ben is on the inter.net

When I was in school, all I heard about video games as a profession was:

It’s hard to get into the games industry!

I guess it’s true, most of the time. Having been “in the industry” for two years now, I can see how, for most people, it might be pretty hard. I’ve read stories of how people got in to Bungie or Blizzard or Valve (note: most of these companies only release games that will score 95% on metacritic) and most of them seem like wayyyyy more work than most people are capable of doing while writing programs for school or while working a full-time job once they get out of school. Some schools will help you get the job you want, but for most people they don’t end up at one of those schools. However, with an eye on the prize, it was easy for me to get in, and it might be easy for you, if you care to take the challenge.

I had wanted to work on video games my entire life. As a child, I would play my NES on an old Quasar TV until the blurry, badly-tinted, oft-fritzy image would give me headaches. I would finish a month’s work of algebra homework in a weekend so I could sit in the back of the class and play Scorched Earth. I beat Metroid II on the original Gameboy (note: is this the loneliest game of all time?). I was scared by X-Com. I loved video games. I wanted to make them! Lots and lots of people that I work with or that I know at other video game companies experienced the same or similar at a very young age.

I went to a private liberal arts school literally 15 minutes from where I grew up because they had an excellent music program and they had an interesting digital arts program. You see, when I was young, I didn’t think I’d have what it would take to get into game development, so I decided to tailor my life towards classical saxophone performance, but I decided that minoring in digital arts might help if I wanted to pay off my loans. By the end of my time at Stetson (4.5 years) I had earned two Bachelor’s degrees: Digital Arts - Computer Science and Digital Arts - Art (note: music was dropped within a few weeks). I did a lot of video game research, started programming homebrew games for the gameboy advance and the PC, and knew a whole lot about video editing and web design. I struck out for fame and fortune in Chicago, and landed a Technical Director job at a small web firm. I absolutely hated the job. This is the first lesson:

Lesson 1: Make friends with similar professional interests and stay in touch with them!

You see, I went to school with Juls, a fellow Digital Artist, and while I was in Chicago he upgraded from a mind-numbing job at a newspaper to a job making video games at EA, or at least, making UI art for video games. We stayed in touch and eventually EA started calling me. I really wanted to be a software engineer, but I knew that I had a better shot at doing UI art like Juls, so when they asked I applied as a UI Artist.

Lesson 2: If you have to, take the job you know you can get! Be careful, though. Starting out in Quality Assurance or Accounting might be difficult for you to transition into the final job role that you want. Make sure you know the career path for the job you want and if you feel you aren’t yet qualified for it, try for something lower or on a different but similar career path.

Interviews started, and I learned another lesson.

Lesson 3: For phone interviews, always use a land line!

I had one of my interviews in my car so I could have good cel reception, and the whole time I was worried that the people on speakerphone couldn’t hear me or that I couldn’t hear them. This interview was a disaster. However, while I was showing them my website portfolio, I learned the next lesson.

Lesson 4: If your website / code samples / design samples aren’t perfect, the people viewing them will likely hate them. However! If you can show them something memorable (as long as it’s not memorably terrible), you WILL get a follow up.

I had a pretty ugly website going into my phone interviews. It was obvious after about 5 minutes that the people from EA hated it; they didn’t seem to doubt my programming abilities but I know I wasn’t really happy with what was on display. As soon as I got off the phone I started on a new website, one that would focus on my strengths (programming). A few months later I got called in for an in-person interview, and I provided a link to the updated site. The people doing the interview were impressed! They still remembered the other site (many of them still refer to me on occasion as the “meat site” guy, something I may go into at a later date if I can find my backups), but I had a fresh new portfolio to show off at the in-person interviews.

Lesson 5: If you aren’t happy with how you’re doing in the first round of interviews, improve yourself before your next round.

I ended up getting an offer for a UI Art position; it was a much better salary than my previous job and I’d be working on video games, so I packed it all up and moved back to Florida. After a year of working as a UI artist, I made my transition over to Software Engineering, and I’ve now shipped two titles with that classification (and am thick with a beard working on the third).

So, let’s review my steps to success:

1. I kept in contact with my friends from school (networking seems to be the most important factor to most career growth)
2. one of my friends got a job at a games studio
3. I had the skills necessary to get into a job that had openings, even though it wasn’t the job I wanted
4. I interviewed ok, but my second round of interviews went really well

And that’s really it. Don’t worry, the rest of my video game career is much more entertaining, and hopefully much more enlightening.

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed