What was your first professional credit?
The first few weeks at Raven Software were pant-fillingly terrifying. I had just left college in my final year doing a job I had no experience (or perhaps business) doing; I had left all of the people that were close to me to live in a city/state that I’d never been to before (save the job interview), I was in a one-bedroom apartment in a business complex with no car, I had no friends, and I was slowly being buried by snow.
My boss, Kevin, knew that I was feeling overwhelmed and sat down with me to go over things such as:
How to connect to the internal network.
How to sync game assets to my local machine and test the build.
How to use the VERY fancy Sound Ideas General 6000 sound effect library. Now, keep in mind this was before Soundminer was commercially available, and we didn’t have the space to keep the library on the network, so we had to go through a huge book and cross-reference the numerical entry with the several CDs that each sound was on. This was time-consuming.
After he went through that with me, he gave me an assignment. He had recently wrapped up work on Star Trek: Elite Force and was working on the expansion pack. I had played through Elite Force a few months prior and absolutely loved it. He gave me a list of sounds he wanted me to do, handed me the book for the SFX library, and said, “Have fun!”
Now. The reference book for the library was hundreds of pages. It was essentially the size of a significant textbook…so I would look at the list Kev gave me and then try to come up with the source material I would want to look for and then go over to the reference tome and try to find something that would be suitable. I’d then pull multiple CDs that might have some material on there that would work, pop them into my PC, and listen. And listen. And listen. When I found material that I wanted to work with, I’d rip the appropriate tracks in glorious 44.1/16-bit WAV format, load it into Sonic Foundry’s Vegas or Sound Forge (I was pretty bad about doing destructive edits in Sound Forge for the first year or so because I was HARDCORE), and start designing/editing/freaking out.
I’d sit down with Kevin to get feedback on my work. He would listen carefully, teach me how to head/tail each sound properly, train me on the importance of naming conventions, and either approve the sound or send me back to my office.
A few months later, while I was deep in development for Soldier of Fortune II (the project I was initially hired for), Kenn, the IT specialist and general good dude, walked through the halls with a big box and handed boxes to everyone. He stopped outside my office and said, “ZQ! I got something for you!”. He gave me a copy of Star Trek: Elite Force Expansion Pack and told me to look at the credits. He walked away while I opened the box, pulled out the booklet, and scanned through. There, at the back, was a section for credits. Towards the bottom was:
Additional Sound - Zachary Quarles
I stood there looking at it for a couple of minutes and just muttered, “Holy shit.”
A shot of my first office at Raven
