I have been wanting to write about my experience getting a job in the games industry for a while now. It really started with the idea of giving a bit of a spotlight on the apprentice program we started, which is intended to give a group of talented people the chance to get their foot in the door, and I know what that first big break feels like.

Originally we wanted to do a big program around it. I had planned on renting a large house and having all the apprentices live together and make them do challenges, like a terrible reality television program. They would blog about what it is like to be a game designer/test subject each week. Sadly, I couldn’t find a suitable house close enough to the office to make this work. I’m also not sure the homeowners I did talk to were down with the plan … “So I’m going to have half a dozen game designers living in your house and throwing parties every weekend as part of their job!” Oh well, by the time we get the next batch of apprentices maybe we can buy the house.

My first job in the games industry was with Virgin Interactive in 1995. However, before I got there, I had graduated art school with a degree in marketing and design. I ended up working as a “grey market” circuitry broker, which was a placeholder until I started an actual career. Not to say that couldn’t be an actual career, it certainly could be a good one; it just wasn’t where I was meant to be, and I could really feel that.

I had jobs all through high school and college. I’ve pretty much had some kind of job since I was a pre-teen, from bookstore clerk (at 11 years old, a little old lady who owned a bookstore near my house let me work for store credit that I spent on Dungeons & Dragons books she would special order for me, she actually asked if D&D was “devil related” but I assured her it wasn’t and she trusted me… the fool! HAIL SATAN!!) to waiter and everything in between.

As a teenager I worked at a clothing store called Chess King in the mall, which could be the most 80’s job imaginable, with the possible exception of Hot Dog on a Stick. But that job required wearing tiny short shorts, and as we all know from the Kickstarter video I am not built for short shorts.

Here’s a picture of me… I was very 80’s… VERY Chess King… when you look at this picture please imagine New Order’s Blue Monday playing (it helps me look less dorky) …actually that’s a lie, nothing will help me look any less dorky in this picture.

But back to being a “grey market” circuitry broker. I was good at the job. I am good at selling things, but it is just not something that gives me a lot of pleasure. Even though I was making a reasonable living for a 24 year old, I was miserable. Each morning I would wake up and lie in bed doing the mental math of whether or not I could miss another day of work. Every day I would have to DRAG myself out of the house, and every trip back from lunch I was in tears thinking about how I was wasting my life (I cry a lot, I’m very emotional).

At this point in my life ALL of my free time was spent playing a [POPULAR TCG]. Every night I would be up late going to game stores and playing. Every Saturday I would be at the Costa Mesa Women’s Club battling in tournaments with people like Brian Hacker, John Yoo, and Frank Gilson. The southern California [POPULAR TCG] scene had an amazing number of high end players, many of whom went on to work in the games industry, interestingly enough.

That’s when I had the break that would change my life. I met a gentleman named Julian Rignall. Julian was an awesome English guy that was currently working as the head of creative in development for Virgin Interactive, a game company in Irvine (“Jazz” was also a pretty famous UK games editor before his stint at Virgin). He was very punk; I believe he had a Mohawk at the time. I think he struck up a conversation with me because I had bright purple hair (an act of defiant non-conformity to balance how I felt about my job.)

We talked about [POPULAR TCG] and how much we loved it, we talked about video games, and eventually we talked about what we did for a living. It came out that he worked in the video game business and I told him about my marketing education and how much I lived for games. He became convinced that I needed to come work for Virgin in the marketing department. As he described it, someone with my passion for games and a marketing degree would be a great fit for them, as none of the marketing people were really gamers. This was much earlier in the games industry and that first generation of hardcore gamers like me was just starting to make its way into the general workforce for jobs in stuff like sales and marketing.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Here was a senior guy at a game company telling me I needed to work with him, and beyond that he was willing to hook me up with the head of the marketing group and put in a good word. I was floored. This was the first actual glimpse that a job in the games industry was possible, I had tried to reach out to game companies before but that’s a story for later.

Julian jotted down a name on little slip of yellow paper: Simon Jeffrey, VP of Marketing. I carried that little slip of paper around for a month, scared I was going to lose it, and even more scared to call and see if this was something that could actually be real. Eventually I decided I was going to get this job, whatever it was, because frankly at that point I had NO clue.

