speaker-1: Death to Liv is back. Season three kicks off right here, right now. Death today of the podcast about everyday video game developers and why they do what they do every day. Rolling into season three with a really great conversation with a friend of mine, Stephen Dwyer. We've never directly worked together, although we both worked at Blizzard while I was at Blizzard, we both worked there. Steven's been at Blizzard for a long time. And this was a great opportunity for me to dive into the history of someone, you know, a friend and someone I I know but didn't know a lot about. How they got where they got. I think Stephen's journey through an early university course that maybe wasn't what he was expecting, but managing to turn it around and and and finding a course at Labate University that really set off his career in the right direction, to finding a job in Japan and living there for a while and then basically burning out on a project and quitting on the spot, to living in Paris and finding his way, just basically playing WoW and sort of recovering from the burnout and then stumbling his way into a role that that started his time at Blizzard and since then becoming someone that really supplies a lot of the tools that a lot of the developers he works with on WoW use and how that reflects him as a person. So this is exactly the kind of conversation I love to have on the podcast. It's a it's a longer than usual one 'cause I mean Steven's had a a really interesting career and honestly I was just really enjoying listening to him explain it. And so definitely on the longer side, maybe the longest episode I've done. But worth every minute, I think. I think it's a really great conversation. I appreciate Steven taking the time and hopefully you'll enjoy it as much as I do. Usual plugs! Nothing's changed. Same plugs for de dev to dev. We're on Patreon, where all of season one and now all of season two are archived for your delectation. I have two tiers. An audio only tier that lets you just listen to the audio and then the slightly higher all access tier that gives you access to all of season one, all of season two, the video versions of both and all of the video versions of season three as as they come out. Season three will now become the active season. out there in the public. So if you're jumping into the podcast and just discovering it right now, that's why you're discovering season three. Because seasons one and two are on the Patreon. So please subscribe if you can. I'd really appreciate it. It would really help me out. Please like and share the podcast as you can, especially leaving reviews on your podcast platform of choice so that others discover it. I keep getting great feedback. Just had feedback from a friend last night at a party about how much he enjoys listening to the show. I think there's something here that a lot of people can enjoy. Both People in the industry and people coming into the industry and people industry curious. So please spread the word. I think the wider it goes, hopefully the more people enjoy it. And that make me very happy. But thank you to everyone that already does listen. Thank you to everyone that's connected. Thank you to everyone that listens and watches and shares and likes. I really appreciate it. Again, if you would like to be on the show or you know someone you think would be great on the show, please reach out to me at dev to dev podcast at gmail.com or reach out to me on the socials. Would love to, especially if it's someone I haven't met, because I love those conversations. Season three is gonna be a mixture, I think, of season one and season two. Season one was mostly people I knew, season two was mostly people I didn't. So I think season three is gonna be a good mix of both, and you know, obviously starting out with with episode one with someone I know and then moving into episode two with someone that I don't. So yeah, I enjoy both those conversations, they're fun to do. Anyway, I've waffled enough. Thank you again. But without further ado, let's sit back and listen in to a the first episode of season three of Dev to Dev with Steven Dwyer. Good to see you. ⁓ it's been a while. Good to see you too. Absolutely. Yeah, it's good to catch up again and and you know, obviously you know, we we know each other, we're friends, but I don't know your history, you know, so I'm excited to dig into it. I always enjoy these conversations when they ⁓ you know I uncover things about folks that I you know ⁓ that that I know but but actually don't know, so it's cool. ⁓ so I always start this conversation with my favourite first question. What first inspired you about video games?
speaker-0: Yeah, one time they'll see. wow. I mean it goes way, way, way back. ⁓ so I'm obviously no spring chicken now. I remember my first interaction with anything that would resemble games was almost like this proto console called the Grandstand. Do you know that? I Yeah, there you go. And ⁓ yeah, so the grandstand it had physical switches. ⁓ you would switch the game like that kind of stuff. ⁓ but obviously the the the goat, as they say, was Pong, which was on the grandstand, and it still used the ⁓ you know, the potentiometer style thing and that that was literally it. And I I would sit there for hours hitting a bat to the other person and it just flying off the end of the screen 'cause I didn't really have anyone else to play with. ⁓ so then I ended up like trying to do it with both hands as everybody eventually experiments that kind of stuff. And like my mum saw me doing this and she was like, Well, this is interesting. And obviously back then no one knew anything about where games were going or what these things were, right? ⁓ so she got me this. ⁓ you know how you've got the old ⁓ it was liquid crystal displays, you know, like the the old kind of game and watch style stuff. ⁓ but prior to that there was ⁓ you Little ⁓ just l like digital watches, right? You would have these little light up displays ⁓ of these small little liqu liquid crystal things. And she actually bought me there's a yellow circle ⁓ that it was kind of flat, it was like squished and it had a tiny little screen on it, and that was Pac-Man. So she bought me Pac-Man shortly after ⁓ I played on the grandstand, and that just started like a fascination with me. You know, I I'm sure most of us have a similar history in the sense that I would go out if I was forced to go out. Go play with your friends out in the street, right? But if I were left to my own devices, I would just sit in front of the the the screen and, you know, do all of this stuff. ⁓ so that basically developed into Being forced outside, finding out that my friends had some other system or console, right? So we're going now into like your Commodore sixteens, some people had acorns, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And I would find these people and I would go to their house and sit in their house where I wouldn't be nagged by my mum and play their computers. ⁓ so it was just like from day one, as soon as that ended up in my hands, it was just like this is the only thing I'm really interested in, right? So that that's how that happened.
speaker-1: Right. So it it just hooked you immediately. And what was it? Was it the yeah, what was it about it that sort of captures your fascination, do you think?
speaker-0: I think it touches a little on I mean, how dark do you want me to go, Alex? It touches a little on, you know, your upbringing. I won't go too dark, but it's like if you if you had a hard time at school and ⁓ you know, maybe you would come home and you would just like look for an escape from reality almost, you know? And you don't know how you process that as a kid, right? You're just doing these things. ⁓ but I'm sure a lot of us have have that kind of similar thing, which is like being here is a system that I is simple and I can understand and I can get good at it really fast and it's like a skill I build and no one else seems to have the skill. ⁓ all of these things together, and obviously you can't frame it in those words when you're a kid, but it's like it's just like that, right? Like I I think it w it was a very much a quite a bit of that. Which was like hard time at school, come home, escape into the the video game universe. And I'm gonna be honest with you, I don't know if much has changed. Necessario. Mu much has changed, but yeah, we we all love video games for the escape, right? So I think I was in like the pro version of that when I was younger.
speaker-1: I can relate to that a lot, very similar, you know, for me that, you know, video games validated me, right? They gave me confidence that I could do something good even if people around me told me I couldn't. And I you know, I I think it sounds like maybe similar for you, you know, like just picking up this control, like you say, getting good at it and feeling like, wait, am I can I am I good at this? Can I do this? ⁓ gave you self confidence, right? Gave you belief almost.
speaker-0: Yeah, I sometimes wonder like if I were born sixteen years ago or something like that, right? And I'm in this world now where you have esports and you have competitive online play and like all of that kind of stuff, like what how would that have changed the tr trajectory of my life, right? Like would would that be what I'd be doing right now, right? Like I think it was because there wasn't that avenue. I feel like I mean that I might be jumping ahead of myself here, but I feel like that's why I got into game development because there weren't really avenues like that. Like if I were just playing a video game and there was an avenue for me to play video games professionally, I very well may have gone that way. Right. But because there wasn't, I was like, well I want to know how this works and how do I make these and I've got so many ideas like can I make these? And that's how I basically I got into game development.
