In today's main Gamasutra feature, we ruminate on the fact that getting into the game industry can take a lot of work, and there's nothing quite like your first job in games. So, for a touch of nostagia, and a look at the whole process of breaking into the industry, the latest Question of the Week asked of our audience of game professionals: "How did you get your start in the video game industry?"
Of the multitude of responses, some of the best are both historic:
"While I was an MIT undergrad, a couple of my closest friends were co-founders of Infocom in 1979. Zork, which they had hacked together in 1977 on mainframes at the MIT Lab for Computer Science, was going to be launched on the TRS-80 and Apple II, and they needed someone to playtest it. Because I had avoided playing Zork up to that point (I feared getting sucked into a time sink), I was the only friend they had who was able to play as a "newbie." So, starting in December 1979, I was paid to play Zork. I quickly fell in love with it, and would happily have continued playing for nothing (though I was careful not to tell anyone that!). I ended up at Infocom throughout the 1980s, co-founded Boffo Games with Steve Meretzky in the early '90s, and I've been at Harmonix since 1997.
-Michael Dornbrook, Harmonix Music Systems"
...or life-transforming:
"It all started when I got an Atari as a kid, and I have been playing games ever since. To make a long story short: I got a degree in economics, then worked at a bank for 5 years. Though I was making decent money, I had many visions of a painful and unhappy future, so one day I up and quit. Then I applied to every game company in Southern California and got a job testing games for 8$/hour at Midway, 80 miles from my house. I remember the first day I came in and sat down and looked around at all these crazy dudes playing games with toys all over their desks, talking smack and having fun. I was overcome with joy, and remember thinking, "These are my people."
-Tony Dormanesh, Midway"
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