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    Hot Jobs with Cool Companies
    Hot Jobs with Cool Companies
    Hot Jobs with Cool Companies
    Ebook69 pages57 minutes

    Hot Jobs with Cool Companies

    By Neil Plakcy

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Do you love playing video games? Wish you could get a job that would pay you to do what you love? Well, you can! The video game industry is big and growing, and there are always opportunities for new hires with the right skills.

    Let Hot Jobs with Cool Companies be your introduction to the video game industry. Sam Jacobs, a twenty-year veteran of the business, provides you an overview of where games have been and where they’re going, as well as information on the skills necessary to succeed, and where you can get the training you need.

    If you’re ready to stop playing around and get a job in the video game business, this is the book for you!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNeil Plakcy
    Release dateJun 21, 2011
    ISBN9781466101555
    Hot Jobs with Cool Companies
    Author

    Neil Plakcy

    Neil Plakcy’s golden retriever mysteries have been inspired by his own goldens, Samwise, Brody and Griffin. He has written and edited many other books; details can be found at his website, http://www.mahubooks.com. Neil, his partner, Brody and Griffin live in South Florida, where Neil is writing and the dogs are undoubtedly getting into mischief.

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      Book preview

      Hot Jobs with Cool Companies - Neil Plakcy

      Introduction: Breakout and Breaking In

      Want to play computer games for a living? I did that for nearly ten years, working for a developer and publisher of games for every computer platform and game console you can name. And you can, too. The video game industry continues to grow, with millions of consoles and games sold. In this book I’ll tell you about my background, a bit of history of the industry, the kinds of jobs available, and how you can get them.

      In 1979, I was a college senior in Philadelphia, spending most of my evenings and all of my spare quarters at University City Pinball, a storefront arcade just off campus. It was a long, narrow room, lit by overhead fluorescents and the flashing multi-colored lights of the machines, with the sounds of bells, bumpers and paddles bouncing off the plain sheetrock walls.

      I wasn’t tempted by those bright lights, by Dolly Parton and King Kong and the Playgirl bunnies. Instead I headed to the back of the room, to a computerized game called Breakout, a kind of one-man ping pong where I batted a small ball up toward a wall of bricks. Each time the ball hit a brick, the brick disappeared and the ball ricocheted back toward my paddle. There was a narrow space above the wall of bricks, and if you could break through to that space, your ball would bounce back and forth between the top of the screen and the wall, building up points rapidly. That was the breakout.

      If you reached a certain score by the end of your game, before you missed the ball and used up your allotment of three tries, you got a free game. With luck, I could parlay a couple of quarters into an evening’s entertainment. I was hooked on video games, and if I could have then I’d have gladly signed up to spend the rest of my life in the glittering, noisy world of the electronic arcade.

      The video game industry wasn’t as developed then, so I had to wait ten years to break into it. My big opportunity came with a company called GameTek, one of the earliest to develop games for the Commodore 64, Apple IIe, and, as we used to note on our boxes, IBM, Tandy, and other 100% compatible computers. We made dozens of simple games for kids and adults, under licenses from Fisher Price, Milton Bradley, and TV game shows such as Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud.

      I started out typing in the database for GameTek’s first Jeopardy! game, and when I’d finished, my boss suggested that since I already knew the answers and questions in the game, I should do some testing once the programmer had finished his work. I spent many hours finding typos in the database and errors in the programming, called bugs, and when I’d finished, my boss asked me to convey my bug list to the programmer. In those days, one guy, often working from his basement, wrote the code, designed the graphics and recorded the simple sounds that accompanied the games.

      Together he and I figured out what had caused the bugs I’d seen, and he fixed them. When the bug-testing process was complete, my boss asked me to write the instruction manual, since I knew best how the game was played, and then come up with a list of the game’s top features to put on the box.

      I repeated this process again and again, until one day a new boss gave me the title of producer, based on all the work I was doing. I began to learn more about the video game industry, as I worked on increasingly sophisticated games for new, technologically advanced platforms. We began to hire artists to create the graphics for our games, and then animators skilled at working with three-dimensional models. We hired professional musicians and voice-over artists to create sound and music. Our programmers learned new languages and new hardware platforms, and as the games got increasingly complex, they had to work in teams to get projects complete. Without realizing it, I had gotten in on the ground floor of the expansion of the world of computer games, and was able to witness much of its growth and development.

      Today’s game business is booming. Latest figures show that Nintendo DS has sold nearly 150 million consoles, followed by the Wii at 87 million, the PSP (68 million), the Xbox (54 million) and the PS3 (51 million). That’s not counting the millions of personal computers and the tens of millions of games sold for them, as well as the massively multiplayer online games like Farmville.

      These kinds of sales figures have led to burgeoning growth in the

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