speaker-1: Interesting. Yeah, that's that's definitely a teaser, 'cause I definitely want to dig into that. I'm I'm curious where where did you grow up?
speaker-0: Glasgow and Scotland.
speaker-1: Okay. And you said there were some gamers around you, you know, some some you know, other kids at school. Did you have any siblings or any other family members that played?
speaker-0: no family members that played. I mean, this was I mean, as you know, this was back when this was nascent, right? Like there was so few systems like that around the video game arcades were yet to come, you know, like that kind of stuff, right? So this was very much just a curiosity that her son seemed to be interested in from my mum's perspective, right? ⁓ my sibling, yeah, I've got a sister, but she didn't come along for another nine years, so that was much later. But yeah, the kids in my neighborhood, they were in a similar situation. They'd been bought a s ⁓ a proto system, ⁓ and there was just so many at the time and they were all weird and they were all bespoke. and so it was a matter of just, you know, you're out there playing and one of your friends starts talking about this weird game that they've got and you're like, ⁓ can I come around and see it? And then, you know, that's pretty much it went. So I'd say like maybe two, two or three of my friends had a different system. This was Glasgow, Scotland, yeah. So sorry to talk of you, but this was Glasgow, Scotland, yeah, so
speaker-1: Do you think gaming was you know, I ⁓ I've spoke to a few different people, right? And some people you know, I just spoke to Luke yesterday, ⁓ last week who grew up in ⁓ you know in a remote part of Ireland and then was like video game development or video game anything just wasn't a thing there, right? It was just there were a few people that played and that was it. Was do you think I mean, you know, Glasgow, did you was there any concept was video w were video games and game shops and that kind of thing? Was it part of the culture there or was it still v I it's like you say, it's proto period, but Was it still very underground or or was it starting to become more popular?
speaker-0: Yeah, it was it was not I mean Especially when it comes to games. I think people were starting to get that so the collective consciousness was starting to kinda understand that computers were making their way into the the homes for for certain reasons, right? ⁓ like one of my friends, he had an ⁓ one of the OG IBM PCs, right? I used to go around and play this might have been a bit later, but I used to go around and play it was ⁓ the one of the original 3D games. ⁓ and it was just all ⁓ primitives, made up of primitives, right? There wasn't any any Definition. ⁓ so he had a PC, but he had been using it to to do word processing and and spreadsheets and like that kind of stuff. so I think people were getting used to the idea that these things were coming, but when it came to like games, like that was still a way off. He when I when I was playing the grandstand, right? Like yeah, the idea of like a video game arcade was just so far in the future that I don't think anyone had even thought about it at that point. So yeah, Glasgow was I mean, I'm going to say Scotland is remote. It obviously is n not by global standards today, but like back then in the I was born in 79, right? So like I was coming of age, mid eighties, and you know, that's when all of that stuff was just starting to kick off. And I think in the major cities, you know, you would have a lot of options. But as you go further north or further out, I can imagine Ireland as well, right? Like takes a little longer for those things to arrive. So ⁓ I think that was the case.
speaker-1: Yeah, that makes sense. ⁓ and so so so video games sound like they were an obsession. Sounds like you kind of loved them. D and and you just played them all through school and then at some point you decide to go to uni. ⁓ and and you focused on computer science ⁓ initially. So so what what took you in that direction of programming or computer science?
speaker-0: You're g you're giving me that this guy's done his research thing. I can't remember if we talked about this before. ⁓ but yes, How would I describe this? ⁓ so obviously as a kid that plays games and ⁓ and I think in the the nascent age of c computers, your parents might get a little worried. like, is there a career in this kind of thing, right? Is is my son gonna make money doing this? Is that a possibility? You know, we didn't even know things like that at the time, right? How the games weren't being sold as games like like we do now, right? So I think there was a worry, right? So in high school I was good at art. Strangely enough, but not not like traditional art, but like graphic design and stuff like that. ⁓ and then ⁓ what else was I good at? ⁓ I wasn't good at math, which is which is actually the the more I've gotten the career, the more I realize how many programmers aren't actually good at math. It's just it's it's kind of like an interesting side of things. There there's a good split. ⁓ I think the the key I'm getting ahead of myself again. I think the key is that to have a logical brain, not necessarily a mathematical brain. But anyway, ⁓ let me go back. So I think when I was in high school my mum was wondering if there was a career in computer games and she looked at the courses I was good at and they were very much graphic design, computing, but there wasn't computer classes back then. either, right? So it was just like these these weird little c curiosities. But there was a computer science class in like one of my last years at high school and we used the old Apple machines. Like one some of the original Apple machines. And I remember using them in I'm not a fan of Mac these days. In fact I've never really been a fan of Apple's products, but ⁓ I still I find it kind of fascinating back then that this system seemed so alien to the other systems that I was using. And so I was into that. So yes I got to the point where it was like, okay, you're finished in high school. Where do you go from here? So it was very much a choice for me between graphic design and computing science. And so by the time I had gotten to that point, the world was catching up a bit. And so my mum, as parents do, asked, Well, if you don't know which one to choose, which one's gonna make you the most money? Right? You know obviously a a logical A logical decision, right? ⁓ so obviously I answered I think computing is gonna be the the the next big thing. But here we touch against, you know, Glasgow and Scotland being further away than most places again. There was only a few computing science classes available. ⁓ now luckily I was in the largest city in Scotland, you know, like I said, Glasgow, ⁓ and they have the very well established Glasgow University. There. So Glasgow University had a computing science class. That was the only computing class available at Glasgow University. So I basically signed up for that. ⁓ and so that's how I ended up in Gl computer Science and Glasgow University. ⁓ I'll I'll pause for questions because the the spoiler of this story is I did not do well in that class.
speaker-1: Well that was gonna be my next question because you you spend a couple of years there and then you move on to Abertei University and I was curious how that happened.
