STAFF PROFILE: STEVE, GAME DESIGNER
What is your background?
Just a school kid that spent too much time playing games instead of doing his homework during the Sinclair Spectrum days of the early-to-mid 80s. Then a 'grown-up' with a depressing, run-of-the-mill job that spent not enough time playing games to try and forget about said job during the Super Nintendo days of the early-to-mid 90s. I never even considered a job in the industry as I thought a) you had to be a programmer and have one of those fancy degree thingies, and b) well, cool jobs like that just happen to other people, don't they?
How did you get to work at Rare?
One day sometime in nineteen-ninety-something, a colleague, who also happened to be a games nut like myself, announced his intention to apply for the job of games tester at Rare, with the aim of eventually becoming a game designer. "Ppff!" I retorted. "As if you'll ever land a job at Rare! You don't have any experience or relevant qualifications. You just waste all your cash on games like I do. And, you know, it's RARE!" Much to my acute jealousy he got the job.
Then one day a couple of years later he called me up out of the blue and said "there are vacancies for games testers here at Rare. Why not apply? It's worth a shot. What's the worst that can happen?" At that stage of my life I was going pretty much nowhere. I was in a poorly-paid and unrewarding job, so I kind of had to agree with my former colleague – it certainly was worth a shot applying for a job at Rare, even if getting it would mean relocating from my hometown of Cardiff. Due to the fact that you're reading this you can kind of guess that I got the job, although I'm convinced it only happened because the guy that usually did the interviews was off on the day of mine. |
