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Feb
How I got to be a video game developer21
posted by James Kay
Working in video games seems to be a very popular dream for many. It was a dream for me too, this blog post covers my history with the medium and how I finally ended up making video games for a living. It's very easy to wax lyrical with nostalgia about the early days of video games, so that is exactly what I'll be doing here in this post.
Growing up I had the great fortune of being the offspring to a technophile father. Even to this day my father has the latest and coolest gadgets, even before I do, which is disgraceful, of course - a man of his age should be frightened of new things, not embrace them. But in the end it served a useful purpose in my upbringing as I was exposed to computers from a very early age.
The first piece of hardware I remember him buying for the home was the Texas Instruments 99/4A home computer. Of course, we had little electronic gadgets before then, like a talking robot calculator and the occasional LED handheld game, but this was the first computer I got my mitts on. We had books, of course, with pages of code, which I would copy over and type out on wasted afternoons, then laboriously save on casette tape. A lot of these were simple little games, but the IT-99/4A also had a cartridge slot, and we had a cartridge game called "Munch Man". Neighbours, defying the natural laws of probability, also owned a TI-99/4A and had the game "Parsec", which I borrowed endlessly. It was an awesome but frighteningly difficult side-scrolling shooter that had me hooked. It took me until last year (!!) to realise that pressing up and down on the keyboard would slow down your craft, which would have made parts of the game a lot easier. Sadly, by the time I really got into making my own little games on the machine, just as my understanding of it grew, the TI-99/4A committed suicide after I switched it on one morning; a little puff of sour-smelling smoke appearing from its fan grill.
During this time my father had brought home what is now laughably considered a "portable PC". It was as big and heavy as a suitcase loaded with bricks. The top came off and had a keyboard on it, revealing a tiny green/black screen and 5,25" floppy disc drives - this is the days when floppy discs were actually floppy! He gleefully showed me "Microsoft Flight Simulator" which had me hooked immediately - well, the dogfighting section of it anyway. But when he brought home his first desktop PC, a pathetic little thing showing, what was at the time an awesome 16 colours on screen at the same time, I got hooked on creating things on it.
One piece of software he had was CAD (not even AutoCAD), a drawing package for making blueprints. It was vector-based, so you could make highly detailed drawings of architecture or machinery. I used it to make little cartoon drawings, zooming in and in to hide little easter eggs here and there. It was my first experience of creating art on a PC and I was loving it.
On this PC and its slightly more powerful successor I learned to code in BASICA. I had a stack of grid-paper notebooks on which I drew my graphics, after which I'd write the code to draw it on-screen. I created simple arcade games, a fully functioning and finished text adventure and more, as well as getting introduced to more and more games to play myself. I think I always had an affinity with games but I distinctly remember playing King's Quest I and being blown away by it. It could be the game that made me realise it was a powerful medium and I wanted to work in it. I was a character on-screen walking around in a fully realised world, it was astounding! Moreso than the many Game & Watch games I had played, this was an awakening for me. At this point I was researching more real "gaming" (as opposed to playing games on a PC). I saved up and bought the original Gameboy, with Tetris packed in, sought out friends with consoles and played at their houses. I was hooked, not just on gaming itself, but the possibilities of the medium. I was sure I wanted to make video games myself.
Around this time the BBS (Bulletin Board System) sprung up, years before the internet is what it is today. I had to dial in a number and as soon as the phone started making noises like an 80-year old smoker coughing up a lung I had to put the received on our modem so the PCs could connect, one to one. Thanks to this system I got access to the greatest shareware games and also heralded my foray into "commercial art". I would use a package called TheDraw to create ASCII and ANSI art, sometimes even animated, for various BBS front-ends in return for higher download ratios. I also made several attempts to hook up with other people, programmers, to make video games, but as is often the case with amateur projects they never came to fruition.
At this point I enrolled in art college. My entry exam, a day long of doing small art projects, didn't go well at all and I was close to being rejected until I dragged the head of the department to the only PC they had at the college, his secretary's, and showed him some of my digital art, at which point my enrolment was guaranteed. This art college was on the cusp of embracing the new media so were highly impressed at my "advanced" skills in this field. Indeed, during the course of my study all old equipment was being replaced by Apple computers and Silicon Graphic workstations. The greatest upshot of which is that my year had the advantages of both the old and the new. We learned splicing 16 millimeter film and linear editing on SVHS sets or developing your own film, as well as Media100 non-linear editing and digital media creation. Then in my final year, just as it seemed likely I was being groomed for a career in video production I was suddenly reminded of my motivations. What did I want to do with my life after college? Make video games, of course, how could I have forgotten that in 4 years of toying with cool equipment?
After graduation I packed up and moved to London, then still a hotbed of video game development. It took me a couple of months and many many resumes and cover letters, but once I got my first interview at a game development company I was in, and hooked. I haven't looked back since, and that was well over a decade ago, approaching a decade and a half now, if I allow myself to feel terribly old for a second.
It is true that a passion for video games is somewhat of a requirement to work in the medium. Work can be hard, sometimes tedious, it certainly isn't the pizza-eating, nerf-circus people seem to think it is. But I am very glad I took the time to get a degree in a vaguely associated field. To this day I find myself using knowledge I learned from my college days, as it gave me a strong foundation of understanding visual media and gave me a wider sense of perspective, allowing me to be influenced by subjects outside the field of video games too. On top of that, being in possession of a degree helped smooth my entry into Japan and getting a visa. I'd have loved to say my years at college also gave me a chance to party, drink and socialise, but possibly presciently, I learned my hard graft attitudes there and spent most of my time there learning to cope with "overtime", little sleep and backbreaking work.