speaker-0: There's a there's this is the theme of this chat so far, which is when I went into computing science, because everything was so nascent, ⁓ the language the programming language that they were teaching us was ADA in in ⁓ Glasgow University, right? So I sat down with some ADA and it was only years later that I realized that, you know, the military had an interest in ADA and like all of that kind of stuff, right? So that's kind of what we're talking about when we're talking about nascent programming jobs back in the day. It's like these industries that had an early vested interest kind of influencing, you know, I can imagine someone from the university reaching out and saying, We're going to offer a computer science course. Which programming language should we offer the students, right? And, you know, the military's going to say, Yeah, we're using ADA, so you might as well use ADA. And so I used ADA and I don't know what it was about it, but I was just so uninterested in in it. And so I'd be sitting in the computer labs. I mean it could have been product of me being that young as well, but I was sitting in the computer labs and I guess it wasn't games, but I hadn't made that connection yet that it wasn't like programming for s just stuff that I wanted to do. It was gate some something game adjacent I wanted. But obviously I hadn't had formed that thought yet. ⁓ so I was in a I was in a class and because it was the only class available at the time, the class was like three hundred strong. ⁓ so I'd be in this massive lecture hall with three hundred students all trying to learn computer science at the same time because that was the only course or one of the few courses available at the time. And you know, I got I started getting this kind of like sinking feeling, which was like, if I want help for anything, I'm not gonna get it because at the end of the class I would see a queue of like twenty, twenty-five people waiting to speak to the lecturer. And that started like a chain reaction of events where I just started disengaging and disconnecting from from the course in general. ⁓ I managed to pass through through unknown like skill or events or something, I managed to pass the first year. so I went into the second year, but like it was almost like burnout, I guess I would describe it as. But you know, now having experienced a little bit of burnout ⁓ during my career. ⁓ I know that that's what it was at the time, but I couldn't it was the first time I'd ever experienced that, so I couldn't put a name to it. I was like, I don't wanna engage with this, I don't wanna do anything involving this, I can't get the help that I need. I'm just gonna disconnect and I'm just gonna like wander around university campus. ⁓ I guess kind of like you the stories you hear of the Japanese businessmen that get fired and then they just go eat a sandwich in the park. Felt a lot like that, right? But you know, there's a lot of pressure on you as a kid, right? Your parents are expecting a lot from you. You know, he's got he did great in high school, high hopes, all of that pressure, all of that kind of stuff. ⁓ so obviously when it came to the end of second year, so I went through the whole of second year, mostly just failing everything. Strangely enough, I passed geography. So I I maybe I've got a little talent for geography in there somewhere. But ⁓ everything else I failed. Computing science, my major specifically. and you know Piper comes calling, ⁓ you know, I got the failure letters and my mum got them and you know, you know how that goes right, ⁓ you know, anger at first and then questions and like all credit to my mum. She drilled right into it immediately. She's like, Does this just like not interest you? What's wrong with it? Like that kind of stuff. And I was very much like, Yeah. I mean she's like, I see you at the in front of the computer like every night, like what is it about that and why are you feeling here? ⁓ It was very much ⁓ yeah, wrong thing, I think. And she she figured that out. She's like, Why don't we look for something else that's related to computers, but like not this. ⁓ and that's essentially how we ended up at Abertee University. So Yep. They they had a compu they I'll I'll just give you a little brief history of Abertee as well. ⁓ when I did that, when I went to go to Abertee University They were the only university in the whole of the world, except for one, which was in Japan, that offered a game specific computer science course. ⁓ yeah, so Aberti was the first. And when I would have been joining, so they'd been doing that for a year by the time I joined. So when I was second year ⁓ in Glasgow University, they had started that course. And obviously a completely new field. from my understanding, joining in the second year, it was very rough. Like they hadn't quite they hadn't figured out what they were going to teach, how they were going to teach it, and so on and so forth. ⁓ but yeah, that was I don't know. I guess that's it's kind of luck and fortuitousness that ⁓ you know, I I didn't struggle through four years at Glasgow University. I stopped. That course was available, so I went to Haberti University and it was the name of the course was Computer Games Technology. Sounds ideal, right? So my mum and I ⁓ took the hour and a half drive to Dundee from Glasgow and ⁓ we sat in front of a lecturer and I think he just looked at my resume, so to speak, and he was just like, Wow, you've been to Glasgow University, you're in, like that kind of thing. And completely ignored the fact that like I had failed pretty much everything. It's just I had been to the prestigious Glasgow University. So ⁓ yeah, so I got in with no problems there. That was great. ⁓ so that's the start of The Aberti era era, basically.
speaker-1: I love that. And then the fact that you you know, you th I presume at that point you were like, I don't just wanna program, I don't just wanna do generic computer science, I wanna do computer game computer science, that's what I yeah, and that's where you put the the dots connected.
speaker-0: Yeah, and honestly I f I flew through the four years. Like it was that was that was it. The key had turned, the lock unlocked, and I just went through all four years of that course, you know, no problem at all.
speaker-1: That's great. Yeah, and like you say, your your mum spotted that and and put you on the right path. so so so you go through you go through those four years. ⁓ you get to do a year in Japan at some point. ⁓ that which was was that related to the the kind of computer game stuff you were doing? How did that come about? And what was that like? That must have been amazing.
speaker-0: ⁓ well I'll start with the the yeah, so I was coming to the end of Abertee, my Abertee tenure. I was in my fourth year, we were doing our dissertation projects and stuff like that. And I was one of maybe five or six people, and I'm not trying to tip my own horn here, but it was like I was one of five or six people whose dissertation were gonna be near the top, right? I think the the lecturers had identified it as like good. I did facial animation for my dissertation. And this was back when we're talking about games like Max Pain from like the original remedy where it was just like one flat texture. Yeah. Constant grimace. And I actually use that as an example. I was like, well, if you had a lot of facial animation, this like emotional driven story would be like a lot better. So that's what I did my dissertation on. And yeah, so that was highlighted as like one of one of the good ones. And so an opportunity came to us which was like, ⁓ we are partnered with ⁓ you know, universities and companies in other countries around the world, ⁓ and would you be interested in an internship, right? And I I had never heard that word before. I'm gonna be honest with you. Like I didn't know what an internship was. ⁓ it sounded like the vaguely American thing, right? Like what's a what's an internship? ⁓ so I asked more about it and they were like, yeah, so you basically you take your skills, you go out there to where whatever company you join. And naturally you do what they ask you to do, but it will be ⁓ you know, they're interested in you because what you're doing right now and you know it will be related work, basically. It might not be exactly what you're expecting to do, but it'll be related work. And here's the options. So I'll look through the options and at Aberti my minor ⁓ just like you you'd have to do like ten modules a year. And Eight of the modules were probably your major, and the last two were kind of like you can choose whatever you want if you want to have some fun or whatever, like that kind of stuff. ⁓ so the minor I chose was Japanese. Because I I just found that interesting. I I had been watching early like anime and manga. I'm not a huge anime and manga fan, but it interested me enough back then, and I kind of had that logical connection, which is like, well, I found out that this is the second place in the world that Is doing a games course, so Japan obviously has a games industry. So maybe I want to leave myself open to the potential of having that ⁓ job market available to me. ⁓ I mean that all sounds very logical right now, but that I guarantee you that's not how I was processing it in my young brain, but that was definitely part of the part of the process. ⁓ so anyway, Japan was on the list. And I said, Well, that sounds very interesting. What would I have to do in Japan? So they said It's a year-long internship, and you'll be working for ⁓ their biggest co ⁓ their biggest phone company essentially. It's a lot more complicated than that. It's kind of like ATT. ⁓ you know, it's a big phone company. They've got, you know, their fingers in a lot of pies. It's not just telecoms, it's like tons of other stuff. ⁓ so their their company, N NT, ⁓ they do ⁓ a lot of their telecom stuff, but they also have a research division. And here's Another proto thing that I got involved in. The research division was working on natural language processing and speech recognition, basically. This was long before your series and like all of that kind of stuff, right? Like this another nascent thing that they were just trying to figure out, like the the recording and like tokenization and of of the phonetics was still separate, completely separate from the actual natural language part processing, right? And so they had two research divisions ⁓ NTT and one of them was the tokenization, the other one was the ⁓ the language processing, and then so I ended up in the tokenization one. ⁓ so I accepted that because hey, who wouldn't want to go out to Japan on someone else's dime for a year, right? And I just had one of the like the work itself ⁓ wasn't really games adjacent. There's a lot of reasons for that. but It allowed me to clock in and then clock out and enjoy Japan for like a whole year. ⁓ and there were other interns there at the same time, and like twenty interns all there at the same time. So it was like just a crazy great time party attitude, you know, like we were all young, you know, we were all fascinated by Japan and it was just a great experience overall. So yeah, that was a good year.
