Slashdot Mirror
Gaming Industry Engages in a Bit of Nostalgia
An anonymous reader writes "At Gamasutra, the latest answers to their Question Of The Week are up, asking game professionals how they got their start in the industry. Answers range from the classic ("While I was an MIT undergrad, a couple of my closest friends were co-founders of Infocom in 1979") to the quirky ("I got into games because my sister complained that I never called her. She set up an account for me on GEnie so I would at least email her. Not long afterwards, she suggested I check out GemStone III... Eventually, I ended up... [at] my current position as a designer for EverQuest II.")"
We sold the TI/99 4A for years at my hardware store. Too bad we didn't get together...we could have bundled your games with the computer and made millions! :-)
Actually, most of our TI sales were to local school districts who used it for the LOGO programming language. It was about a two year run before TI pulled the plug on the computer.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Zork was my first exposure to computer games. I was at MIT from 1977-79 and spent many late nights exploring the "Great Underground Empire". In those days, they were coding the dungeon so it grew as time went by. There were bugs to fix, and a number of inside jokes (MIT specific) that got left out of the commercial version released by Infocom.
When playing the game, you usually had to use the printing terminals (Decwriters?) and log in via Arpanet to the computer running Zork (command was something like "@o AI" where AI was the machine you were connectint to). If too many people were already logged in to Zork you'd get a message like "A large burly troll hacks at you with an axe and thunders 'None shall pass'" (or words to that effect. Eventually I had a TI thermal printing terminal with a 300 baud modem built in (with the little cups that you squeezed the phone handset into after manually dialing the system). I was able to dial-in and play from the dorm which saved a trek over to one of the labs (where the terminals were often occupied with people doing actual work).
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
I kind of miss the amount of customization found in Tribes and Tribes 2. Chances are if you wanted a hud, or a script to rotate a weapon after firing a grenade, there was one, or it was easy to write yourself. And there were 64 player FPS servers years ago. BF2 is just now catching up.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Then I met a friend in high school who had a C64, and together we learned assembly language and tried to put a few things together, without a great deal of success (using a debug monitor rather than an actual assembler can do that, I now understand).
Then VGA came along and made the PC a viable game system, and I switched over to that. After various false starts joining small game companies destined to failure, and trying to get into shareware, I finally got my BSc. in computer science, and put together a game / advertisement on contract: Humpty's Scramble.
That led to a job with EA where I stayed for quite some time, primarily on SSX. I recently left as part of a new startup (Blue Castle Games) and things are going well there.
Ultimately, I got my start by loving games, and loving programming. Being smart and actually being a good programer also helped of course. :-)
My advice to anyone thinking about the games industry would be the same as it would be for any field: love what you do (and hopefully be good at it). If I didn't love games, I could probably find a more comfortable job programming something else, but it's been in my blood for as long as I can remember. If I was only a mediocre programmer, the games industry would be a meat grinder. If you can handle it though, it can be an immensely satisfying experience.
sig fault
Quite the opposite I would think.
With the shear number of resources and amount of support availible on the internet,
support forums to ask questions from people who have been there done that so to speak
freely availible resouces, 2D, 3D art tools, scripting languages, entire game engines for free download.
ease of distrobution, upload your project to sourceforge, or have your files hosted on a site like fileplanet for basically no cash, no effort. And let people all over the world download your game.
not to mention graphics, intput, sound APIs/libraries have gotten substantially more user friendly. No more poking video memory to draw a pixel on the screen.
Now, you might have a point that it takes a bit more to get into a proffessional developement house than it did 20 years ago. People expect you to have formal degrees in CS/CE or art rather than just a disk full of your demos.
Like many game programmers, I decided my career path early on in childhood (thank you nintendo). Unlike many programmers, however, bad, bad, really bad grades in high school and college discouraged me from the whole field of computer science (again; thank you nintendo).
During my last semester at school, when I knew that I would not be welcomed back for another semester, I decided to NOT go to any more of my classes and I spent every waking moment in the university computer labs working on my own video game. After entering the game at the school's computer science showcase at the end of the year, I attracted a lot of attention and got a few job interviews. A few months after "finishing" school, I had a job in the game industry.
Actually, my employers only recently found out that I don't have a degree! Lucky for me, I had already proven myself to be a dedicated programmer long before that. Drive and desire count for a LOT. (But drive and desire usually lead to a college degree of some sort!)
for great justice, this sig has been moved
I got started at Accolade (which eventually got bought out by Infogrames to morph into Atari and I was there for six years) by sending in my resume since it was located down the street. I got an interview and was interviewed by a half-dozen people.
One guy asked me with a straight face what I would do if two of my co-workers were having a fist fight in the hallway. I almost blurted out, Does that happen a lot around here? I gave a neutral answer that I would get a supervisor. (No reason to put my neck on the line.) Anyway, the correct answer was to start taking bets. Go figure.
