If you’ve seen any of the trailers for the new Mass Effect game you may have noticed a shot of a Krogan dropping a guy off a ledge. I’m the guy that made it, and I just wanted to tell you a little about myself. I’m not claiming to have had a particularly special or noteworthy life, but it hasn’t been boring and I’ve never really written it down in one place, so I figured why not? If anybody finds it interesting, great. If not, then no harm done.

My name is Richard Boylan and I’m 37 years old. I was born in Hamilton, Ontario, to newly-arrived British immigrants in 1979 who went on to have to have two more sons after me. My parents divorced when I was 14, my mom got custody and my grades plummeted. I wasn’t the best kid: Smoking cigarettes, skipping school, etc. To my parent’s credit, they started me in piano lessons when I was 8. I hated it, but loved music, so they switched me over to guitar, which I still play to this day. In 1995 I started a punk rock band called Gym Class Joke, and we enjoyed modest success, locally. There’s even a video on youtube of us playing on a Canadian teen talk show called Johnovosion back in ’98. There was another new band on there called Sum 41. Wonder what happened to them?

Anyway I did the band thing for the late 90s and of course I was convinced I was gonna be a rock star. Naturally that didn’t pan out, so when we broke up in 2000 I was left with terrible grades, no college and no real aim in life. Naturally I did what every real punk rocker does and look up “recruiting” in the yellow pages. A few months later I started basic training with a Canadian army reserve unit called the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry.

I loved Army life: Running around in the woods fighting mock battles, the discipline, everything. Ever since I was a kid I’d dreamed of going off to war. Of course, at the time Canada hadn’t fought since Korea, so the odds of that happening where a million to one. This was in early 2001.

We all know what happened next. Things in the Canadian army began to change after 9/11 and we started shifting to a war footing, however it still took years before Canada actually joined in the fighting. I started to lose interest in the reserves. One day I noticed my computer had rudimentary editing software. Curious, I dropped a couple video clips in a timeline and added a transition. Then I added some music. I was love at first Edit.

I immediately started going back and getting high school credits through an adult education program. Once I had what I needed I applied everywhere I could and was accepted to a broadcasting program at a college in the middle of nowhere. Over the next three years I discovered that my real love was directing. My student films were, of course, brutal, but I enjoyed it. Like a lot of students though, by the end of three years I was a little burned out.

Towards the end of school, in 2005, I started going back to the reserves to make some cash. They stuck me on a leadership course that was mostly regular force soldiers as opposed to reservists. That was my first glimpse up close at what it was like to be a professional soldier. It wasn’t glamourous, but the life of a soldier had always resonated with me, and being a reservist just wasn’t enough. Also, there was a war going on now and Canada was on the front lines.

After I graduated I said “what the hell”, walked into a recruiting centre and signed on the dotted line: 3 years, regular force infantry. Here we go.

I was demoted from Corporal to no-hook Private and posted to Edmonton as a rifleman in the 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. I arrived in the middle of the night during a hideous blizzard, and reported to a bored-looking duty NCO. I didn’t know anybody and I’d heard horror stories about how “reg force” guys treated reservists. As it turned out my fears were unfounded. I wasn’t a complete bag of hammers as far as soldiers go, so I got on alright with the other guys in 3 platoon, A company.

Battalion life was enjoyable. As a formerly wayward youth the rigid structure and discipline was refreshing. I’ll admit there’s something oddly comforting about surrendering your decision-making for a bit. It wasn’t easy though: In the reserves, the longest time I’d been in the field on manoeuvres was a week. My first field exercise in the reg force was 2 months! But I loved it! In fact I eventually tried out for the army’s (then) new commando unit. I passed the physical and psych tests and was offered a spot on the course.

Then my life changed.

Christmas 2006 I went home to visit my family. My Dad had a nasty cough. He was getting tests done, but given my family’s medical history I wasn’t too concerned. Then in early February I called home to get some info for the course paperwork and he told me he was dying. Not sick, dying. He’d had cancer for years, starting in his kidney, and now that it was in his lungs they’d finally caught it but it was much too late. I pulled my application from the commando unit and jumped on a plane, planning to take bereavement leave and be with him for what time he had left. The leave would have been pointless.

