Industry Memoirs: Lessons Learned, Part 1

This is a revised and expanded version of an email I sent to my QA team back in March of 2010. I was a Sr. Manager at the time working for THQ in Phoenix, AZ.

To set this up, the majority of the team was at the peak of testing the second installment in our UFC series. Some cracks were starting to show in their resolve and camaraderie, so I decided to share this with the entire department.

It might have been specific to that particular time and project, but I think this is useful advice for any new leader, or someone coming into the workforce fresh, whether it’s in videogames or not.

20140724_ufc2Stress levels run high on big projects. Stress levels run high in Quality Assurance, period. This has been a universal truth for as long as I’ve been in this industry. As the end of UFC 2‘s test cycle approaches, I’ve been asked several times, “How do you deal with all this stress so well?”

The thing is, I don’t know that I do. I know I haven’t in the past. Maybe I’ve learned to not let it show as much?

Whatever the case may be, I know it’s hard not to focus solely on — and get annoyed by — the world as you know it: Your team.

This very insular existence becomes the mind-numbing standard until that submission notification to Sony and Microsoft goes out and releases us back into the wild. “What is this… ‘sunlight’ you speak of?” and its variants are things I commonly hear during crunch-time, even in Phoenix where that scalp-baking sun seems to hover just a few short feet above our heads.

Sometimes we get pushed beyond our limit, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of losing it with our testing brothers and sisters, and so I want to share a couple key moments in my career that helped me keep and maintain perspective.

Back in early 1996 when I was still a new Tester, my middle name was “Overly Ambitious”, and I had an arrogant, know-it-all attitude to match. I thought I was going to be the next big-shot Designer on The Bard’s Tale IV, after all. I came into the job thinking that I was above my peers, just because I had played a bunch of obscure import games and could namedrop various industry figureheads. It’s definitely cringe-worthy stuff to recollect.

Anyway, about 4 months or so into my time at Interplay, one of my coworkers was chosen to be the newest Lead Tester. I don’t know why, but I got so mad that he was picked instead of me. He ended up taking over as my direct supervisor, and frankly, I treated him like garbage. He would ask me questions and I wouldn’t even look at him. When I did answer, it was with a bitterly sarcastic tone, usually under my breath.

From my perspective, I was just venting and didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. I was responding to the situation the best I knew how. I was only 21, and in hindsight, it was the exact same way I would typically respond to my parents if I hadn’t gotten my way. In other words, childish. What a spoiled brat I was!

Instead of talking to him about this directly, I just clammed up. I found out later that my ridiculously immature behavior was being communicated up the chain to the head of the department, with suggestions that I be let go. Miraculously, I was somehow spared, but it could have easily led to a quick end to an even shorter-lived “career”.

Eventually, he invited me outside to talk during one of our breaks, and he just came out and asked me what my deal was. When I put it all out there instead of just internalizing it, I realized just how insanely unfair I was being. Here I was, a green Tester, angry about someone’s promotion that was completely well-deserved.

We became good friends after that, often shooting the breeze about art, and it was a critical lesson in teaching me the importance of not taking a passive-aggressive approach to coworker tension.

In most cases, an open and honest chat is the best way to get things resolved. What I did almost got me canned, and upon reflection, I was in the wrong the entire time. After that, my perspective changed, and I realized that all things considered, work was good! The summer before that I was jockeying a telemarketing desk and pushing carts around at Target. At Interplay, I was testing Descent II and Wolfenstein 3D, enjoying complimentary pizza during overtime, and hanging out with great, like-minded people that I am still friends with today.

20140724_freespace2However, another incident that really stands out for me was from when I was working offsite at Volition back in 1999. This one doesn’t have such a happy ending.

I was a Manager at the time, and I was asked to go out there to help put the classic space combat sim FreeSpace 2 through its final testing phase. There were 3 other Testers there from back home who had already been there for a few weeks —  including one of my best friends from college — and we would all be together for an additional month.

Things started out great, as it was a heck of an amazing opportunity to be working directly with the studio, and spending all that time with my coworkers would be a terrific way to build strong bonds. However, as the days, nights, and weeks passed, well, you know how it goes. You’re in the same office for 16+ hours per day with each other, you go out to lunch and dinner with each other, you ride in the same car with each other, and you’re in the same hotel room with each other. Something’s definitely going to give.

And give, I did.

