Why Bother
From AboveTheGarage
Contents |
Why bother writing?
I think it's a compulsion. I like telling stories.
Why bother reading?
Because you like reading stories! As a 20 year veteran of the game business I've lived through a lot of astounding situations.
- For instance: This one time, at Virgin Interactive.
Things like that.
What are my credentials?
You can look at my official resume but it's kind of dry.
Most interestingly I ran product development for Virgin Interactive for a little over four years. During that time our wholesale sales went from $30 million to $180 million. I grew the product development staff from eight to 180. While growing we published a number of hit games. I gave a lot of people their start in the game business - because back in 1990, in Orange County, CA, there weren't any existing game developers.
Some famous people who worked for me that you might have heard of include David Perry, Tommy Tallarico and Neil Young.
Some less famous people that went on to great success include:
- David Bishop (now Senior Designer at Popcap Games);
- David Luehmann (now General Manager of Microsoft Game Studios);
- John Botti, who founded Black Op Studios;
- Lyle Hall (now general manager of Heavy Iron Studios);
- Seth Mendelsohn (now Director of Casual Games Product Development at The Walt Disney Company);
- Nick Bruty and Scott Quest, founders of Planet Moon Studios;
- and others.
And further it was all done on a strictly enforced budget.
We didn't just make hit games - we constantly innovated on the technology front.
In addition to Virgin Interactive, I've worked as a programmer on a number of games and media projects, and I built a new console game studio (with cofounders Jonathan Mavor and Jeff Petkau) from scratch. That studio (or a variant of it) is still producing games today using the technology and processes we developed over a three year period (2000 to 2002).
In 2005 I made a sideways career move, as I am prone to do, and became a network programmer at ArenaNet. Since I knew next to nothing about network programming this was a pretty big deal. I spent most of the first four years there learning everything I could about how Patrick Wyatt had architected the amazing server system that keeps Guild Wars running 24/7 even as we make changes to the game. I wrote several servers during that time, including the observer mode system (which had been already been started by Pat when I joined), the "Feat System", a relatively small project that records the Challenge Mission scores, and then the automated tournament system, which is still the most difficult thing I have done in my life. (What makes it doubly difficult is that it seems like it should be so easy! But once you add the 'ilities' in like restartability, reliability (100% uptime), network outage resilience, and so on, it becomes hard!) Starting in 2009 my colleague CS Lim and I started digging into the overall threading architecture and we made (I think) some pretty cool improvements. (Most of what you read in books about threading is wrong.) That was a lot of fun because there was nothing theoretical about it - all of the work was driven by systematic measurement. A lot of our intuitions flew out the door as we started measuring everything we could think of. Did I say that was a lot of fun? Yes, it was a lot of fun.
Now my main focus is on the launch of Guild Wars 2. Do I expect that to be a lot of fun? Yes, I think, in a career that has seen some pretty amazing achievements by the teams I have worked with, launch day for Guild Wars 2 is going to be incredibly exciting. It's one thing to finish a game and see it on the shelf. But how often do you get to watch your customers play? In Guild Wars 2 I will be able to run around with our players and see them enjoy the world. Yes, I expect it to be a very exciting time.
-30-
Nano-Plasm
BTW, I wrote a book. It's a techno-thriller! See Nano-Plasm.
