NTSC-RePlay 012: Risky Business

[Neon Ignition]

The videogame industry is a constant subject of discussion on the board but some key sites offer a level of discourse that goes beyond armchair fan observations by having people who in some shape or form have actually worked in the industry itself. It was this observation that led marcus to start a thread on 16 March 2003 discussing what experiences everyone had had within the business. It's what we will be looking at nearly twenty years later as...


This isn't NTSC-UK... it's NTSC-RePlay


From development, to media, to publishing or distribution and sales etc. Are or have you ever been involved in the games industry and if so what were your main takeaways from it?

If not directly within the industry, what has been your experience of the business and has it changed in the last 20 years?

[Neon Ignition]

My connection is... none

I got my name in an issue of Total! magazine once though for submitting an Earthworm Jim 2 cheat... that's... yeah, that's as close as I get though

[Asura]

You probably won't get much here unless we have people who have been out of the industry for a long time. Media industries are surprisingly small and Google sees all.

[QualityChimp]

I have a friend that works at Rare.
The Elite Systems offices were about 3 minutes from my house growing up.
I have a friend who worked at Codemasters and now at Pixeltoys (Warhammer 40K: Freeblade)

That's as good as it gets, I'm afraid.

[Atticus]

^^^ Doesn’t count unless you skated with them ^^^

[briareos_kerensky]

I did a 3-months stage in Ubisoft Italy back in the day, two/three years before Beyond Good & Evil. Back in the day Ubi Italy was a smallish studio, mostly doing support jobs for the main French branch and other bigger studio. Modelled a ton of tables, chairs, and random forniture I think was never used in any game, but at least it was a paid stage and not a "come work for free for a few months then we'll dump you" kind of stage.
Place and people were OK but that cemented my idea that's better to play games than making them...then a few years ago Mario & Rabbids comes out and I'm like "eh, coulda've worked on a Mario game"...now I think I dodged not just a bullet but a carpet bombing attack for choosing to go to my first proper job instead, which was...modelling and animating characters for Flash-based games associated with toys found in Kinder eggs.
Fun stuff, plenty of creative control and the job wasn't particularly hard...but it took me one hour and a half to get to the office.
After that I started freelancing and briefly worked for a company making mobile games. There I did edit just one video and actually had to sue them for missing payments.
After that nothing game related...unless you count military simulators as games.

[nonny]

I was a test lead working on localising Final Fantasy 8 into european languages for its PC launch.

Not proper game development but I did get 3 months to work from home with a Playstation Dec console to get acquainted with the game. If anything the experience taught me I didn't want to work in game QA long term and I pivoted to financial software.

[Neon Ignition]

Honestly, all these little stories of career routes are fascinating

[kellog7]

I worked as an animator for a game company for 5 years, between 1998 and 2003. I'd previously been a traditional animator, working on films and TV series, but around '95 the work started drying up. I was freelancing at the time and having trouble making ends meet, but in 1997 I had a chance conversation with another animator, who told me that game companies were recruiting people like me as the new consoles were capable of more realistic graphics. I remember walking home that day and making a detour into WH Smiths to pick up a copy of Edge, which back then had pages of jobs advertised. All in all, it took me just over a year of applications and interviews before I was hired.

The first year or two of work was great - initially they gave me a month to learn the software before I'd have to work on production stuff. We were using a program called Lightwave, which was extremely easy to get your head around, particularly coming from a traditional background, as the old pencil and paper systems of timing were really similar to the scrolling timebar for computer animating. I was doing in-game animations after 2 weeks, and getting better paid than I ever did in my previous jobs.The work environment was a little weird though. Out of a company of 60 there was one female employee - a big difference from regular animation studios where the balance is a bit more even - so there was a real lad culture everywhere. Lots of porn being shared around etc Also, a lot of the programmers resented people like me being brought in. These guys had been with the company since the 8-bit days,when they'd be doing 'animation' on sprites - very basic stuff like jumps and runs, and they didn't think it was necessary to hire people like me. You'd constantly be bumping heads with them with your animations. I'd do a nice run or walk animation and they'd send it back and ask me to strip out some frames to cut down on memory. Eventually I got the hang of it and started to know what would work and what wouldn't.

Like I said the first two years was amazing. The company mainly worked on film licence tie-ins for the PS1, and a project would take approx 15 months from beginning to end, with a small team of about 13 people. Even with a bit of crunch time at the end, it was never really hard, and you'd get a bonus every 6 months, plus a bit of down time at the end of a game where you sat around doing nothing. The types of games we were guaranteed to sell, so there was tons of money floating around.

The rot set in when we made the jump to the PS2. Bigger teams and longer production and new software to be learned. The atmosphere went downhill rapidly and they started moving people to other games after their crunch time had ended, so if you'd been working 7 days a week for a month, instead of having a bit of down time, you might end up being put onto another game's crunch period. After another couple of years they ended up getting rid of about 30 of us. I was given a cash settlement and escorted out of the building. I didn't work in games again. I learned Flash and retrained as a graphic artist/animator and went back to freelancing.

I've never really wanted to go back to the industry. When I see the complexity of modern games I often wonder what the atmosphere is like at those companies. I'm glad to have been a part of it all back at a time where you could genuinely have a bit of fun AND work hard for a decent pay. The games our company made weren't the best, one or two of them were quite good actually, but those small teams felt like a family.I hope the people working in the indie games studios you see everywhere nowadays get that vibe.

[QualityChimp]

These are all fascinating.
Thanks for sharing, all.

[fuse]

I have a friend

I was expecting some tall stories in here, but do pull the other one!

Very much an outsider looking in, but from writing the odd bit here and there, there was a period for a few years where I had a few opportunities to play some games early, poke my head around some offices, attend some industry events, and so on. I covered E3 (travel on my own dime, I'd add) but prior to that I'd also blagged my way in to a number of UK-based trade-only shows, though less with valid credentials and more just a want to see what was on show and to hoover up swag. The nature of these things meant most of my interactions were with marketing / PR folks, whose work seemed a hard lot and not something I'd fancy. That's about the extent of it for me.

[nonny]

These are all fascinating.
Thanks for sharing, all.

Yeah me too, it's a real eye opener and a great thread.

[Hirst]

I used to write occasional reviews for a fairly minor website back in the days when PR companies thought that having a .com website address meant you were some kind of big deal and not just a bunch of college students.

Most of the games I reviewed were mediocre ones that nobody else could be bothered with, but for some reason I got to do Shenmue 2 and was playing it about a fortnight before the PAL release.

A lot of the time they'd send you the full retail release so you could trade it into Gamestation later, so I don't have many of the games from back then left that aren't press copies. I kept my Shenmue 2 (came in what was basically a PAL Sega CD box), Metal Slug X PS1 (had to be played on a chipped machine weirdly) and a weird "limited" version of TOCA Race Driver for PS2 where the boxart looked like a ring binder.

[Hirst]

Bonus post!

[nonny]

I used to write reviews for this website... in fact my first ever review that got on here was Ico for the PS2 (yep I'm old) and it's still one of my favourite games.

When I moved to Australia I got involved in another site (xboxzone.com.au) as I was obsessed with Halo at the time and started to write reviews for them. I became an ambassador for Xbox and got quite alot of free games via that review process, plus got invited along to quite a few VIP launches line Halo 2, Gears of War 2. I think the best night out I've had is sitting at the bar at the Gears 2 launch and having an impromptu 10 mins chat with Cliff Blezinski who was trying to get served. Really nice bloke and very down to earth.

Best thing I've reviewed in that time was Rock Band as they sent me out the entire kit, drums, 2x guitars and a microphone. Got to keep the lot!!