As the Manager, I really should have kept it together. Instead, I reverted back to playground behavior, where I would be sarcastic, play favorites, not stand up for them in meetings, and mainly focus a lot of that rubbish on my friend. I was even throwing Sega Dreamcast controllers and being hurtful with my words if I was beaten at Soul Calibur. Yes, really. I actually look back on times like that and attribute it to why I don’t really care for multiplayer games anymore.

I don’t know why things turned out that way, but by the end of the project, real damage to our friendship had been done. Although he and I still hung out and for years after that, it created a permanent rift between us that never fully closed. At the end of the day, why? Because I got tired of the same stories and jokes? Because I didn’t like hearing him snore?

No, it was because of me. I put myself and those superficial things ahead of anything else, including a friendship that we had both invested a lot into. Once again, an important lesson was learned about treating others fairly and compassionately, and it would take at least several more years to finally get it right.

My experiences are not unique, and mistakes are part of life. I know that judgment during stressful projects can sometimes be clouded by many different factors, but these situations can be transformed into something great, and hopefully some of the missteps I’ve made along the way can help others avoid the same traps I fell into.

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Interplay, late 1996: Packing my bags for PD

(Previous entries in this series can be found here.)

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The 17922 Fitch building today, Interplay’s original home.

Following E3 in May of that same year, a handpicked team of Testers and I were making our final preparations to move out of Interplay’s Fitch building in Irvine, California to a temporary spot in what was only known to us as the Alton building. It was a couple miles down the street, and housed the OEM division that we were moving to. It also contained several development teams, which were still a nebulous, mysterious group of people that sat in dark offices lit only by the glow of their monitors and the occasional lava lamp.

I remember several of my coworkers from QA telling me that I was the luckiest person in the world to be moving away, having open access to the developers there. However, all I kept thinking about were my friends back at Fitch, and how I’d miss all of our daily banter.

Instant messaging was still in its infancy, so most communication was done through good old-fashioned land lines, pagers, and of course email. Interplay used the DOS version of cc:Mail, so if you were testing PC software — which was primarily DOS-based back then — you couldn’t check your email. Very few, if any of us in QA had dual monitors or more than one PC at our desks. This was long before the days of thin LCD monitors too, so just fitting more than a single screen on your desk was a challenge. There was always buzz around the department whenever someone would get a nice, new Sony Trinitron monitor, and that buzz would usually be tinged with more than a touch of jealousy. Me, I never liked them because of the aperture grille damping wires that I could never un-see.

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Interplay’s interim digs in mid-1996 at 2121 Alton Pkwy.

Anyway, that summer we were off to the Alton building’s OEM division, a team that worked with developers and hardware manufacturers to create customized game software — usually demos that would show off specific features, such as hardware mipmapping and bilinear filtering on 3D accelerated video cards.

The four of us sat together in a long, skinny office where we started off testing many different versions of Parallax Software’s Descent. It got pretty mind-numbing after a short while, so we would often break up the monotony with sessions of Quake, which were a blast! One of my coworkers also discovered that playing Descent to the Chemical Brothers’ album Exit Planet Dust (especially the three “Beats” tracks) made it an almost transcendental experience. If you ever get the chance to try it out yourself, I highly recommend it.

Around that same time, I had posted something Final Fantasy VII-related on Interplay’s internal message board. I don’t remember what it was about, but it must have been controversial, because I almost immediately got an angry response from someone in Product Development (PD) ripping me a new one. I was like, “Who the hell does this guy think he is?” We sent a few emails back and forth to smooth things over, and before long, it became clear that I had a lot in common with this guy. Turns out he would become one of my best friends, educate me in the ways of import gaming culture, introduce me to the classic works of Hayao Miyazaki, and be a groomsman in my wedding twelve years later. He would also provide an “escape” for me of sorts from OEM later that year.

It’s important to note again that I was still very new to being a team manager of any kind. There wasn’t any training, so you had to somewhat fly by the seat of your pants, emulate other Leads who you thought were doing it the right way, and hopefully ask a lot of questions. I didn’t do a whole lot of the latter, only because I had this notion in my head that asking too many questions would make me look like I didn’t know what I was doing.  That’s the problem, though: I didn’t! Plus, I was young and thought I knew it all. These are such common mistakes for new managers, and they really bit me in the ass over the next few years.

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Interplay’s new home in 1996 at 16815 Von Karman Ave.