I found writing your own game engine, your own 3d modeler, and reverse engineering ~50 AAA titles data formats opens a few doors. I still giggle when people ask me about the OpenGL renderer for Tomb Raider! ;)
When I was 15, I got myself a SAM Coupe home computer (this was the UK, and yes, no-one has ever heard of it).
.NET. After that, I ended up at Sierra, working on genealogy, printing and photo editing software.
... and now, I'm at Surreal Software working on Suffering: The Ties That Bind, as a lead engineer in their advanced technology group.
;-)
I'd been programming before then on the BBC Micro, ZX81, Commodore 16 and ZX Spectrum +2... (I was programming a BBC Micro at school when I was 5, and I got my ZX81 when I was 6, and wrote a pacman-like cops & robber's game - the only flaw was that it was impossible to catch the robber - because he moved in lockstep with you). On the Spectrum, I wrote a tile-based game called "amazed in a maze in a mazda", which was a cross between bomberman and minesweeper, as well as a few tape loader tricks that did interesting things like countdowns while the something loaded. On the C16, I wrote a few BASIC games - nothing special.
But when I was 15, I got this computer, and started coding for it... ended up writing all kinds of flashy demos... and wrote a fader routine for and helped debug a port of Prince of Persia.
Since then, I worked on ports of Zub and Bubble Bobble (both never completed, but Zub was mostly done - flawed compression routines killed my source code, and Bubble Bobble was unfortunately stored on tape, so one day the tape glitched and I lost it), port of Lemmings, Exodus (a SmashTV rip off), port of Populous, Parallax (a sideways scrolling shooter). There were all kinds of other bits and pieces and projects, which I finished to various levels of completion.
Because of what I was doing on the SAM Coupe, I got a regular column in Your Sinclair magazine - a games and tech mag in the UK for the Spectrum and SAM home computers (although the SAM only came along at the end).
All of this took a back seat for a while when I went to college, and did a physics degree. I almost dropped my degree and went to go work for High Voltage software in Chicago doing GameGear games, but something stopped me (glad it did too - getting a visa with no degree can be painful in the US).
For a while I worked as a software consultant for a small firm, then got moved to the US working in their newly acquired Mainframe Capacity Planning division. That went south quickly when the parent company went bust, and I went to work for Microsoft on
Sierra died, laying off people (it would be another 2 and a half years before it died entirely), so I ended up working at a small startup in Seattle working on Mass Spectrometers. That also died after 3 years...
So somehow I went full circle, and ended up back in the games industry. The hours can be long (the past three months were hell - I lived at the office only going home to sleep and eat) - but on the whole, I love the people I work with, the things I'm working on... it's all worth it in the end.
Roll on Next Gen.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
I moved from a job as systems programmer at Apple Computer to game programmer for Sirius Software. Many twelve hour days later, 20th C. Fox bought my game and three others for $1,000,000. When it was time to cut the check to me, Sirus Software went bankrupt. I became unemployed.
Years later I got my job back at Apple.
I was a self taught programmer and loved to get on early PDP-11 BBS's and write little multiuser programs. I learned C this way and wrote a chat forum (early IRC like program that used shared memory for interprocess communication).
Meanwhile an older friend on that PDP-11 was writing a full blown text-based multiplayer RPG- one of the first VT100 massively multiplayer (ok, at the time only 7 people could login to the PDP) games I had ever seen. I offered him my forum as a chat area for staging before launching into the game.
Later, he was approached by someone who was starting a multiplayer games company and wanted him to bring the game to that company. He took the job and I got my first paycheck for writing software when he gave me money for using the chat program. The game went on to be a huge success and has been revised with Graphics and still has a large following today.
I thought it was great getting paid to do what I enjoyed, so I continued working on my skills and got better and better at C, wrote a few demos, and got a job interview at a company that was putting Spear of Destiny in arcades with a VR helmet. I happened to go for the interview when they had John Carmack in town helping them code support for the helmet. I got to spend a short time talking to him about the game and was further inspired. I didn't take the job though because it was an operator job, not a programming job.
A short time later I got a call from my pal who asked me to come to Key West and interview for the company for which he was now the Director of software development. I went, but was still a bit too young, hadn't finished my degree, and declined the offer.
2 years later I met an exchange student, fell in love, and we decided to get married- but I had no real job. I gave them a call back and asked if I could be considered again and they did. I sent them the demos of stuff I had been writing, and a short time later accepted my first real game developer job working in Key West Florida and making $30K/yr.
I went on to cofound a couple companies and help other people make a lot of money, but now I work in IT and do game development on the side. I miss the work and find IT to be such a waste of energy- but the money is great.
My only regret is that I declined to go out on the town after the interview with John Carmack and the guys who had interviewed me. I really didn't know who John was at the time, but had played his games and remembered seeing his name in the credits.
When Doom came out, I really knew who he was.
One thing I've noticed: Practically every ad for game-programmers has the requirement, "Must have a passion for games."
This doesn't sound unreasonable, but it isn't something one sees in other industries. For example, I've worked in EDA for about 15 years, but nobody's ever asked me if I have "a passion for Verilog".