speaker-1: That's amazing. And and did you ⁓ did you get kind of a good exposure to the gaming, you know, the culture over there? I mean, you know, I was so inspired by Japanese gaming culture, ⁓ you know, you're right there at you know, good time to kind of explore it.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, very much so. So by the time I got out there, what are we talking about now? So it was a high school, it was just starting out. We're another eight ish years, maybe six to eight years forward. So we're at like the nineties now or something like that. Early nineties, right? So we'd now we've got video game arcades, we've got the early consoles, ⁓ you know, like all of that kind of stuff. ⁓ I think it was like s It was more than SNES era, I know that much. ⁓ I'd have to look at the timelines, but when I went out there there was definitely stores, gaming stores in Japan and you could play the arcades and they had the ⁓ one of the things I'll never forget is I ended up in one of those twenty four seven gaming arcades. It was like a multi floor I think this was in Osaka. Like I missed the last train and you've got a few options, right? To y you either just sit at the train station and wait for the morning train or you can go to like ⁓ twenty four seven arcade. So that's what we did. ⁓ and yeah, you play lots of cool games there. A lot of the ⁓ lot of the games like the you know physical games, they were doing like Fists of the North Star punching games and you could even play bowling there and all that kind of stuff. ⁓ but yes the culture there gaming culture was great. I enjoyed that. That's not what I was working on day to day. And because I was kind of like out socializing with all of these other interns I actually didn't get a lot of chance to kind of express my gaming interest while I was there that first year. ⁓ so that actually leads me to why I ended up staying, 'cause I I got to the end of the internship and I was like, this was a great experience. I feel like I can experience more in Japan, so I want to stay here. So I I applied to as many video games companies in Japan as I could to see if I could actually move into the industry.
speaker-1: Yeah, and that that took you to now production, yeah, to work on actual game stuff.
speaker-0: Yeah, so I did the the kind of desperate foreigner thing, ⁓ which was I had no idea okay, so my Japanese wasn't great. the company, the intern company I worked for, everybody spoke English, even all the Japanese people, right? And in fact, they saw as a chance to practice their English, right? So it was kind of hard to get them to speak Japanese sometimes. But you'd you'd go out, you socialize, you pick up some Japanese, that kind of stuff. ⁓ but overall I think it was just kind of like daily Japanese I was good at. So I was a little worried that ⁓ if I went to an actual Japanese games company where they weren't like this, and everybody only spoke Japanese and maybe a few of them spoke haltingly English, would I thrive, would would I do would I do well? ⁓ and in the end I was like, Well, how much do I want to stay here? ⁓ that overrode any kind of fear about me not doing well. I was like, I'll let them decide. I'll show up, I'll do an interview, and I'll use ⁓ the crappy Japanese that I have. And if they're fine with that, then okay. If they want to hire me, they hire me. It's really on them. ⁓ that was an expensive process because I basically applied to fifty different companies. I just shotgunned it. Like I I basically found a list of all the game dev companies that I could, from Hokkaido all the way down to I think the farthest I went was like Hiroshima or something like that, but Just fifty companies and I got back five responses from the fifty. So we're, you know, we're we're at ten percent. And then ⁓ from those ⁓ three of them were like, Why did you apply to us? Like we we don't get it. Why did you apply? And then the last two were like, Why did you apply to us? Please come to an interview so that we can talk about it. Like that kind of stuff. Wow. Strange, right? So one of them was in Osaka and one of them was in Tokyo. I was living in Osaka at the time. That's where now production is. so now production is Osaka. NTT research division was in Kyoto, but that's really close to Osaka. I was commuting to Kyoto pretty much mo ⁓ most days. So that was a good choice. And then the one in Tokyo I was interested in because Tokyo is Tokyo, right? It's like this massive city. That but that might be an interesting place to live. So I went to both interviews. I went to the Tokyo one. And obviously got lost in Tokyo because it's like a megalopolis, but I managed to make it to their studio and I will describe it as a curious experience. And I think most of that is just like my language skills weren't that good. So it's hard y you can only really pick up on vibes when co c conversations get to a certain complexity level. ⁓ the vibes I got, and this could just be me being paranoid and uncomfortable, ⁓ was that I was gonna kind up kinda end up like their pet foreigner. Right. ⁓ and you know, after a while in now production, looking back, I think I kinda understand that position from the Japanese mindset. But it was very much ⁓ they looked at my stuff. I had a demo game and a demo engine and all of that kind of stuff. And they looked at it and they're like, Yeah, I mean that seems interesting. You know, if you wanna work for us, we'll we'll find something for you to do kind of thing. So I was like, okay, great, I'm gonna go back to a second, I'll think about it. And I went to the interview at and now production and ⁓ it was just kinda like night and day. I think ⁓ you know, the CEO ⁓ of the company or the president of the company at the time interviewed me, right? So it wasn't like the game team. He was just very curious and I think he like their their company, so let me explain now production a little. Their company, ⁓ made a lot of really cool games in the in the early era of the consoles themselves. And then as they kind of transitioned and the the industry and industry transitioned into something larger, ⁓ they were getting kind of like contract work. So they would get bigger games companies, kind of like Nintendo and Sega, would say, hey, we want you to make this little project for us. And they would take that on. And then they would just be named under the Sega banner as as it went out. So they showed me the pro when I showed up the CEO like, Let look at our prospectus, look at this kind of stuff. And it just felt like he was trying to sell me on working for them, right? So it was like kind of a s much stranger dynamic. And he's Yeah, it'd be really great if he'd work for us because we think just a different, you know, mentality than the than the current, you know, folk there have might be more creative or something. I don't know. I can't say exactly what they were thinking. But that's the vibe I got. The vibe I got was that he was trying to sell me on their company and he would just like love to have me there. And so just immediately on that feeling I was like, Okay, I'm gonna go back, think about it. But I pretty much already knew. I was like, Yeah, let's do this. So I started working at Now Pro shortly after. So I had to go home, get a new visa, come back. Wow. ⁓ so there was all of that in the background, you know, the country admin stuff. Yeah. ⁓ But yeah, that that worked out just fine. So ⁓ left, came back and yeah, started working for N T T.
speaker-1: Yeah, I was gonna say, so yeah, you've made the big so you made the jump from Glasgow to Dundee to to go to uni, and then you make the then you make the jump to Japan and stay there for a while. But you've sort of but you know, as someone that's you know emigrated myself, once you've kind of made that you know made that move somewhere else, like it's it's not it's hard not to want to go somewhere else after that. Yes. So so you do you do kind of a year at ⁓ at now production working on, you know, all kinds of stuff. ⁓ and then you go to Blizzard. So how did that happen? How did you make that jump?