We had since moved from our temporary spot in the Alton building to our new “campus” around the corner on Von Karman Ave. It wasn’t Microsoft or Google huge, but going from the cramped spaces we were all used to into three large buildings was a big deal for us. Plus, parking! There was never enough parking at the original Fitch building, and we would constantly hear people over the intercom asking double-parkers to move so that other employees could leave for lunch.

The Computer Dealers’ Exhibition (COMDEX) in Las Vegas — which I’ll talk about more specifically in another post — came and went that November, and we were all flying pretty high from it. However, one day the part of my brain that controls egotistical idiocy must have been on vacation. I had walked into my office after lunch to find another coworker lounging in my chair waiting to speak with me. Something about that really rubbed me the wrong way, and after he left, I thought I’d complain about it vehemently via IM with a friend of mine.

Little did I know that the guy who I was insulting saw everything I wrote. He had to do some work from my friend’s PC, and he saw everything as I sent it. It’s one of those moments that drains the blood out of you, and I sat frozen at my desk for the remainder of the afternoon. I was expecting that at any minute my boss would walk in and tell me to get out. I was expecting it and it was deserved. But it didn’t happen.

I did a lot of thinking that night and throughout the next couple days as well. I wondered if I should let it blow over, since nothing had come of it. Instead, I psyched myself up and went into my coworker’s office to apologize. You can’t take back words, but you can certainly ensure that it doesn’t happen again. We ended up having a really good conversation about our friendship, working relationship, and various frustrations we’d had that year. What I did was a horrible thing, and it was probably the most important lesson I learned early on: If something’s making you mad, walk away from it until you calm down, because nine times out of ten, you’ll end up doing something you regret.

I’d hit rock-bottom in other ways too. Simultaneously that year, a small group of us had been working directly with Interplay’s team overseas in Japan trying to secure and localize a number of console games. Attempt after attempt, and nothing ever materialized, which was frustrating. It exposed me to the process of pursuing licenses, and how difficult — sometimes impossible — it could be.

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Quintet/Enix’s beautiful Tenchi Sozo / Terranigma (1995).

We pursued everything: Sakura Wars, Langrisser, Hermie Hopperhead, Tenchi Sozo / Terranigma, Keio Yugekitai, Tokimeki Memorial, you name it. 2010 was the first time Sakura Wars appeared in the US, if that says anything about the difficulties surrounding that one. I really thought we were going to be the next Working Designs, only bigger. Looking back, the market really worked against us: Sony didn’t want 2D games on the PlayStation, the Super Nintendo was old news, and the Saturn was more or less dead in the water here in the US. Focusing on import game localization wasn’t high on anyone’s priority list except ours, so with nothing to show for it but research material — namely some import games and a stack of Famitsu Weekly magazines — we pulled the plug and called it quits.

I was also terribly bored with my OEM Test Lead job, often wishing that I had stayed in QA where there was not only more variety, but I also really missed the more casual and fun atmosphere. At the same time I wondered what it would be like working in PD, even though I didn’t know what was really involved. It seemed cool, though, and since I still wanted to make games, I figured the timing was right.

At the tail end of 1996, I contacted my friend — the same guy who didn’t have kind words for me on the topic of Final Fantasy — to see if there was anything available. To my surprise, there was an open Line Producer position for an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons PC game! What’s a Line Producer? Who knows, but it sounded like a dream, so I accepted without question.

So, in early 1997, I packed up my things and moved over to the building next door. There was no application, no interview, no nothing. Basically, I got an email from the Producer saying, “See you on Monday!” What a different industry it was back then.  It would be a move that proved to be highly rewarding and educational, but would also make me feel like an ignoramus among geniuses for that entire year on what was a very, very troubled project: Descent to Undermountain.

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Interplay, mid-1996: My first E3

(Here are the links to Parts 1 and 2.)

20140603_e3_logoAs several coworkers and I were getting the last details of our transfer from QA to Interplay’s OEM division finalized, the videogame trade show known as the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) was drawing near. It debuted the year prior, and it was already legendary, mainly due to the combined impact the show and the Sony PlayStation had on both the industry and consumers alike. Most of my gaming friends and I had one already because of the strong buzz it developed and for its solid launch lineup, including Ridge Racer, Battle Arena Toshinden, and Rayman.

