How did YOU get into the industry?
So. I’m an old bastard. I’ve been doing this for 25 years now. When I was starting out, there wasn’t a degree program dedicated to game design or anything like that. There was also 10 feet of snow on the ground and I had to walk two miles uphill both ways to work. Yeah. Get off my lawn.
One of the first things that locked into place for me was when we got our first soundcard for our PC. You see, in the Punic Ages, computers didn’t have integrated…anything. If you wanted sound beyond the basic bleeps and bloops of the PC speaker, you needed to get an additional card dedicated to sound. Our first one was a generic 8-bit Adlib ISA card which was essentially a basic FM synthesizer. It didn’t have digital audio and couldn’t play back basic recordings. Everything had to be generated on the Yamaha OPL2 chipset. That being said, it blew my mind. The first thing I tested was this game by Dynamix (they’re gone now) which was a subsidiary of Sierra On-Line (they’re also gone now). With the PC speaker, the opening scene originally had this goofy phrase that went into a basic theme song. When I loaded it up with the new Adlib card, I was greeted with a sweet, swelling chord that went into a more fully realized theme. I was blown away. If you want to hear the difference that will not impress you, check this out: https://youtu.be/1SreaAPtUr4?si=fQqhonlsF81nmvTX. Disregard the third soundcard. The Roland MT-32 was a monster and cost waaaaay too much money for a scrub like me (I finally got one on eBay a few years ago. God, I’m cool).
This was the beginning for me. Something unlocked within my brain that made me understand that sound & music was something important. I wanted to make things sound better and better. I soon upgraded the Adlib card to one that was Sound Blaster compatible. The Pro Audio Spectrum 16. This allowed me to plug in a terrible Radio Shack microphone and record basic things. Of course, this meant that I recorded all of the burps and farts that were possible.
Around this time, I started teaching myself about MIDI and started playing DOOM. I was playing around with writing my own music and changing the sound effects in Doom with quotes from Big Trouble in Little China and the aforementioned recorded burps and farts.
After Doom there was Quake. Quake was another unlock for me. I started understand 3D more and started pushing myself into different disciplines such as level design, texture painting, and a host of other things.
As I was wrapping up high school, I was approached by a mod team that was working on a Doom total conversion called, “Hacx”. They needed texture artists, so I joined up and helped paint a whole bunch of textures.
After graduating high school, I went to college and majored in musical theatre performance. While my schedule was absolutely insane, I still made time to experiment with sound design and music compositions. In 2000, I was working on a few different Quake 3 mods where I was writing music and recording unique sound effects. I also started an account on MP3.com, which was a way of releasing digital music and actually getting paid for it. I was very burnt out at school, and I started sending emails to different video game companies to ask them about voice-over and how to get into that arena. Through that I got a response from Kevin Schilder at Raven Software. We started a dialogue and I told him I had been working on a lot of music and sound design projects and he asked me if he could listen to some of it. I said, “Sure,” and I burnt a CD, wrote my name in Sharpie, and shipped it off to him. A couple of weeks went by and I was like, “Oh well. That was super cool of him to chat with me.” A couple of days later, I got an email from Kevin saying they were hiring for a sound designer and were wondering if I’d be interested in applying. I exited my body at that point and was like, “uhhhh…what? Yes?”
I was flown up to Madison, Wisconsin and interviewed with Kevin (I also had my credit card declined at the hotel but that’s a story for a different time). It was incredibly surreal. I had no experience with actual job interviews except standard retail gigs (most of those were low-pressure or with people I knew). I distinctly remember looking at some concept art on the wall and asking Kevin what it was for, and he responded, “Oh, that would be what you would work on.” I stopped in the middle of the hall in shock.
After returning home, I walked through the next few days in a daze. I didn’t know what to expect. Surely, they wouldn’t hire some college kid who had no experience in the video game industry. It was incredibly cool for them to even talk to me, let alone bring me up for an interview.
A few days later, I walked into my house with a couple of friends, and the phone rang. I walked over and looked at the caller ID box (yes, I am well aware of how old I sound right now), and it said, “Raven Software”. My stomach dropped and I looked at my friends. They both looked at me and immediately sat on the couch. I picked up the phone and said “Hello?”.
”Hey Zack! It’s Kevin. How’s it going?”
“Hey Kevin! Doing pretty well. How are you doing?”
“I’m doing great! I was wondering if you wanted to come up here and help me out. We want to bring you onboard.”
To say I was in shock is an understatement. I can’t really remember everything we talked about...other than I said, “Yes.” I remember hearing the salary number and while it was very low in today’s numbers it felt like I had won the lottery. After wrapping up the convo, I hung up the phone and stared off into space. My friends said, “Well??” I handed them the note with the salary number. They jumped up and started screaming and hugging me. I took a digital camera next to the phone, took a picture of the caller ID, sat down, and put my head in my hands.
My friends pulled me up, hugged me again, and said, “Let’s go get some beers.”
