. Contract/entry level QA at a small team worked through nepotism pretty often back then.
- Got laid off in normal QA/Project cycle, but knew I wanted to stay in the industry.
- Started at CS at another company.
- Did everything I possible could for every department that needed help. Basically, got noticed by "being the man" to get random things done.
- Moved into publisher/1st party project management.
- Boss decided that he wanted to start publishing games out of our office (till then, we only published games from our JP mother company), so we slowly start moving in that direction and I get pulled along. Been learning as I go ever since.
- Did it at that company while was there for 15 years and now I've been at my current for 4.
Didn't take a typical track and I don't know if I ever would've gotten into being a Producer unless my boss at the time wanted started doing it. As I said above, right place/right time.
- In college for unrelated major. Worked at a kiosk selling cellphones at the mall.
- Started in QA through a fellow salesman that got a job doing it because he knew someone. Contract/entry level QA at a small team worked through nepotism pretty often back then.
- Got laid off in normal QA/Project cycle, but knew I wanted to stay in the industry.
- Started at CS at another company.
- Did everything I possible could for every department that needed help. Basically, got noticed by "being the man" to get random things done.
- Moved into publisher/1st party project management.
- Boss decided that he wanted to start publishing games out of our office (till then, we only published games from our JP mother company), so we slowly start moving in that direction and I get pulled along. Been learning as I go ever since.
- Did it at that company while was there for 15 years and now I've been at my current for 4.
Didn't take a typical track and I don't know if I ever would've gotten into being a Producer unless my boss at the time wanted started doing it. As I said above, right place/right time.
Last edited:
I as well went in with QA but dropped it once I really started modding games, and I thankfully got a break on a large fan mod for a game that net me a job offer or 3.
Wrote a number of tunes in Soundtracker on the beloved Amiga back in the day, sent floppy disc containing said tunes to various UK companies, 21st Century Entertainment "bit", worked on Pinball Dreams 2 on PC amongst a few other projects. Made friends (still friends) and eventually colleague Allister Brimble, working on Mortal Kombat 2, Colonisation, Primal Rage and Dungeon Master 2 with him in 1994, before (finally) hooking up permanently as Orchestral Media Developments in 2005 until 2017 where I then took an in-house position at my beloved Double Eleven where Im currently Snr Audio Producer working on Minecraft Dungeons, with nearly 200 titles under my 44yr old belt.
- Went to university and studied one of the first game design courses in the UK.
- Quit after the first year as I could learn what I was being taught by myself.
- Modded on source engine for a while.
- Applied for a job at Lionhead in the QA department rewriting badly written bug reports for B&W2.
- Left and joined EA in QA.
- Left and joined Codemasters in QA.
- Moved from QA into Community Managenent and Marketing for MMO games at Codemasters.
- Left and joined Frontier as a designer.
- Left and joined Crytek as a designer.
- Left and joined Jagex as a designer.
- Left and joined Remedy as a designer.
- Left and joined CD Projekt RED as a designer.
- Left and came back to Remedy as a designer.
I've been a beta tester for WMC since 2017.
I just applied and they accepted me after 2 weeks. Played and tested several games in the last 2 years and I'm enjoying it so far. Not a game dev but I'm in the gaming industry more or less, at the bottom but I'm there.
.
I just applied and they accepted me after 2 weeks. Played and tested several games in the last 2 years and I'm enjoying it so far. Not a game dev but I'm in the gaming industry more or less, at the bottom but I'm there.
.
Played games my whole life, was pretty deep into the 80s/90s BBS scene, friend there asked if I wanted a QA job where he worked, I got it, and have pretty much been in the industry for nearly 25 years now. Can't believe it's been that long, but I love it even more today than I did back then. Also don't picture myself doing anything else. I did briefly in 2013 outside of gaming and it was the worst job I ever had.