Some fifteen years ago I sniffed around hoping to make a career move. I enjoyed my university career looking for aliens, but as a child I had dreams of making video games. Wally hooked me up with a potential lead working on Guitar Hero. Cool - but this opportunity fell into my lap faster than expected. Balls were rolling and calls being made within hours. I had zero time to prepare for any of this. Turns out Wally worked with Nick - somebody I jammed with a few times 15 years earlier. Nick remembered me so he happily reached out to coach me about an impending interview.
After guiding me what to say or not say to the interviewers, he asked about my impressions of modern video games. Here's the thing - I was a gamer.. waaaay back in the 80's. Outside of that I had a Quake II phase in the late 90's. And around then I kicked ass playing Um Jammer Lammy at Jai Young's place a couple times. But otherwise nothing.. and here we were in 2008 and I had no fucking clue about the various consoles nor any recent video game hits. So after it became patently obvious I was severely out of the loop, Nick insisted I quickly find somebody with an Xbox or something and dig in as much as possible.
I immediately got on the phone with my friends who live down the street, Dave and Betty. "I have a weird request," I said. "Can I.. come to your house right now and play every video game you have?" After explaining the mission they were stoked and invited me over.
Betty expertly and excitedly walked me through everything I needed to know about Bully, Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto, Sonic the Hedgehog.. a whole bunch of stuff. I found myself amazed how software design has improved over the past couple of decades. By midnight I felt like I could impersonate somebody knowledgeable on this topic. Thanks, guys! Totally saved my ass.
It didn't really go much further than that, sadly. I couldn't get past the first exploratory interview because the recruiter felt I was simultaneously underqualified and overqualified. I couldn't really argue. I'm a scientific programmer working on global scale research endeavors, not a game developer. And being a database, web, and systems guru didn't offset my lack of industry experience. So be it.
If there's any silver lining Wally and Nick soon moved on from that design house (which collapsed shortly afterward). And then Wally threw me a bunch of freelance work on the side developing levels for that iPhone game Tap Tap Revenge. So I got extra bucks and a (brief but sufficient) window into that gamer geek scene. Not exactly my thing, as it turns out. But one Friday night I got a call from one of Wally's workmates who offered bonus money to generate a couple levels for a couple Paramore tunes within the next three hours. I came through, my work was released Saturday morning, and by that afternoon there were already several playthrough videos uploaded by fans to YouTube. I admit it was refreshing - after years working on underfunded and understaffed academic projects that drag on forever without deadlines - to see a whole project through, from inception to prime time, within 24 hours.
It's interesting - when I did the theme for FarmVille I had a 24 hour turnaround, but other than that I never did anything with turnaround that fast. A one-off.