So, without calling Virgin first, I quit my job and told everyone I had gotten an amazing new job in the video game industry. This was probably not very smart (actually, there is no probably about it). But this is pretty typical of how I go through life, I imagine the reality that I want, then do whatever it takes to make it happen. Also, I should emphasize: don’t treat any of this as life advice. I incur a tremendous amount of risk chasing my dreams, and I am the first to recognize the degree to which luck has always been on my side.

I gathered up my courage and called. My heart was beating out of my chest as I introduced myself to Simon. He was pleasant enough, and Julian had told him I would be reaching out. After a brief conversation he transferred me to the HR department and had a time set up to come in for an interview. Luckily it was several weeks away, which gave me time to prepare.

Preparing was a challenge. I had zero idea what the specifics of the job were, and what was even more daunting was that the role, Product Manager, was not a junior title. There was a clear expectation that I would know how to do this job. Well, as I mentioned before, risk really isn’t a factor in my decision making process, so this was no different. If I was going to work in the video game industry it was just as well that I would start with an important job.

I began building a portfolio, something my schooling had trained me to do reasonably well. I figured it would be better for me to build a “spec” portfolio showing the kind of work I would do if I were in the gaming industry, as opposed to just showing my student work (at this point I had zero actual real world work to show). I think in the end this was the choice that actually got me the job.

Believe it or not, I think most of the people who looked at my portfolio thought I had actually worked on the products in the ads. They were unclear on the “spec” nature of my work. I explained it several times but I still think there was some confusion, at least in the first couple of rounds of the interview process.

One person that was NOT confused about my lack of experience was the HR director. He was borderline pissed that I had an interview at all, and he quickly pointed out my total lack of applicable experience. It went something like this: “Why in the world would we put you in charge of millions of dollars of marketing money? You have zero experience. It would be the height of irresponsibility to allow you to learn on the job with so much at stake.” The funny thing was that I actually agreed with the guy, but I was there to get this job. I was not going to take no for an answer, so I needed to make him understand why I was perfect for the role, even with no experience.

Luckily I had anticipated this potential line of questioning and had clipped out several magazine ads for Virgin games. I proceeded to explain to him why the ads didn’t work and what I would have done to change them. This was the first of many times that the “magic shield” of being a hardcore gamer would allow me to overcome traditional business setting challenges. The HR director was not a gamer, so I could make a VERY compelling argument about why the ads didn’t work and how I could create ads that spoke to gamers in a way Virgin, at that point, could not.

How could I do this? I know how to market to gamers because I am one, and no amount of marketing experience would EVER overcome that advantage. It took over an hour of back and forth, but eventually he agreed I was probably the best choice for the job, even with no experience.

The rest of the interview process was relatively easy, all the way up to interviewing with Simon. I will say Simon is one of the kindest people I have had the pleasure of working with; we had a very honest conversation about my abilities, experience level, and raw passion for the opportunity. I told him how much this meant to me. I explained that I had quit my job and that I couldn’t imagine a future that didn’t have me working at Virgin, that I must get this job. I told him I would be the hardest working person in his group, and what I didn’t know, I would learn quickly. I got rather emotional during the interview. I had never wanted anything as much as this job, and I think he could really see it.

Five days later I got the call. They offered me the position: full Product Manager with a salary FAR higher than what I was currently earning (actually, I had quit my job at this point, so technically I was earning zero). I lost my shit! I got my dream job. I yelled and ran around the house, high fiving my roommates. At the time I lived in a huge house with half a dozen childhood friends, a couple of which would end up in the gaming world a few years later, including Kevin Jordan and Pat Nagle, both of whom ended up at Blizzard (Kevin would eventually leave Blizzard to join me working on HEX … it is incredible how things work out).

The first day of work was amazing. Even during the interview process, I was falling deeply in love with Virgin Interactive. The office was gorgeous, at least by my standards at the time. Exposed brick walls, high ceilings, and indirect lighting like a fancy showroom (and VERY unlike the harsh florescent overheads of every other job I had ever had). Everyone was cool and beautiful, and they had a café with a themed menu. Clearly this was twenty years ago, before Google re-defined office excess, but for its time, it was very cool. And shit who wouldn’t want a Toonstruck themed chimichanga… stuffed with delicious Car-too-nitas!

