‘Passion’ meant working six days a week –16-hour days. I still play games,but having seen the inside of the sausage factory they’ll never be the same againAt the age of 11, I wrote my own version of Space Invaders. Someone I met on the internet who I knew only as “Mit” (it was a more trusting time) gave me the code. I muddled my way through the logic of enemies sliding back and forth, and collisions and player controls,and after a few weeks was totally hooked. I loved playing computer games, and now I could acquire my own: I knew that I definitely wanted to become a games programmer.
When I left university, and it was in the middle of the last economic meltdown and buying games wasn’t really people’s top priority. The whole industry was going through a massive round of layoffs,so jobs were lean on the ground. In the end I was incredibly lucky, landing a junior role at a major UK studio owned by a console manufacturer just after they had made some more experienced engineers redundant.
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Source: theguardian.com