speaker-0: So another moment of brutal honesty. I like to think that like I have a good work ethic, right? Like if I if I if I do stuff, ⁓ I'm gonna try and do it as best as I can, right? and so l kinda like what I was talking about earlier, ⁓ now production was a company where very few people spoke English. And so ⁓ my Japanese had to get good real fast. ⁓ So there was a lot of discomfort there, I feel like, ⁓ for me. I'm not gonna say there was any miscommunications, but just personally speaking, I just struggled day to day of as you would, right? Because you want to have a conversation about, hey, I'm making this effect for this level, right? Like how do you see this playing out? And the only language that they can use is like complicated version of Japanese to describe these things, right? Like how do you how do you describe God rays in Japanese to someone that doesn't like particularly know Japanese that well? So all credit to the Japanese team there and they were very patient ⁓ and you know very amenable to to my needs and all of that kind of stuff. But overall it was a very difficult project. And we actually got ⁓ it was Sonic Team that ⁓ gave Now production the contract for Sonic Riders, the original Sonic Riders game. And that's bas that was basically if we're talking about first games in the industry. I'm looking over there because I have the disc and the thing ⁓ for Sonic Riders. But that was the first professional job, games industry job that I had, basically. ⁓ and it was Sonic Riders. So I mean, right out the gate, being a member of Sonic team was just like huge. Working on a Sonic the Hedgehog game was huge. and ⁓ yeah, a year and a half there, it was a very tight schedule. We were trying to release the game on three consoles, the Xbox, PlayStation, and GameCube, which gives you an idea of what era we were in. and so there was just a lot of issues and problems there. and obviously we had two Sonic Team spokespeople with us and they were you know telling us what their expectations were and all that kind of stuff. And it got to the point where, ⁓ because of my work ethic and my struggles, I think, with language and things like that. ⁓ the last half year, maybe three quarters of a year, was just like super tiring in the sense the Japanese work ethic sense. In a the Japanese work ethic sense, ⁓ I mean then I know there's a lot of like stereotypes and all that kind of stuff, but when you're in it, it just it kind of feels natural to like get you stay with your whole team late into the night trying to get this thing done. So there's definitely that this team kind of peer pressure aspect. And then sometimes, yeah, I'd I I c literally fell asleep on my keyboard sometimes. ⁓ stuff like that, right? So major exhaustion, major burnout, like all of that kind of stuff. ⁓ so I got to the end of that year and a half. and when our manager came over and says, I think it was Nintendo we were trying to get the last approval for, right? Because you send them the gold master back then. And then they obviously play it and they're like, Okay, this is good enough, we accept it. and so we had PlayStation and we had Microsoft and we were just waiting on Nintendo and ⁓ yeah, the manager came over, I was asleep at my desk and he got got a ta tap on the shoulder and he went, You know, Steve Son, ⁓ Nintendo's accepted ⁓ our game. You you know, go home and rest. ⁓ you know, you've done well, team's done well, great job, all of that kind of stuff. And I was still like half asleep, so bleer blearily eyed, like, ⁓ okay, okay. And he went back and like within ten seconds, almost like involuntarily, I h had stood up, wiped the drill off my face, went over at my manager and went I quit. Yeah. So there was part of me that was like that knew like this is not sustainable, right? So all of this to say like this is how I ended up in France. ⁓ for for Blizzard was this was my first programming job in the industry. And of course you don't think that you've got no framework for comparison at the time. I just knew that if this was the experience, I'm not sure I want to be involved in it. Right. Or I don't think I'm gonna survive it. It was almost like an up lower on the Maslow's hierarchy of decisions, right? So I just thought, hey, if this is what it's gonna be like, maybe I made a Bad choice. You start getting all these existential crisis moments, all that kind of stuff, right? You're in a foreign land, you don't speak the language, even though I did speak the language, and I was enjoying living in Japan, all that kind of stuff. All of these things when you're exhausted just start to build up. They seem much larger than they are. ⁓ so I was like, I don't know, maybe I'll just go home for a while and see see what's up, see if I can think of something else or do something else. So yeah, I quit and I was out of Japan two weeks later. You know, I had gotten rid of all of my stuff, gotten out of the apartment, and so on and so forth, closed my bank accounts, and I was back home ⁓ within two weeks and one of the eye opening parts for me, I'm gonna keep crediting my mum throughout this whole process, was I got off the plane and my mum as soon as my mum saw me, she started crying. And so I just kinda must have looked so gaunt and so white or something like that, right? ⁓ and to her credit she didn't bother me for like about a month. And I basically I mean I look back at it now, I didn't feel it at the time, but I look back at it now, I was recovering for a month, right? Just like trying to get energy and strength back and all that kind of stuff. And during that month, ⁓ back home I found a little game ⁓ and played a little game called World of Warcraft. ⁓ so World of Warcraft I credit for my recovery in that regard, right? So Vanilla WoW had just been released. Massive success, huge success. became a global phenomenon like over the course of that first release up until the Burning Crusade expansion. ⁓ but I was we were still very much in initial launch phase and so I was playing that and I was just I mean, I used to play D and D in high school and things like that, and so it was just right up my alley. This, you know, fantasy world game. ⁓ and I just felt good to play that and make progression and and all of that kind of stuff. All the things that I wasn't feeling I was getting in Japan, I guess. ⁓ and so I did that. But you know, after a month of living at home with my mum, you know, God bless her, she walks in and she's like, Maybe you should start looking for a job, Steven. You know? I think in the two and a half years I'd been away from home, she kinda had started to enjoy the freedom of the house to herself, like that kind of thing. ⁓ and now I was imposing on her, so she was like, Yeah. How about you you go look for a job? So I I reached kind of like a crisis point ⁓ where I was like, I don't want to work on programming because in my mind was this thing that I just went through. And and so she again with the wisdom, she was like, Is there not something else in the games industry that you might be able to be able to do? ⁓ that would, you know that wouldn't throw away all of this stuff that you have and that you've been learning and and that kind of stuff. And she just turned I remember a moment where she she was saying something like that. She had that we had this conversation many times, but she was saying something like that and she turned around and I was sitting there like this, you know, like the the you know the the typical player of WoW ⁓ back then and she was like, Why don't you see if they're looking for people? And I hadn't I hadn't even made that connection. It was weird actually, because I had just made a game and I was playing this game and I hadn't made the connection that people made that game as well.
speaker-1: Yeah. It's almost like you'd you would sort of like refuse to, right? 'Cause it sounds like you had such a bad experience of making games that you were like, I don't even want to think I just wanna consume, I don't want to think about making.
speaker-0: Yeah, it's like I my brain was just like, Yeah, just imagine these things materialize out of nowhere and you'll be much happier, like that kind of stuff. ⁓ so after making that connection I was like, okay. ⁓ and I looked so early internet as well, so I I looked at their website. and because of the success of World of Warcraft, ⁓ they were hoovering up people for their customer support department. ⁓ so ⁓ especially because they were going global, right? Obviously Blizzard American company. ⁓ but around that era ⁓ was the so that there's a there's a there's a long i ⁓ history there that I'll probably munge. But ⁓ there was Vivendi, ⁓ which is an American company, and then they merged with Activision. and I don't know when that was, was that around like two thousand seven, two thousand eight, something like that? ⁓ But they they did that merge and then ⁓ you know, I think that just kind of opened up a lot. I know they were a global company, but I think they got like things were starting to get super global at that time. And so they were looking for customer support in in France to cover all of Europe, and then they were looking for customer support in Asia for for all of Asia and so on and so forth. So that was like, ⁓ my god, the game is so successful, we need this customer support and this these offices around the world to deal with the global success of this game. And so I think they were very much in a snap expansion. ⁓ so when I joined Blizzard, it was customer support because that's who they were hoovering people up for. They were like, Yeah, we need like fifty to a hundred people yesterday, like that kind of thing. And so it wasn't a particularly difficult process, especially not for me. ⁓ and I joined at the same time is like twenty there was twenty of us and then two weeks prior there had been twenty people joined. So we all went to a near so there was the office, there was a nearby hotel. Shout out to all my ETAP people. ⁓ so the hotel was called the ETAP and all of the recent Blizzard customer support employees were put there by the company ⁓ so that we could all get our training. It was like two weeks training or something that but that was a if I thought my first year internship in Japan was like crazy intern parties. The first two weeks at the ETAP and Felizie ⁓ and the south of Paris was just nuts. It was just like crazy. It was a good environment. And I was ⁓ older than everybody else there. So that's that's kind of been a recurring theme throughout my life as well, which is because I failed the two years at university, when I arrived at Abertei, I was two years older than everybody else who was just starting out. And then and so on and so forth. That just seems to have carried through my life. So th ⁓ it's kinda like the when you learn like the the best hockey players are the ones that held were held back I think. Not that I'm saying the best, you know, but like probably for that reason I had more experience, ⁓ was more comfortable with myself. Yeah, and so on and so forth. So anyway, I arrived there, ⁓ yeah, that was the start of ⁓ Blizzard customer support. ⁓ if you asked me if I saw myself moving back to engineering at that time, not a single chance.
speaker-1: No, it doesn't sound like it. It sounds like you took a hard pivot, you know, away from what you've done, but still found a way back into video games. So you find yourself in in France, ⁓ you've pivoted away from engineering and you're into customer service. How was that? How I obviously you're a huge WoW fan, so how was it to sort of you know be on the inside and you know and be be working with fellow players and trying to wrangle all that customer service stuff?