I really wanted to see E3 for myself, but since the show would be moving to Atlanta the following year, I figured this would be my last chance to attend. I worked up some courage and kindly asked the management team if I could go for one day. I was thrilled when they said yes and were able to secure me a badge. I didn’t even care that my name wasn’t on it; I would be known as the generic “EX96”, and treated that pass like gold! I still have it.

The first day of E3 arrived on May 16, 1996. Little did I know what I was in for.

First of all, nobody told me about the parking, or lack thereof. I suppose I should have known that I would need to get to the LA Convetion Center by or before the crack of dawn to secure parking at the actual venue. I would never make that mistake again.

20140603_sm64_boxThat was a big year, as among many other things it marked the debut of Nintendo’s Super Mario 64, and everyone wanted to get a taste. It’s a classic that a lot series die-hards still consider the best of the 3D Mario games, if not at the very least the most revolutionary. I would go on to spend way too much money on an import Nintendo 64 to play it before its US release, but I’ll save that story for another post.

Anyway, back to the parking saga. After sitting in gridlocked hell for over an hour, I finally found a “parking lot” about 5 blocks away. It consisted of little more than rock-riddled dirt, a chain-link fence, and a shady attendant, but after wasting nearly 3 hours driving to LA and scouring the area, lowering my parking standards didn’t take much effort. I parked and headed towards the convention center, wondering if my car would still be there after the show.

Now, if you’ve never been to E3 before, pictures and videos really don’t do it justice. The enormity and intensity of everything is very difficult to fully capture in words, especially back in the day when the sky was still the limit for everyone. The venue itself was already larger than life, with giant banners adorning the outside of the convention halls, while advertisements, kiosks, models, bright lights, huge video walls, and very, very loud music hitting me from every angle once I stepped through the building threshold.

It was sensory overload of the highest magnitude, and I loved it. I was just about to turn 22 that month, so I was still in my “I’m able to go out every night to loud clubs and bars and function fine the next day!” years. I was ready.

Walking into one of the main halls, I just didn’t know where to start. I saw the names of my favorite companies hanging high in the air: Nintendo, Sega, Konami, Namco, Square, Sony, Capcom, and many others. It’s interesting to look back and see how much the Japanese companies dominated the industry back then, compared to what it’s like now. While I wanted to make a beeline straight for the heavy hitters, I decided to just go up and down each row to check out every booth in order.

About halfway through the first hall, though, I was not only starting to feel fatigued, but also incredibly annoyed with the insanely dense (and sweaty) sea of attendees.  It was pretty cool to see so many like-minded people together at one event like that, but when you can’t even focus on a game you’re eager to check out because someone’s standing there yelling at you to go through their game a certain way, or you’re being constantly bumped by the flow of people behind you, it quickly becomes an exercise in patience. Or rage control, rather.

That aside, however, the announcements and games themselves that year were fantastic! It’s crazy to think that Windows wasn’t even really a gaming platform yet. Most things we did at the time were still done in DOS. I was definitely more comfortable with the streamlined C:\> prompt than I was with the clunky and ugly Windows 95. Microsoft made a big gaming push that year, but I didn’t really pay attention, since I was still very much attached to DOS gaming. I was there for the consoles, man.

20140603_crash_1_boxAlthough Super Mario 64 was the star of the show, Naughty Dog — who was still relatively unknown at the time — was showing off their own mascot platformer for the PlayStation: Crash Bandicoot. Like the whole Windows gaming thing, I remember walking past it, thinking that it looked nice, but I didn’t really pay much attention to it. Part of it was the Mario 64 buzz; the other being my weird bias against domestic developers at the time.

While I loved them for traditional PC game development, I found most US-based console games to be lacking when stacked up against their Japanese competitors, and the vast majority of my favorite 8-bit and 16-bit games came from overseas. There were exceptions, like the excellent Cool Spot and refined Disney platformers from Virgin, but heading into the 32-bit generation, a lot of those ill feelings still persisted. However, by the second — and especially the third — Crash Bandicoot game, I was a huge Naughty Dog fan, with their games and the games of many other US-based developers looking and playing as good as the best out of Japan.

20140603_nightsMeanwhile, after a year on the market, Sega was still struggling with their Saturn console. It was one of the worst console launches ever, and even though I felt burnt by both the Sega CD and 32X — both were huge disappointments for me — I was still a big Sega fan at heart. One of my most anticipated games was NiGHTS into dreams…, which I had only seen in tiny, compressed video clips on the internet earlier that year, but the design, colors, and sound immediately drew me in.

