Q: What advice do you have for people who'd like to work at a
game company?
A: First and foremost, you must play games. Although you don't have to be
a hardcore gamer, you should know what makes a game fun and addictive.
Game developers live or die by their products' quality. Computer hardware
doubles in speed every 14 months, and the average development cycle for
a game is 18 to 24 months. As a result, developers can only hope that in
two years they will have correctly guessed what people are going to want
in a game as well as what the hardware will support. If their game date
slips, the hardware and their competition will leave them behind. This
means that the game industry must continually push the boundaries of
technology in an effort to be the best.
With the deadlines so concrete, you can expect to be working more than
the usual forty hours a week when crunch mode comes around. On the
other hand, it's all worth it see your name in the credits of a million-
seller. Playing games on a regular basis will help keep you on track about
what trends are evolving and what they mean for the future.
Q: What projects have you worked on over the years? How big
were the teams?
A: I've worked on many projects in my career; most published, but some
not. Most of the teams have been relatively small, usually less than six
team members, and sometimes it's just me. I tend to like the smaller team
environments because it makes you learn a little bit about everything. One
of the Dreamcast titles I worked on allowed me to tackle animation, mod-
eling, texturing, and lighting--the whole enchilada. It was probably the
most educational project that I've worked on yet. I also enjoy working on
larger teams, though. Although you do tend to specialize in a particular
aspect of the project, when it's all done, you find out how rewarding it is
to work on something much larger than yourself.
Q: You did some extremely detailed Star Wars models as
posters--talk a bit about them.
A: Around the time that Mondo Media decided to switch their business
focus to 2D work, I really started to get into making large poster-sized
prints of my work. As an artist, I detest anything that compromises the
vision that I want to share; for me such restrictions include rendering time
and resolution. I tend to like posters more than video because prints can
have incredibly high resolution. The resolution for animation is generally
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