I ended up coming in through through
competitive gaming through our eSports I
played a lot of gears as a kid much to
my parents dismay a lot of late nights a
lot of early mornings I ended up playing
that throughout my like my university
the computer games Tech degree so that
was kind of relevant and then yeah upon
graduating I knew that Splash Damage were
working on on Gears or had worked on the
previous gears and it was kind of just
like a potluck chance of just try let's
let's throw my CV that way if I found
the lead tester on LinkedIn and I just
kind of handed him with questions like
hey I'd love to work on Gears it's like
my favorite game and yeah give me a shot
luckily lucked out got the interview and
yeah started like a week later
I studied creative writing in history in
University and a good friend of mine was
working at a company named turbine near
Boston and said didn't you take a
Tolkien class in college I was like yep
he says my company's making Lord of the
Rings Online and we could use somebody
who is in QA who knows about the lore
and could be our lore monkey and I said
I've never played an MMO before nor have
I done QA I don't know what you're
talking about I'm a single player you
know I've always played single-player
games but it turned out that I sort of
walked in the office I was like my
people I had no idea this is where you
all were
I went university and studied as a
marine biologist and then I quit that
really quickly we did loads of Natural
History stuff so I was always drawing
and I've always been obsessed with films
so I started doing storyboard art film
for film TV and stuff and while I was
doing that I trained up myself in 3d
arts I'm fully self-taught and then
eventually I worked making assets for
the Unreal marketplace and then I
started working as an outsourcer and I
just kept working on my portfolio and I
kept trying to just do environment art
and eventually someone decided to pay me
to do it
Applied to every games company
that I could find
and this was back before you could apply
on through companies websites so I had
to print off my CV print off cover
letter
stick in an envelope address it send it
off and hope that I heard something back
I eventually got an interview which was
great and one of the things that I've
really learned over the years from being
in interviews and conducting interviews
is be honest and be yourself a lot of
the time it's more important who you are
than what your skillset is
It was kind of an accident to be honest I was meant
to be doing a course in robotics but I
didn't get accepted in and then I saw an
advert in a paper for a games
programming course and it was something
that I've always been talking about with
my friends you know how cool would it be
to join the games industry maybe we
could go to university and come back and
start our own company and once I saw the
advert I just thought actually yeah that
would be really cool so that's how it
all got started
I played games forever
and I got a job at game working in
retail and and then I went around
about way working in a hospital in shops
working in PR and then saw a job at
Splash that kind of ticked off a bunch of
skills that I kind of picked up along
the way and then just applied for it I
didn't think I was gonna be qualified
for it but still here still going yeah I got it