And that, as they say, is that.
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Growing up I had the great fortune of being the offspring to a technophile father. Even to this day my father has the latest and coolest gadgets, even before I do, which is disgraceful, of course - a man of his age should be frightened of new things, not embrace them. But in the end it served a useful purpose in my upbringing as I was exposed to computers from a very early age.
The first piece of hardware I remember him buying for the home was the Texas Instruments 99/4A home computer. Of course, we had little electronic gadgets before then, like a talking robot calculator and the occasional LED handheld game, but this was the first computer I got my mitts on. We had books, of course, with pages of code, which I would copy over and type out on wasted afternoons, then laboriously save on casette tape. A lot of these were simple little games, but the IT-99/4A also had a cartridge slot, and we had a cartridge game called "Munch Man". Neighbours, defying the natural laws of probability, also owned a TI-99/4A and had the game "Parsec", which I borrowed endlessly. It was an awesome but frighteningly difficult side-scrolling shooter that had me hooked. It took me until last year (!!) to realise that pressing up and down on the keyboard would slow down your craft, which would have made parts of the game a lot easier. Sadly, by the time I really got into making my own little games on the machine, just as my understanding of it grew, the TI-99/4A committed suicide after I switched it on one morning; a little puff of sour-smelling smoke appearing from its fan grill.
During this time my father had brought home what is now laughably considered a "portable PC". It was as big and heavy as a suitcase loaded with bricks. The top came off and had a keyboard on it, revealing a tiny green/black screen and 5,25" floppy disc drives - this is the days when floppy discs were actually floppy! He gleefully showed me "Microsoft Flight Simulator" which had me hooked immediately - well, the dogfighting section of it anyway. But when he brought home his first desktop PC, a pathetic little thing showing, what was at the time an awesome 16 colours on screen at the same time, I got hooked on creating things on it.
One piece of software he had was CAD (not even AutoCAD), a drawing package for making blueprints. It was vector-based, so you could make highly detailed drawings of architecture or machinery. I used it to make little cartoon drawings, zooming in and in to hide little easter eggs here and there. It was my first experience of creating art on a PC and I was loving it.
On this PC and its slightly more powerful successor I learned to code in BASICA. I had a stack of grid-paper notebooks on which I drew my graphics, after which I'd write the code to draw it on-screen. I created simple arcade games, a fully functioning and finished text adventure and more, as well as getting introduced to more and more games to play myself. I think I always had an affinity with games but I distinctly remember playing King's Quest I and being blown away by it. It could be the game that made me realise it was a powerful medium and I wanted to work in it. I was a character on-screen walking around in a fully realised world, it was astounding! Moreso than the many Game & Watch games I had played, this was an awakening for me. At this point I was researching more real "gaming" (as opposed to playing games on a PC). I saved up and bought the original Gameboy, with Tetris packed in, sought out friends with consoles and played at their houses. I was hooked, not just on gaming itself, but the possibilities of the medium. I was sure I wanted to make video games myself.
Around this time the BBS (Bulletin Board System) sprung up, years before the internet is what it is today. I had to dial in a number and as soon as the phone started making noises like an 80-year old smoker coughing up a lung I had to put the received on our modem so the PCs could connect, one to one. Thanks to this system I got access to the greatest shareware games and also heralded my foray into "commercial art". I would use a package called TheDraw to create ASCII and ANSI art, sometimes even animated, for various BBS front-ends in return for higher download ratios. I also made several attempts to hook up with other people, programmers, to make video games, but as is often the case with amateur projects they never came to fruition.
At this point I enrolled in art college. My entry exam, a day long of doing small art projects, didn't go well at all and I was close to being rejected until I dragged the head of the department to the only PC they had at the college, his secretary's, and showed him some of my digital art, at which point my enrolment was guaranteed. This art college was on the cusp of embracing the new media so were highly impressed at my "advanced" skills in this field. Indeed, during the course of my study all old equipment was being replaced by Apple computers and Silicon Graphic workstations. The greatest upshot of which is that my year had the advantages of both the old and the new. We learned splicing 16 millimeter film and linear editing on SVHS sets or developing your own film, as well as Media100 non-linear editing and digital media creation. Then in my final year, just as it seemed likely I was being groomed for a career in video production I was suddenly reminded of my motivations. What did I want to do with my life after college? Make video games, of course, how could I have forgotten that in 4 years of toying with cool equipment?
After graduation I packed up and moved to London, then still a hotbed of video game development. It took me a couple of months and many many resumes and cover letters, but once I got my first interview at a game development company I was in, and hooked. I haven't looked back since, and that was well over a decade ago, approaching a decade and a half now, if I allow myself to feel terribly old for a second.
It is true that a passion for video games is somewhat of a requirement to work in the medium. Work can be hard, sometimes tedious, it certainly isn't the pizza-eating, nerf-circus people seem to think it is. But I am very glad I took the time to get a degree in a vaguely associated field. To this day I find myself using knowledge I learned from my college days, as it gave me a strong foundation of understanding visual media and gave me a wider sense of perspective, allowing me to be influenced by subjects outside the field of video games too. On top of that, being in possession of a degree helped smooth my entry into Japan and getting a visa. I'd have loved to say my years at college also gave me a chance to party, drink and socialise, but possibly presciently, I learned my hard graft attitudes there and spent most of my time there learning to cope with "overtime", little sleep and backbreaking work.
And that, as they say, is that.
Comment in our forums ...
