Thirteen1

There are a few questions that I can usually expect to be asked whenever I tell someone about my job in the games industry.

1.How did/do you get a job like that?
2.Can you get me any free games?
3.How DO you make that stuff move about on the TV?

I love the first question and I find I’m being asked it more and more – by students looking for work experience, by younger gamers who’ve been inspired by the games on their iPod touch, or by others just looking for a way into the industry.

My journey into the technical side of games started back in 1980, when I discovered the Sinclair ZX81 in my school, and it totally captured my imagination. I typed in all the programs in the user manual and was enthralled by the results produced on the screen. From there I graduated to a BBC Micro, and later a 32-bit Archimedes. Machines like these really were the games consoles of the time, and although we played a ton of games on them, we also started to figure out how these games were programmed and, crucially, started to figure out how to make our own.

We absorbed user manuals like sponges and we spent entire weekends painstakingly typing in source code from magazines. We examined and reverse engineered other people’s game code. We slowly learned how to build games, but of course our first attempts were clumsy – dodgy graphics, garish colours, bad sound. Over time though, our games got better and more refined as we learned from our mistakes and found better solutions.

Read The Full Article