How I Turned Playing Games into Research

How I Turned Playing Games into Research
Robert Pitts, out of the office.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been entranced by video games.  Since I got my NES over 20 years ago, I’ve owned and well worn over 10 different game systems.  During all that time, I had the goal of one day working on such games, but did not know the way.  This is the story of how I became a game designer.

 Having no clue how to actually get into the game industry, I went to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo for my Computer Science degree.  After graduating, learning about programming languages, AI, animation, and coding but no more about the game industry itself, I started looking for game testing positions.

The EA Redwood Shores studio was hiring, and I was soon testing on the first Godfather game.  After about a month of mainline testing, a new QA team was formed, designed to work closer with the developers and handle more focused tasks.  I was a part of this Dev Test group for about three months when an opening appeared in the Godfather venue design team.  Due to my hard work and some lucky timing, I was offered and agreed to transfer to development.  I spent the next 5 months working with 4 other designers before the game shipped.

This short experience, the contacts I formed, and the reputation I made for being hard-working and attentive to detail were enough to help me land my first design interview and subsequent job.  In 2007, I returned to EARS (now Visceral Games) to be the designer for two levels of Dead Space.

Mine is just one story of how to break into the game industry.  The advice I can give to those interested is to work hard, make friends in the right places, and never stop “researching” the games we all enjoy.