Just over a week later ICU doctors asked me, as his primary next of kin, if I wanted him to be taken off life support. It got him that fast. I consented and sat next to his bed for the night. The nurses did their best to wake him up one last time so he could say goodbye to me and my Brothers. He partially came to, and his last words were “Be good.”

He stopped breathing about 6:30 in the morning.

I can honestly say that I divide my life into the time before and after that night. I miss him dearly and I wish he could have seen the man I became. I hurt so badly for years after, and even ten years later it still feels fresh. I can only describe the experience with one word: Horror. I realize I’m not the only one who’s lost a loved one, and maybe other people handle it better than me, but the suddenness of it, being in the room with him, listening to him moan. Watching the man who’d been there for me my whole life take his last few gasps… Pure, absolute horror.

Just under a year later my rifle company deployed to Afghanistan. This was 2008. We spent 7 months in the south, patrolling, guarding camps and conducting offensive ops against the Taliban. I can’t possibly sum up the experience in a few simple paragraphs, but it was easily the most significant thing I’ve ever been a part of.

I remember one night we had just gotten orders for a patrol the next day in a particularly nasty area. Four soldiers had died there the previous week and tomorrow it was our turn. I was in the forward operating base, smoking a cigarette and looking up at the stars. Everybody was so quiet that night. I started listening to some heavy metal to get myself pumped, but it didn’t work. It sounded… empty. That memory really stands out.

The next day we advanced into a Taliban-controlled area and as expected they launched a 2-sided ambush. They fired their 82-millimetre recoilless rifle at us and missed. We responded with the wrath of God, starting with small arms, then 25mm canons on the APCs, and finally enough artillery to level a grid square. It was quite a sight.

Side note: I was sitting in the middle of a war zone when when my first paycheck from the video game industry arrived in a wrinkled envelope. I had a friend at Bioware Edmonton who knew I still wrote and recorded music sometimes and he got the company to buy a song off me, so if you ever play Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood for the Nintendo DS, I wrote and performed the opening music.

I couldn’t find anywhere to cash the check.

So my tour ended and I came home. I’d had my fill of army life, so I decided not to re-sign for another 3 year contract, and retired at the prestigious rank of Corporal. I bummed around for a bit doing odd jobs and I started making Machinima (short films made with pre-existing video game assets) in my spare time. Eventually I somehow landed a job as a producer/director for a new hunting show called The Edge that was being made by a local outdoor network. They figured with my background in the infantry as well as my education in broadcasting I’d be the perfect fit for the job, and they were half right: I’m proud of how the show turned out and we did solid numbers, in fact we even got to go on a sponsored trip to South Africa, but by God did I hate hunting! It wasn’t some moral thing, mind you, although I’ve seen some trophy hunts I didn’t feel great about, but after years in the infantry I’ve come to loathe the outdoors with a passion: I’ve spent far too many days and nights trudging through swamps or laying in the prone freezing my ass off, and here I am sitting in a tree filming hunters in the cold, pre-dawn light of an Alberta winter. Wonderful.

So the show turned out great, but I quit after a season and decided to get back in the film game. I wrote, directed and shot a feature called Heavy Metal Horror, which was a… learning experience.

In 2011 Bioware came calling once again. The same friend who had recommended my song for the Sonic game had passed on some of my Machinima. They were hiring cinematic designers for some Mass Effect 3 DLC so I went out to Montreal, interviewed, got the job and moved there. I learned the software pretty quick and was actually able to sneak some content into ME:3 (Most of the times you talk to a hologram on the Normandy it was me who did that).

After that I worked on Omega, Dragon Age: Inquisition and now Mass Effect: Andromeda. I also continued shooting shorts, and am slowly improving. One of them, a VHS time travel movie called Timelike, actually did okay in festivals and even earned me a few conversations with some Hollywood studios. I’m in the process of trying to turn it into a feature film.

I also took up painting.

So here I am now: Still playing guitar, still making movies and most certainly still making video games. No family yet, but a wonderful girlfriend. My career goal is, and always will be, to direct movies for a living, and every day I get a little bit closer. It’s been a wandering path to get here, sure, but an interesting one.

To partially quote Ed McMahon, I just hope when it’s all over I’ll be remembered as a good artist and a great soldier. I think my dad would have been proud.

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