Game Resume: Doing Time

I started professionally in the game industry in 1998. The sad part is I didn't get to work on a game that actually shipped till 2003. Yup, five years of telling everyone "Yes, I really do work on games!" but having no proof.

I got my first industry job programming at Running With Scissors. This was back during the heady days when places like Panasonic were throwing money at any game with a snazzy character. RWS had just finished POSTAL and I came on during a time when martini hot tub parties in Vegas and leisurely, 3 hour lunches were part of the work week.
It was like a dream--this is how everyone thought the game industry acted--and it was really going on! Until... we had to make a new game.

We went through several iterations for the next game and even secured funding for a little while. At one point RWS artists were hand-painting intricate sculptures, photographing them, and scanning them into the computer to be used in a new adventure game. It was pretty cool in theory and totally insane from a development standpoint when you saw it in action. It would literally have taken years to see that vision through. RWS never got any versions of that game finished, but we did make a pretty sweet game a few years later.

After RWS slowly closed down in 1999, I moved to Orlando to work at n-Space just before the world was going to end. There, I worked on a Duke Nukem game for the PS2 and helped with an Austin Powers game to coincide with the new movie. Neither made it to Gold, but it was a pleasant, mediocre ride along the way. As the PS2 Duke game floundered and Take Two slowly distanced itself from n-Space, I decided to jump ship and head back toRWS for POSTAL 2. It seemed ridiculous to me that the game would go from top-down isometric to a first-person shooter, but I knew it would be more fun than what I was doing at the time.

Next update--a game that ships!

But before that, let's look at a picture from Weapon of Choice's past. Here's a very early version of Xerxe's Jet Engine gun in a old test level with a simple background.

The flames aren't quite as big now, but I promise it's even more fun to use in the current version!