Through the Mirror

As Borges so eloquently illustrated in "Borges and I", the author is not the same person as the persona of the author. So, I begin by putting this "I" under the sign of uncertainty. The "I" that you see here is not the same "I" who writes these words. Consider yourself warned.

I have had many names in many places, which is only fitting because I am not always the same person. I have been Zolton. I have been Eyejinx. If you've seen me in a beta-test or public forum, one of those names is probably how you know me.

I have a long history with computers, stretching back to the days of cassette drives and monochrome monitors (the days of punch cards I have some recollection of, but those were not media that I ever crafted). I am older than I suppose I would really like to be, although I do not begrudge my years.

These days, I work more than I play in the electronic worlds, which is not to say that I don't play rather a lot. But, one of the ways in which I make my life is by designing games.

Of course, it was a rather odd road that brought me here. Once upon a time I studied literature and literary theory, spending more time with books in my hand than keyboard and mouse. If you look at the other writings here you will notice rather a lot of jargon, reference, and allusion. I blame my education for that. One day (such things always seem to happen at such times) I was reading the paper and discovered that a local company was accepting beta-testers for a game they were developing (if you care for such details, the company was VR-1, and the game was Ultracorps). I went to their web-site and signed up for the beta, little knowing what I was in for.

It did not take long before I became entranced with this new world, for I have always loved learning and I have always loved games. It was easy to lose hours and entire days in the game world because it was a very good game. Over time, I learned a great deal about what a beta is and how it works (and perhaps more importantly how it does not work), and I made a few friends and a few enemies and conquered some worlds along the way.

Over time I became more and more interested in the shaping of games, and I began to ask my new friends (some of whom worked in the games industry) about what they did and how they did it and how one might begin to do what they did. I won't bore you with the details of everything they told me; suffice to say I discovered that one of the common points of entry into the industry is through becoming an internal tester. When the opportunity arose, I applied for a testing job at VR-1, and they fairly promptly declined my services.

I was somewhat heartbroken, but not altogether discouraged, and I continued to do beta testing and to learn what I could about the industry. In the midst of quizzing one of my friends about what sort of a role I would be suited for in the industry, he suggested that "designer" was probably a good fit for me, and by the way he was looking to hire one for a new project that his company was developing. I wish I could say that I jumped at the chance, but I didn't. In fact, it took me about a year to figure out that I really did want to leave the academic world behind and to align the other factors in my life before I was ready to accept the job. Luckily for me, the job was still available.

So, that led to my first professional game development gig, at Atomic Games, Inc.  It is an exceedingly rare event that someone gets hired as a lead designer with no industry experience, but Keith Zabaloui (owner and president of Atomic) took a chance on me, and I am grateful that he did.  My first project was a science-fiction strategy/combat game.  Keith and I developed the design collaboratively, and I still hope that it finds its way to production some day, as I'm rather proud of it, but  unfortunately I cannot talk about in any detail.  The games industry being what it is, the project was cancelled, and with no other development deals on the table, the studio suffered an almost complete meltdown.

At this point, I actually had to go through the job process the normal way: submitting resumes and cover letters, doing phone interviews, hitting up my contacts for leads, pounding the pavement as they call it.  My search eventually led me to Red Storm Entertainment (a division of Ubisoft), where I worked as a designer for almost four years.  Again, my first project was a science-fiction game, although this time a character-driven, third-person action type.  However, that project was also cancelled, and in its place I was assigned to The Sum of All Fears, which is my first published game.  Following up that success, I got a chance to work on more Clancy-based games (Ghost Recon 2, Rainbow Six: Lockdown), and a non-Clancy game that was, unfortunately, also cancelled.  When it became clear that the only plans Ubisoft had for the Red Storm studio were to make more squad-based military and police FPS games, I decided, reluctantly, to move on.

After looking around the industry a bit, I found a job description for what looked like my ideal job: working with multiple teams to improve game designs.  That's how I landed at THQ, where I am currently employed as a Director of Creative Management.  Par for the course to date, I'm working on all kinds of interesting things that I can't necessarily talk about, but I continue to learn, and to share some of the gleanings of that through this site.