speaker-0: ⁓ yeah, I in many ways it just felt like I was feeding World of Warcraft addiction by also doing it I mean from a different perspective, but ⁓ also doing it during the day. ⁓ th there's a lot of interesting dynamics there as well because this obviously was in France. This was ⁓ Felize Paris, so kind of s thirty minutes ish south of the centre of Paris. So not in Paris proper, but ⁓ down that way and I lived in Versailles, which is the the old capital, ⁓ before they you know lopped everybody's heads off and stuff like that. ⁓ so I lived like down the road from the palace of Versailles, so that was a lovely place to live. and yeah, I would ⁓ I mean so I'm kind of steeped in that environment. I'll I'll give you a quick ⁓ is I'm using it's kind of like a funny, funny sideline story. So obviously living in Japan two and a half years, right? One of the most efficient, well ordered societies that one might have the pleasure to live in. Now obviously that comes with its downsides, as I've already discovered. ⁓ but moving from there to Paris was like absolute cultural whiplash, basically. And it took a could took from that perspective, it took me a while to get used to. very laid back. ⁓ you know, hey, I arrive in I I get my apartment. I arrive in my apartment. You want to get internet right? Plot hooked up, right? Not only are the buildings like four hundred years old with like ancient copper pipes, but if you want to get someone out, it's like just sitting there with a cigarette, you know, hmm, maybe. Maybe I'll think about coming and installing your internet, right? It was just such a very languid, slow pace compared to Japan. ⁓ and then equally ⁓ the things I loved about it, you know, vacations, ⁓ you know, all sorts of stuff. They very much love that ⁓ kind of relaxed view of of work. I'm not gonna say it's work shy because I think that gives the the wrong impression, but it's certainly adjacent. to that in the sense that people value ⁓ I guess it's a big thing these days work life balance. ⁓ and yes the the Parisians and the French in particular have that have that down, I think. And just going from Japan to France. So that was my first ⁓ I well, it was my second experience with culture shock. First experience with culture shock was going to Japan in the first place. Setting culture shock was just the whiplash going from Japan to France and and just the the differences in an entire society and how they deal with things. I mean it doesn't sound like that would be the case, but certainly if you go from Japan to France it is. ⁓ anyway, so I was in that environment, which is you know, I would say if I'm talking about a recovery period is good for my recovery, ⁓ because, you know, I the Not only is the pressure low from the job, ⁓ but the pressure was also low from the culture and society that I was in. And, you know, it was just like, yeah, just start to live and enjoy life again and all of that kind of stuff. In World of Warcraft, I mean, there is a world that you could escape into. I mean, I just don't think I mean there were obviously things like EverQuest and kind of like all of that kind of stuff, but World of Warcraft, when I arrived on the CM ⁓ scene, I think that just opened so many eyes as to like what a living, breathing online world could be like. It deserves a success in that regard. So when I went into work each day, ⁓ yeah, it I mean it's kind of unreal, I guess. Like you you go in and we had these tools which is gonna be relevant to to if we're gonna talk about what I do now. but we had this tool called GM tool, imaginatively named. ⁓ so that was gate so ⁓ customer support were called Game Masters from Blizzard. And ⁓ the idea was I mean you didn't go into the client or anything like that. You didn't you weren't in the game talking to players. That was vanishingly rare. ⁓ there was a whole interface ⁓ for customer support, which is ⁓ a player in the game would have some access to the c ⁓ the ticketing system as we would call it, and they would enter a ticket, hey I've got a problem, I'm stuck in a fireplace or something like that, right? ⁓ Torin always getting stuck in fireplaces. ⁓ so we would get that ticket and then we would ⁓ it would just be like in a big queue ⁓ as you would imagine. I guess it's just like any other customer support tool. ⁓ and so you just get a big ticket in a queue and then you pull the ticket from the queue and you answer the ticket and and so on and so forth. So when it comes to World of Warcraft in particular, sure I felt like I was involved in World of Warcraft. But it didn't feel like I was interacting with it as you would the game. Right. So day to day felt different. Well, I mean, it's sure as sure as hell I'd go home and play WoW. So it was like my almost my entire day would be World of Warcraft. But I th I felt like it kept fresh just 'cause it was like two completely different sides of of the story, I guess. So it was like a two week training period and then we were just on the floor answering tickets, basically.
speaker-1: Yeah, and it's it's they say it sounds like you kind of helped avoid burnout there. It wasn't like you were steeped in well wow, twenty four seven, you had this sort of two sides of it. And and I'm s I'm sort of struck by the parallels of like how you talked about losing yourself in, you know, the pong clone in grandstand on a grandstand, and then you get this incredibly rich, lush, you know, ⁓ fantasy world to throw yourself into. It feels like a and you're coming off of an equal perhaps an equal knock on your kind of confidence and self worth almost, you know, through that crunch period. It's a beautiful parallel there. I think it's beautiful. I think the timing's beautiful. I think, you know, the effect it had on you, it's had such a positive effect on you from what sounded like a very dark, dark time. I think that's that's one of the things video games can do, right? They can sort of pull you from those yeah, from those dark places. ⁓ so so you spend your time in France and you know in customer support for like you know, what, almost four years? and at one point you're sort of managing folks, yeah, you kind of move into a more managing role. How was that? How did that feel?
speaker-0: So the the general path I took, ⁓ so obviously y there's avenues for promotion and stuff like that in in any any job that you take. ⁓ so from Game Master, if you had a specific aptitude perhaps or an interest in doing more in depth investigations, for example, I mean this was the early days, but like people being hacked So speak I do that in air quotes because it was kind of rare that people would genuinely get hacked. It was probably because they shared their details online or something and so on and so forth. The end result nonetheless was some actor would ⁓ some nefarious actor would log into their account and sell all their stuff, d to create gold, and then they would mail that gold to some other bot account or player account or something like that, right? And then you got all of these. That's that's how the whole third-party gold selling market. you know, came about this kind of CD underbelly of of wow as it was in its Haiti and and all of that kind of stuff. So though internally there was ⁓ I won't call it a department, but there was a group of people called specialists. ⁓ and they were from the GM pool. ⁓ and it would be like we would go into the logs and we would pour over the logs and we'd try and find the patterns that would identify these people and like all of that kind of stuff. and, you know Do what we could for our players to try and get their things back. And you know, we went way out of our way, like sometimes I guess it varied from person to person, but in general, ⁓ the people that were specialists were just very interested in helping players out, right? Because we were all like players ourselves. And it was just like, Yeah, these awful situations, the worst situations you can be in, the worst experience you can have in a game to date. ⁓ I mean just awful. Like it Th this is kinda I guess the start of like real world money criminal organizations and stuff like that getting involved in gaming. ⁓ and so we were very interested in trying to like stem that tide and return our players to kind of a great experience that we were having and like all of that kind of stuff. So I was one of those people that was interested in that. So I became a specialist after about a year of being a GM. ⁓ and I was a specialist for a while. I was in a great team there, the team that I had at the time. Still my friends now. I was ⁓ at a wedding just last year. ⁓ you know, like twenty years past this time. ⁓ I was at ⁓ one of my specialist friends ⁓ wedding last year and yeah, that was a lot of fun. And we re out he invited everybody from the team and we reconnected last year. That was a pretty awesome experience. It was almost like we'd never left. ⁓ we just fell right back into the old parents. But anyway, that was my specialist team. We got really close, ⁓ really enjoyed that. And then, of course, opportunities come up. ⁓ you know, maybe ⁓ the teams are expanding. We need more specialist teams, or ⁓ your manager is has been promoted and moving on and all the usual stuff that you get in a corporate corporate environment. ⁓ so I I got the opportunity to become ⁓ what they call a senior. A senior in most jobs is kind of like a mentoring role, I would say, in most jobs, but in the GM department it was a manager. So when when you became a senior, you essentially became the manager of a team and those people reported to you basically. ⁓ so I I became the senior ⁓ maybe year two and a it was like two and a half, three. but I at that time so I did senior for a while and I was managing and that's kind of a that was my first real experience with like proper management. ⁓ So like I had a great team. They were all my friends. So I I basically got the team that I was a part of. So they were all my friends already. A little bit of a dynamic shift there, but it was it was a good experience overall. and so I did that for a while. But here's the important part. ⁓ I started kind of getting the itch that this wasn't enough. Right? Like this is this is I'm not gonna say it was too easy because obviously it was challenging every day, that it was different things and the game was evolving and all of that kind of stuff. But for me it was it it was like the way I frame it is it it started to feel like a little easy or I wasn't being challenged. Maybe that's the better way of putting it. Like the work I was doing was challenging, but for my interests it probably didn't feel challenged enough. So around the two and a half year mark, ⁓ when I was a senior, I kinda started finding myself on on job boards and stuff like that. And I was looking at like engineering positions and things back, right? And perhaps my recovery worked and t enough time had passed that I was like, maybe I made a mistake. I mean, that was only my first job. ⁓ maybe, you know, there were parts of it that I really liked. So maybe I think I guess with another two and a half years of maturity under my belt and maybe managing people and all that kind of stuff, I kinda got that feeling that what if rather than abandoning everything from there. I really analyze what I liked and what I didn't like and see if I can find somewhere that suits me better, basically. And almost as I had like finished those revelatory f thoughts, a job posting came up internally for Irvine, California, Blizzard Entertainment, ⁓ tools engineering, basically. And I ⁓ the it's w what was I talking about earlier? Internship. I'd never heard the the w really what internship was when I was a young lad. And now tools engineering, I'm like, I I I know those words, I can get a vague idea of of what's involved there, but it's not like the game development that maybe I struggled with. Perhaps there's some adjacent kind of engineering that gets me involved in video games. So tools engineering I started to research that a little and I found out that it was Essentially, ⁓ yeah, as one might expect, you're making the tools that help make the game. ⁓ and so ⁓ I found out very quickly that they had a tool called WoW Edit. ⁓ and it's it's kind of like a tool that ⁓ the way I describe it to most people that ask me what is your job, is like, well, the game designers and and all of that kind of stuff, they are using hammer nails, like all of that kind of stuff, and they're using all of these tools to put things together. I'm the gay guy that makes the hammers and the nails and stuff like that, right? ⁓ so we've got this tool and it's a really powerful world editor. Now the convenient thing about this ⁓ nowadays is that there are a lot of tools that are almost exactly like WoW Edit now. There w there weren't always WoW Edit is very bespoke, but now we've got Unreal Engine, we've got Unity, we've got Godot, like all of that kind of stuff, right? Those things are very similar to WoW Edit, except WoW Edit is very specifically designed to make World of Warcraft. ⁓ so that's what Wow Edit is. WoW Edit is the unreal of World of Warcraft, and that's what I work on. So I improve WoW Edit day-to-day, basically. ⁓ anyway, so I found out they were making WoW Edit. there's some more life shenanigans that go on during this period, and that is mostly related to the visa process for getting to America. So I always laugh when I see people like posting videos like I moved to America and I got a job here and like all of that kind of stuff and they don't talk at all about how difficult it actually is to that. And you you will have experienced this as well, right? ⁓ so I got an H one B visa. Is that what you got?
speaker-1: I got an L one B, but yeah, I know I know the H one B, yeah.
speaker-0: Yeah, so I I got the old H H one B and it was touch and go for like a whole year because this was the Obama era, basically. And ⁓ you know, Obama obviously much loved as a president ⁓ in many regards, but at one point during his tenure he decided he was gonna redo a lot of the immigration process, and part of that was he canceled all active and application visas. ⁓ so I was in the middle, so it was about six months of waiting at this point. So I had already moved on mentally from the the the specialist role that I was in, and I had been accepted for this role over there tools engineering, and they're like, Okay, now we need to work on your visa. Blizzard did a fantastic job of mostly doing all that for me. ⁓ I've had very little to do with the actual nuts and bowls of putting that together. So that was great. They sponsored me fully in that regard. But it took about six months to get to the point. that I had gotten to and then Obama cancelled. I'm not gonna say Obama, like he Obama personally signed the thing, but his administration canceled all of the visas. I got a letter saying it's been cancelled. If you want to reapply, reapply. And essentially everybody else is in the same position. So they're all reapplying at the same time. And so I ended up in just this horrific queue and like there was a point where I was sitting there like, well, they in America are trying to fill this role. I'm gonna receive an email any day which is like, look, we tried. We really need someone for this role, so I'm sorry, we're gonna we're gonna cancel cancel the job and go with someone else. But they didn't do that to their credit. That's what's great. The HR department in ⁓ Irvine, California, they were apparently apparently my manager, the the the manager that I would get at the time asked that same question to them and they were like, No, no, no, we'll get ⁓ we'll get ⁓ we'll get ⁓ It took another six months for me to get Into the position where the visa got approved and all that kind of stuff. So total time waiting for a visa while in France was a year. It was almost exactly a year to the day. ⁓ so I was sitting there, I mean, no offense to the job or anything. It was just like I had mentally moved on. I was ready, I had been accepted for this other role, I had done the interview, I had done the code review, I had done all of that kind of stuff. Good to go. but then a whole year passes and you're just kinda in limbo, I guess, mental limbo. ⁓ so it was touch and go there for a while. ⁓ but they stuck with me and ⁓ in the end I managed to come out here ⁓ two thousand and nine. I think that was. ⁓ yeah, it was ⁓ it's gonna be around September two thousand and nine. ⁓ so yeah, it'd already been about three, three and a half years in the job at that point.
speaker-1: Yeah, and amazing they say, amazing that they you know, they were committed to to bringing you over. ⁓ yeah, having been through that visa process I was actually at Blizzard when my visa my L one ran out and I had to switch to an H one for a bit. And I had a similar that they were really the the the the HF department was great. They they they did tell me one day, like, Do you have a girlfriend? Would you think getting married? 'Cause they were like panicking a little bit that that might be the only way out. But ⁓ I can definitely second that they, you know, they did a great job of kind of managing a very complicated and I think that's a great little point to zero in on, right? Like, you know, we're very lucky that we get to do this role in other countries, right? It's amazing that we can have our our career can take us to other countries and let us do the thing we want to do. But it ain't free and it ain't easy. ⁓ I mean you'd already made a move once, so I guess that part of it you are comfortable with, but like you say, never never getting all the visas and all the uncertainty is very challenging.
speaker-0: I mean that's a very good point. People people are like how how do you I guess people have a hard time like how how do you move? How do you emigrate? Like that kind of stuff. How do you leave everything behind and and and end up somewhere else? And you are very right, I had done it twice before. And I was already by the time I was in France, I was traveling light, let's just say, right? Like I kinda lost there's a part of me about like the materialism ⁓ and I just kind of lost that things in me like collecting things, you know, b having tons of things on shelves and like all of that stuff. I guess I just became more and more minimalist as a result of like ⁓ upping roots and and moving. There's the downside to that as well. I mean, there's a whole philosophical debate in here which would probably fill up another three or four hours. But it's like You kinda start to feel like you don't belong anywhere.
speaker-1: ⁓ thank you for saying that. Yes, so true. Yes.
