My Story...

Obviously, I love my job. My wife always tells people (when they ask what I do) that I got my dream job right out of college. I get to work on games all day long, then I go home and play games at night.

So, here's my story. I've always loved programming. I used to write games on my TI-85 calculator back in high school. I also played around in QBasic back then. I took computer classes throughout middle school and high school. I remember learning HyperCard (anyone used it?) on a Mac Classic in 7th grade. But it wasn't until I got to college that I finally started learning real, useful programming languages. I'd always loved video games, but it didn't quite occur to me until about halfway through college that I could really, actually go into the field of game development once I got my Computer Science degree.

I eventually graduated, and I applied at some 20 or 30 different companies, some game-related, some not. I had several interviews, and even some job offers. But I decided I would only fall back on the non-game-related jobs if the game programming ones didn't pan out. I was flown out to Phoenix, Arizona, for an interview, and almost flew out to San Rafael for another, but eventually I decided to accept an offer at Sensory Sweep, even though the pay was less than some non-game-related job offers I had received. For more pay, I could have been a Java coder at some newspaper publishing company. Or I could have been a database programmer in a large corporate environment.

Sure, I could've taken the money, but would I have been happy? Probably, to an extent. After all, I enjoy programming, no matter the nature of the task. But would it have been this fun? Definitely not. The great thing about working at a video game company is not just the games you get to work on. In my opinion, the best part of working at Sensory Sweep is the atmosphere. Everyone you work with loves video games just as much as you do (and some probably more). Everyone talks about games all day long. You can't find that at Microsoft, or some web development company. It's a pretty casual environment too. Our break room has 2 ping pong tables, a foosball table, air hockey, and 2 arcade machines. I can honestly say that if it weren't for my job in video games, I would not be as good as I am now at foosball and ping pong. But of course, those are just perks.