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.")"

Comments

Playing Zork on the MIT DEC machines

[John3]

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).

My start...

[kreyg]

I was always the person in my family with an interest in computers, and fortunately my dad had access to the earliest Commodore microcomputers in his line of work. This landed me a Commodore 64 at home in 1983 or so, and I started working in BASIC, trying to put a few games together, but not getting very far.

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.

my "start"

[sm.arson]

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!)