I had stumbled into a magic world, a place you would imagine people on TV working. I honestly couldn’t believe it for a while, like it was a dream. I tend to live sort of one foot in reality and one in fantasy, the “is this a dream” feeling is something I deal with a lot, especially when very good and very bad things happen in my life. This was a VERY strong instance of that, I was actually afraid I would wake up and find out I was still a broker and this dream job had never happened. I had a similar experience as a child, I had woken up convinced I had telekinesis. I tried to turn the light on in my room with my mind but the light switch didn’t budge, I sat trying over and over, then it dawned on me… it had been a dream, I was so crushed. I had woken up excited to “force choke” some kids at school, and now it wasn’t going to happen, I was stuck just regular choking them.

After the first week, it really started to sink in how out of my depth I was.

I would sit in meetings and not understand half the words being thrown around. I would be furiously jotting down terms into my notebook. Sadly, coupled with this lack of industry specific knowledge, was the fact that this was my first job that used e-mail! Hell, it required a working knowledge of Word, Excel, and all the Microsoft Office products, none of which I had ever used in a business setting. Shit, at my last job, the monitor had a total of … ONE COLOR … sort of an amber orange. Luckily, I’m computer literate and figuring out the office products was just a matter of buying books and studying.

What was proving more difficult was the industry specific jargon and the expectation that I would be able to build a Marketing Plan, which is the core document a product manager creates, the basic blueprint for the launch of a game. Starting with my second week at Virgin, I asked my supervisor if I could look at old marketing plans from the large catalogue of games Virgin had put out in the past. It was a reasonable request and ended up being my gateway to unlocking the mysteries of the job.

I spent the next week holed up in my office reading marketing plans and deciphering all the lingo, deconstructing the plans, and building a notebook of ideas and tactics. Within a month, I was fully up to speed and adding new ideas to the team. I started using my insight into gamers to help shape the marketing plans and even provide early input on the games themselves.

I was tasked with marketing all the “hardcore gamer” games. Thrill Kill was one of my favorites and was a game I actually had the privilege of naming. Thrill Kill was a game with the dubious honor of being 100% finished and having gone to gold master, then never released. I loved that job. It’s sort of like your first girlfriend, it will always hold a special place in your heart. In the end, Virgin was bought by EA, primarily for Westwood Studios and the Command and Conquer franchise.

The last few months at Virgin where very odd, when the company was in the process of being sold. They didn’t want to let people go, but there really wasn’t any work, seriously ZERO to do. I spent a solid 3 months playing Ultima Online and taking long lunches with my work friends. I would play UO all day and sometimes right through the night and into the next morning. It’s funny when you get a “Boy, you’re here bright and early!” from a co-worker when, in actuality, you never left.

(I also had time to make this .gif)

Eventually the sale went through and Virgin closed. I was leaving my first job in the games industry, but luckily I already had my second one lined up. That job turned out to be fun, but I was working for a VERY different type of game company.

So why the hell am I telling you all this? Well, this is a personal blog and some of the content will just be about my experiences or take on things, so there’s that. But also, I recently had the chance to give a group of game designers their first real entrance into the gaming industry. It was incredibly satisfying and I thought it would be neat to relate my first gaming job story as I welcomed the apprentices into the HEX family.

I was having lunch with Ryan, one of our apprentices (now full time associate game designer), and we discussed his background. He told me how a finance degree was great, but a career in the gas and oil industry wasn’t going to make him happy. He is passionately creative, and he laughingly described his college textbooks as having the margins filled with cartoon doodles (he is a pretty awesome cartoonist) and designs for card mechanics. The funny part was the realization that what filled those margins would end up being more important to his future than the text they surrounded.

Oh… and also, here is a card I have been looking forward to spoiling, as I LOVE IT DEEPLY as an RTS player I would be called a Turtler, and this card really speaks to me.

(I was going to spoil a different card but we had an art issue, maybe next blog)

Thanks for reading,

-Love Cory

By coryhudsonjones - Sep 3, 2014