How I got into Gaming, Part 1

Introduction
An old Producer friend, Matt Powers called me the other day to ask if I might write a small note about my experiences as a Lead Game Designer for an article he was doing for Gamasutra, and it dawned on me that I should include these notes on my own blog on Gamasutra, while I’m young enough to still remember them :-)

Paying your Dues
In kicking off my long history of notes as a Professional Game Designer I’m going to set the way-back machine to before I got my first full-time job working in-house as a Game Designer.

The first thing to note is, unless your fortunate enough to have a friend or family member who works in or owns a game development studio you will have to have to fight really hard to break into the field. In my case it meant holding down other jobs and willing to come home at night to pound away on the computer to develop your own games.

It’s true that I started off programming at the age of 13 and by 15 had published my first game, Diamond Hunter for the Atati 800, but shareware games weren't known for making people rich and for me it was no exception.

So for many years while I made these shareware games, building up my experience to impress the big-boys I worked many different non-video game development jobs, my first being as an Assistant Manager for an Arcade and Mini-Golf course. I would say an easy job to get for a kid right out of school who knew all the latest coin-op video games and was a master of Mini-Golf lol.

But once I left my home town of Big Bear Lake things became more complicated and expensive, including the computer systems I wanted to work on at the time, which was the Atari ST.

In Corona, CA where my brother and I moved to there was lots of work opportunities, unfortunately none in game development at the time, so we took whatever jobs came our way. For me it was working for Marie Callender's as a Busboy and Pie Maker, while at the same time working as a Press Operator at a Mold Injection company, both of which were full time jobs. It was crazy, for when I left Marie Callender's only a few hours off before I had to get over to my graveyard shift at the plastic company.

As you might have guessed, this left me no time for programming after work, but through the law of attraction it would pay off down the road.

You see, while working at the plastic company one late night I was given an assignment to mold these little plastic cartridges… yes, video game cartridges. So, after a little detective work on my behalf I found out that there was a small company, Elcom System right up the street who developed the video game ROMs for game publishers.

Now I knew they didn't make the games themselves, I saw it as an opportunity to learn more about the field, if I could get my foot in the door. So at every opportunity I had I would ride my bike by the company, stop in and ask the secretary, “Do you have a job for someone with video game experience?”

The answer for months and months was “Sorry, No!”

I must have seemed annoying to the poor lady, but I would say around my 15th time in that front door and hearing no again, I hear a man say… “Wait!” from an office in the back.

A fairly short man came walking out into the lobby and asked who I was and why I kept coming by. I promptly told him my story and that I wanted to work for him, where he asked if I knew anything about TTL Electronics or working with circuit boards and I said no, my experience was in making games. He then looked at me and said, “Your Hired!” come back Monday next week. I was confused, but happy at the same time. He ended that conversation by telling me, he wasn’t giving me a job for my experience, he was giving me a job because of my tenacity. He said, "I've heard you come in here time after time hearing the word no and yet here you are every month asking again, you’re the type of person I like working for me!"

I didn’t know it at the time but Gerry Weddle, the owner of Elcom Systems was a multimillionaire who had spent much of his life building up companies across the US and then selling them, a man who really knew his stuff and would become a mentor to me over the next two years. Especially when he decided to put my game development skills in action when he formed Corona Micro, which was to be a shareware game software branch of his company.

This only lasted for a few years, for when a large financial crisis hit Elcom Systems it quickly spread to Corona Micro, leaving Gerry with a tough call, that to sell the whole company off to his business partner, who had little to no interest video games. Gerry pulled me aside and wanted me to stay on, but it was clear that staying at the company wouldn’t include game development anymore, so sadly I had to walk away.

At this point I retired from working full-time to devote more time for game development, only working for others part-time through a company called Thomas Temporary, a temp employment agency in Corona, CA. During this time I would develop a number of different RPG games that would be published through Astra System Software. A company originally known for making one of the top-of-the-line hard drives for the Atari ST’s. But when I showed up on their doorstep with a number of video games for the ST the owner thought it would be cool to jump into the game field.

Still not making a full living off games yet, I was forced to once again take a full-time job, but this time it was working for Pep-Boys in Corona. While this wasn’t my bliss, it was my second bliss, for I had always been into cars in some way or another, having taken auto shop in high school.

I would continue working as an auto mechanic and making shareware games at night, until I got my big break with Virgin Games in Irvine, CA in October 1991.

But that’s the next story :-)