The display that Sega had for NiGHTS was pretty cool, with the title character flying high above their booth, but the area they had for it was small. Most folks stood transfixed (myself included) on the utterly amazing Virtua Fighter 3 demo, showing off Sega’s new Model 3 arcade board. To put it lightly, it melted faces, and I think it still looks pretty darn good for its age.

I didn’t get the sense that Sega really believed in NiGHTS, and I remember that it didn’t do much when it came out in the US later that year. I loved it, though; the analog controller was terrific, and it remains one of my all-time favorite Saturn games. It also possesses a magical soundtrack that is still part of my CD collection.

20140603_ff7One other major title at E3 was Square’s behemoth: Final Fantasy VII.

At the time, I don’t know if any other game was anticipated as highly as this, and it had already made tsunami-sized waves with the announcement earlier that year that it would no longer be released for the Nintendo 64, but instead would be exclusive to the PlayStation. The announcement underscored the high cost and low capacity of cartridges, practically outdating the N64 before it had even been released. This was absolutely huge news at the time, since Nintendo fans had grown up with so many Square classics across its 8-bit and 16-bit systems, and many would find themselves deserting the child’s play of Nintendo for the cool, new kid on the block.

I honestly don’t remember much about FF7‘s presence at the show, as I think it was only there in CGI trailer form. No matter, though; the demo that was released later that year pretty much guaranteed that everyone and their mother would buy it upon release. And buy it they did, to the tune of about 10 million copies over its lifetime. No wonder it’s often referred to as the game that sold the PlayStation.

But after only about 4 hours, I was done. That whole “I don’t remember much” theme would continue through all E3 shows I would attend as either a guest or exhibitor. There’s just so much to see and do. If you do get a chance to attend, I’d recommend bringing a camera and notepad so that you can actually document and remember what you saw, because otherwise you won’t. There’s just no way. This is especially true for the tiny diamonds in the rough, of which there are always many.

My next show wouldn’t be until Atlanta ’98, where I would also work the Interplay booth for the first time. I almost didn’t make it onto the flight back to LA, if that says anything about the good times that were had.

I’ll always be very thankful that I was able to go, and yes, my car was still there, parked in the dirt as I’d left it.

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Interplay, early 1996: Into the Lead Tester fire

20140515_vrsoccerAfter getting my feet wet as a Tester, heading into the second half of my first year at Interplay was a whirlwind experience, to put it lightly. I had only been working there for about 5 months, testing games like VR Soccer ’96, Cyberia, and Casper, when in early 1996 I was selected for a Lead Tester position. Prior to this, the only leadership experience I had was working briefly as a Floor Supervisor at the pub down the street at UC Irvine. I was definitely more comfortable fixing a good meatball sandwich that I was managing a team.

I felt so incredibly ill-prepared, even though I had displayed some rather ugly arrogance earlier regarding my readiness to be a Lead (more on that in a future post). I even emailed the Director of Quality Assurance about how I was having second thoughts and that they should pick someone else. Both he and the Assistant Director came by, calmed me down, and said they had every confidence that I would do well.

Even though there wasn’t any formal training, I was completely supported. That pep talk gave me enough of a boost to sign the dotted line on the promotion. I often referred back to that moment throughout my career, since I would see those exact same expressions of hesitation and fear on the faces of future employees making that difficult transition from individual contributor to management.

20140515_quicksilverThe first game that I was Lead on was Quicksilver Software’s Conquest of the New World for the PC. I was already a fan of theirs since my friends and I had played lots of Castles back in high school, so I was excited to dive in. However, stepping into the project as it was nearing its crescendo was overwhelming.

The bug list — which was tracked and maintained entirely in Microsoft Word and not a database — was massive. It was practically a second job keeping it updated, which is a big reason why I rarely left work. Lead positions were still hourly back then; not something you see much of these days. That helped ease the sting of the long hours we collectively put in, but I was young, and it didn’t really bother me. You always knew which teams were doing lots of overtime, too: they would have the newest and nicest cars in the parking lot.

In terms of my health, I was decently fit when I was 21, but it didn’t take long to develop what was affectionately known as the “tester gut” around the office. I still carry it with me! Fast food was the norm and poor sleeping habits certainly didn’t help. Overtime meals — provided by our Producers — would include pizza, Chili’s, Claim Jumper, and all manner of other take-out options. I still loved playing videogames and hanging out with my friends in my spare time too, so that meant staying up even later. I honestly don’t remember many nights where I was asleep before 2 a.m. Nowadays? 9 p.m. hits and I’m ready for bed.

