I recently read a blog by a designer who worked at Bioware (a game company) for 10 years. He left that studio and wrote a blog post detailing his time through each of those years he worked there. I found it very interesting and, while I can't claim to be equally as interesting, I thought I might write some posts about my career to accomplish a couple of goals:

1) Just to remember. I haven't really thought about those times much and it'll be nice to have a written "diary" of those times to remind me in the future.

2) In the hopes that others may find my story half as interesting as I found the story I read.

I don't know how frequent I'll be updating my posts, but I'm hoping at least once a week, but maybe I'll get on a tare and it'll be every other day or something. I dunno. I hope you guys find them interesting!

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Year -0

I suppose I should start at the beginning and detail my experiences even getting started in the game industry. I know lots of people out there are students and enthusiasts who are still looking to get their foot in the door, so to speak.

I knew I wanted to be an artist at an early age. I remember writing and drawing my own comics and giving them to my friends in grade school. I had a dozen or so different comic book super heroes and another dozen villains I would circulate. Some of my favorites had names like Bullet Clip, Infinite, The Protectorate, and Blaster.

I remember a conversation with my dad when he asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up and I enthusiastically informed him that I would be pursuing a career in comic books as an illustrator! He warned me that that would be pretty difficult, but he was encouraging about it.

Then it happened. When I was 12 or 13 years old, Jurassic Park came out and I, like many others my age, was completely blown away! My mind was completely blown by the sheer amazement of what I was seeing on the screen and the unbelievable realism that these computer graphics were bringing to the table.

Afterward, with my limited means (no computer or internet), I searched for every scrap of info I could on how those dinosaurs came to be! I resolved then and there that I would switch my focus from comic book illustrations to computer graphics!

I knew what I wanted to be, but had no idea how to do it.

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I'll continue in a later post. Feel free to let me know if this just seems really pretentious. That's not my intent.