A lot of people ask me, like I’m sure they ask you if you’re also working on games, “How did you get into the game industry?”

For me, it was about a few things leading up to where I am today. First of all, I’ve almost always played them starting with the VCS and so on. Even BBS games like Tradewars. So there is clearly some passion there that drove me towards my inevitable downward spiral into the video game industry.

When I was young I played games, read magazines like Nintendo Power and basically anything else I could get my hands on that was related to them. This is probably where I inferred the idea of testing from, even if it wasn’t directly mentioned so specifically.

Back in 2000 I started getting interested in Linux, through an online avatar based chat system I met some nice people that helped me convert to using it on my computers. Naturally I wanted to play games on Linux, and not just Tux Racer or XBill, commercial quality games. At the 2001 (or 2000, I can’t remember) Linux World Conference and Expo in New York City I ventured over to the Loki booth and much to my wallets sadness bought Quake 3: Arena in the tin box. I met a number of nice people there, including some Slashdot editors, a few fine folks at the Slackware and Mandrake booths, finally at the end of the day I walked over to Penn Street Station and took the train back home to play around with Quake 3.

The fine folks at Loki ran an IRC channel where I got to talk with them and discuss their ports, including their bugs and whatnot. They even invited me to beta test their ports before they were released. This is about the first time I had ever had a game developer talk with me about their game and invite me to QA their work. At one point I noticed that the guy who posted the most on LinuxGames.com was chatting so I talked with him until he let me post over there as well.

LinuxGames.com also lead directly to the first real paying work I’ve ever had, Linux Game Programming published by Prima was indeed Technically Reviewed by myself. It is also arguably the worst editing I’ve ever done in my life. To anyone who purchased the book genuinely expecting the code to work; I apologize. If you expected the CD to be up to date, then I’m also sorry. Literally the day after I uploaded the cd-rom, the kernel source included with it was obsolete; Linus has released a new version. In any case the book is very outdated now. However, it did lead to the idea of Game Industry + Me = Money!

After Loki died a horrible death, full of drama and temporarily ruining the lives of a number of my friends, icculus.org went up.

Founded by Ryan “icculus himself” Gordon, icculus.org quickly became the sourceforge replacement for the discerning nerd with something vaguely interesting that tickles Ryan’s interest. Or if you’re me and know him personally you just get almost whatever crap you want hosted there. I even ran a Linux World Expo booth in 2003 for icculus.org, which was arguably the best Linux World booth ever: I met my girlfriend of the last 3 years there.

Hint: Microsoft’s Program Managers can be extremely persuasive with the selling, though I’m still not convinced.

Some time after that I went to work on a number of jobs, including Microsoft’s Xbox game QA team. I suppose this isn’t actually terribly interesting, but now you know the rest of the story.

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