Overtime took its toll in other personal ways as well, triggering a rather bad break-up with my girlfriend at the time. Although it was never that solid of a relationship to begin with, my work was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And wouldn’t you know it? It happened over the phone one night while I was still at the office trying to get Conquest out the door. Perfect.

Overall, though, the whole Conquest project was a great thing, and I have to somewhat selfishly admit that being credited as the Lead for the first time felt really good! I don’t think the game sold well, receiving middling reviews, but I didn’t care. I was still extremely proud of the work we did. My testing team and I spent a number of weeks onsite at Quicksilver’s office prior to it going gold, working directly with the developers. I learned so much about game design and development, and the small office culture affected me in a very positive way. It’s those “in the trenches” experiences that really stand out for me as I reflect on my career. They’re unbelievably stressful on the body and mind, but they have the potential to bring teams together like nothing else can.

20140515_descentAfter a short break to recover — and a patch or two — QA started receiving a number of prototype video cards. I was used to playing most PC games in chunky 320×200 resolution, and with 3D-intensive games like Descent, sometimes in an even smaller window than that. These new cards sported built-in 3D acceleration and bilinear filtering, and allowed those same games to look and run smoothly in 640×480 or higher. Even though those early cards were buggy, I immediately knew this was going to be a big deal for games. My enthusiasm for the technology (and probably some begging) got me put in charge of a specialized team that focused on testing our games with these cards, which was pretty cool.

There were many emerging players and names on the 3D hardware front — S3 ViRGE, Matrox Mystique, ATI Rage, 3Dfx Voodoo, etc. — and they were all chomping at the bit to show off their capabilities. Interplay had a new building a few miles away from their main location that housed several production teams and the OEM division. The latter was responsible for working out deals with the various hardware vendors to customize and bundle our games with their gear, and OEM was where all those 3D cards were coming from.

Because the business was growing so fast, they soon needed their own QA team. Although it was tough to leave the group of people that I had gotten to know so well, it was a great opportunity, so I, along with a few others, packed up our things and moved over in the middle of 1996.

It would turn out to be a rough patch in my career, but a very valuable one as well.

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My start in the videogame industry

Note: This is a revised version of an email I had sent to my Quality Assurance (QA) team while working at THQ in 2010. I was a Sr. Manager in Phoenix, Arizona at the time, and these were meant to be a regular, ongoing series about my experiences in the industry. Although I only managed to get a few of these written, I’m happy to be bringing them back to life here at GHG.

20140423_pacmanA question I receive on a regular basis is, “How did you get your start?”

This can be a tough question to answer, especially when people ask it in the context of why I managed QA at a publisher instead of working as a Producer or at a game development studio. As with most things in life, it was not planned this way, and there were many decisions — both good and bad — that factored into and affected my career path. Before I actually began working in this industry — and even several years into it — I really did believe my future was in game design.

But first, I have to rewind to the beginning, circa 1980, when my love of all things videogames started. I was fascinated by arcade games, and clearly remember “playing” Asteroids for the first time. I utterly failed at it, since my still-developing brain had trouble understanding the concept of button controls instead of a joystick. I’m sure it would still intimidate me if I ran into it today!

20140423_dkIt didn’t matter, though. Games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong had already sealed the deal, and it was in 1982 when my dad bought the family an Atari 2600, a console whose success Atari was never able to duplicate. It’s popular to hate on 2600 games like Pac-Man and E.T., but I liked them. Did I know they were poorly made games? Sure, but by the same token, playing the bad games made me appreciate the great ones like Yar’s Revenge, Space Invaders, and River Raid.

Several years later in 1984, our first computer arrived: The Apple //e. I remember my dad saying it would be a good educational and home business tool, but let’s face it, it was all about the games and programming in BASIC and assembly! A very fond memory of the time was the plethora of magazines and books chock-full of programs, and I remember transcribing nearly all of them and saving them on disk. They were also ridden with syntax and logic errors, so this taught me how to troubleshoot code before the days of more advanced debuggers and compilers. While it annoyed me when programs wouldn’t work correctly the first time, I was later thankful since they helped me improve at general problem solving and how to improvise and create my own code.

20140423_archonI loved game design at an early age as well. Around 1986, my best friend and I worked on a prototype design for Archon III in our spare time. We were huge fans of Archon and Archon II: Adept, and I’m not sure what our naive minds were thinking, but we actually thought that if we submitted this to Electronic Arts (EA), we would somehow get jobs working for them creating this game ourselves!

Imagine our disappointment after having spent months working on graphics, gameplay, stories, and maps, and not even receive so much as a thank you letter? We were crushed, but it taught us to keep idealistic wishes in check with reality.

In the end, it was still a fun experience, and coincidentally, we used one of EA’s own programs at the time, Adventure Construction Set, to create the sprites and map layouts for our design. It was extremely time-consuming, but this gave us a deep appreciation for the work artists and animators put into all the games we loved to play.

20140423_btBesides the Archon series, Interplay’s The Bard’s Tale was a huge influence on me, and I still remember the day I loaded it up for the very first time. I had borrowed it from my neighbor across the street after having played some street football after school, and even on the Apple //e, with its 280×192 resolution and 7 colors, I was blown away. The graphics and animation had a unique style I had never seen before, and the battles were fast, fun, and descriptive. A desire to work on games like this for a living began to materialize in my head once again.

I remember reading an article in an old magazine (I believe it was K Power), which described the rubber band gun battles that Richard Garriott, better known as Lord British, would have with his team while working on the Ultima games. It sounded like such a fun place to work, and it would turn out that this fun spirit in the industry was actually quite accurate.

Fast-forward to 1995. My love for all things Interplay was still going strong, and that summer, my friend who worked there asked if I wanted “a cool job playing games”, wording that I know makes QA professionals twitch uncontrollably.

Unsurprisingly, though, I took the job.

I spent my first day there testing a final version of Castles II for the Mac. I had no idea what I was doing, there was no such thing as training, I was staring at printouts full of abbreviations like NF, PF, and NB, and I was surrounded by strangers. I almost quit after my first day.

I always thought back on that when I saw new Testers quit before they were through their first week. I wondered if they did so because they felt the same way I did?

Anyway, I stuck with it, and after a few weeks, everything clicked. However, I quickly learned the difference between what I played and liked as a consumer and what I was required to test. Just because I really liked Descent and Virtual Pool didn’t mean that I’d be assigned to games like that all the time. Early on, I tested a CD-ROM musical documentary and a sluggish Myst-like adventure game, both of which sat on buggy middleware. Needless to say, this didn’t exactly align with my plans to work on the next Bard’s Tale!

So that’s what initially got my foot in the door: lots of passion for gaming, a little bit of luck in terms of timing, and an open mind.

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I’m loving South Park: The Stick of Truth

It was 1997 when I first saw the original Spirit of Christmas video clip circulating around the office at Interplay. I, like so many of my coworkers, sat there laughing hysterically at these cute little foul-mouthed kids. South Park was gaining some considerable buzz as the TV show was getting ready to premiere later that same year. The rest, as they say, is history.

Throughout its ongoing 17-year run, it has remained popular, and still provides some great laughs and its trademark biting social commentary on world events, celebrities, movies, race, videogames, sports, disabilities, you name it. They are equal opportunity offenders — offending everyone equally — but I usually find myself agreeing with the underlying message of each episode. That’s been a key quality of the show: They know what we’re all thinking, but they’re bold enough to say it. Loudly.

My interest was through the roof in 1999 when Bigger, Longer & Uncut was released, which I just loved (it was a great year for movies in general). The episode Chinpokomon also first aired that year, which is still one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. I haven’t been able to look at anything Pokemon-related in quite the same way ever since!

I started playing The Stick of Truth last week, and it’s been a fantastic game so far. Even though there are characters I’m unfamiliar with and surely references that are going over my head, the core components of what make South Park great are all here. The important qualities that make a successful RPG are also here, courtesy of Obsidian, a developer who knows a thing or two about the genre.

I’m very impressed by the look of the game, which is so convincing that you could swear you’re watching an episode of the show. Controls are crisp, objects you can interact with are clear, and there is a nice variety of activities and quests to complete. Combat requires attention and very good timing, which is similar to the excellent Paper Mario series.

Although I’ll be 40 in less than 4 weeks, this game’s reaffirming the fact that I still love lowbrow, childish humor, and probably always will. It also makes me want to go back and watch the show again, but for now, it’s time to continue my quest as Douchebag.

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