speaker-0: Even when you go back home, right? After you've after you've travelled. So I'll go back to Scotland and I'll look around and it's just like everything's the same but everything's slightly different and it's almost like slightly surreal and you just kinda don't feel like you belong anywhere. But I I think the the antidote to that is ⁓ friends, family, ⁓ people that you build bonds to in the area, right? You will always have those bonds. I mean look, ⁓ going to that wedding last year, right, and we just dropped right back in. ⁓ stuff like that. I you you find that you're Your home is the people and interests that surround you rather than the physical location you're in. Philosophy.
speaker-1: Yeah, no, I I couldn't agree more. Yeah, I've definitely had those same feelings. ⁓ and and and just quickly, I mean, you know, you you taking that switch to tools engineering, you've gone back to programming, you had to d you had to do a an exam, you know, a programming test to to qualify. Like, was that you know, did he have cold sweats when he went back to programming? Like did it just did he just drift back into it without any trouble?
speaker-0: No, that was definitely friction. I mean I think it's an odd person that goes into so ⁓ I'm gonna flail around a little here. So I was a lead here for a while, so I became a lead engineer, which is a manager here. ⁓ and I ended up doing interviews, right? And I would always find not one hundred percent of the time, but I feel that the people that go into interviews a hundred percent confident. There's something not quite right about that candidate, right? It depends on the level, I guess, right? So y I you've got you like principal engineers, they know their stuff, like all of that kind of stuff. But I don't know. Maybe it's just me. It's just kind of like Interviews are terrible. And no one likes interviews, right? ⁓ who would walk in an interview and like an interview? Or at least feel this is their jam? Maybe you can feel like you're gonna nail it, but interviews are just awful in general. And everybody ⁓ one thing Being an interviewer myself, you realise is it's also awful for the interviewer. Mm-hmm. Which you don't really realize. Maybe when you're earlier in your career and you're sitting there and you're nervous and you're like, ⁓ god, what are they thinking about me? Right. I guarantee you they're probably sitting on the other side of the table, like, I'm gonna do my best, but I kinda wish this was over as well. You know, like that kind of stuff. So once you kind of get into that mental frame of mind where you're like, it just kinda becomes more of a conversation. That's what I do now in interviews. these days, like if I'm going for a job or something like that. ⁓ like when I got promoted to to lead. ⁓ I had interviews for that as well. And it just felt a lot more like a conversation like here's my philosophy on management and like all of that kind of stuff. And if you want me, you want me. If you don't you don't and I'm not going to like attach too much to this. So going back to that ⁓ f I was sitting in France and this was long before the Zoom and all that kind of stuff, right? So we had janked together this really awful like video call in like two thousand and nine, right? And when I connected, so they gave me a test, ⁓ their code test, it was a standard like Blizzard code test. They gave me a test and it was printed out on a piece of paper, the code test. And and I was like, okay, what do I do with this? And he's like, Well yeah answer it. And I was like, Who how do I answer this? Is do I put it do it on a computer or something like that? I was like, no just here's a sheet of paper and a pen, write your answers on a piece of paper. And so I was like Okay, right? Like I I don't know, like my Japanese interview when you remember if if you recall was me going in and they were selling on me on their right. So I had never really done a code test before, at least in this regard. And so again, no framework for comparison. I'm like, okay, this is the way it's done. I'm gonna off the top of my dome, try and answer these complex algorithm questions and like all of that kind of stuff and write it down, right? And of course Even by then I was so used to being on a computer I hadn't handwritten in years, right? So I'm writing out this doctor script and chicken scratch with like these algorithms and all that kind of stuff. And then I give it to the guy at the end of it and he's it's so it was going to be followed up immediately by a question answer session. So I give it to the guy and then ⁓ I don't know what he did. He must have went off and like scanned it or faxed it. If faxes were a thing back then, right? So he he must have scanned it, sent it to them because When the video call connected, and this was an awful video call, it was like twenty eight two two eighty p or something like that, right? And there was a table I remember, and now that I know, I know it's one of the the meeting rooms at Blizzard, but it was just like this long table, three people to a side, and then two people on the back, right? And that was apparently the entire WoW Tools team at the time, plus some other people. ⁓ and so I basically was being interviewed by the entire team, not just like the manager. and now now that I know that manager, I know why he did that. And it was a good move, I think, because you know, when you get to a certain point and you're introducing one person into an already established team, you want the whole team to feel good about that like that kind of stuff. But to me, as a young lad connecting internationally to this to this crazy dream job, so to speak. ⁓ and after having just tortured myself handwriting algorithms on a piece of paper, I connected, yeah, I'm sweating bullets. Like I'm already sweating just having to handwrite. Like so now I have to answer these these questions. ⁓ so anyway, we connected to that meeting and yeah, it was to me it felt you kinda go into like a black hole, you kind of like you know, implode a little. ⁓ and they're trying to ask leading questions to Who answers it? I mean, like that kind of stuff. And I know my feeling afterwards was like, ⁓ my god, that was so awful. I I don't feel like I answered anything right. Like all of that kind of stuff. ⁓ but they were asking stuff, they yeah, they they the first thing they said was, We got this and it looks like you've handwritten it. And I was like, Yes. And they're like, Why don't you just type it out on computer? And I was like, I didn't get a computer, and they're like, You weren't given a computer? And I was No. And so it just seemed like everybody was confused about what just what just happened. And I think to their in their defense in France, they're like a HR, you know, they're not they're not a programming or engineering facility by by any means. So I don't think they made that connection. Here, have this person do this test. And I think a s a layman would take that and go, This is a handwritten test, you just write the answers like that kind of stuff, right? But obviously they were expecting ⁓ some sort of type thing. Anyway, so they were like, Well, we just got these like faxes or whatever. And we've we've c photocopied them and the the team's sitting around with them. And they basically just went through and they were just like, Okay, why did you answer this? Why did you answer this? Why do you answer this? And I remember one of them was like a 3D positional sound question. It was like if you ha if you have a player and you have a ⁓ a point in space where the sound is played, how do you calculate which angle that sound is is being played from? Like that kind of stuff, right? I mean I imploded instantly when I saw that question on the thing 'cause I'm like, math, right? ⁓ and I d I I didn't answer it very well on the piece of paper because I was rushing to try and answer as many questions as as I could. But to their credit, they sat there and they went, Okay, now we're gonna give you time to to think about this and answer this, right? And so they they kept giving me leading questions about, all right, so you figured out like
speaker-1: Yeah, there you go, yeah.
speaker-0: You figured out whether it's on your left and right, how do you figure out if it's in front and back? And like they s I'm gonna say that they had to sit and suffer through my rambling answers as I tried to find the solution. But I kind of wandered my way towards a solution at the end. And so to me, I'm just like, ⁓ I was waffling so hard. This was just such an awful interview and all the questions were like that. And of course after they were asking me, How do you do, what interests do you have, like all of that kind of stuff. Why are you here? All the typical stuff. ⁓ and I gave them the history that much of the history that I've just given you here now. you know, prior to that. And ⁓ so I just thought it was awful and I was like, I've I've flubbed this. I was like, okay, that's fine. I actually it was interesting because I was like, that's fine, I still have the job here, I had that security. I was like, I could probably look for something else and I'm not worried about it too much. But they contacted me again and they were like, Yeah, you did great. we would be interested in having you over here. And That was the acceptance that then led to the year visa wait. ⁓ but the point of that was I learned that day and now after knowing my manager for many years, it was during the interview process, that I mean, I was being hired as an associate software engineer, basically entry level software engineer, fine. ⁓ and I learned that he just wanted to know if he could work with me in the sense that if I didn't know the answer is something, could he like lead me to the answer and I would figure out the answer myself? And It wasn't important to him that I would answer the question specifically. It was just that he could lead me to an answer that would arrive at myself. And I had apparently proven that by doing that. So to me, it's funny the lens in which you look through. So to I was imploding in a it was a disaster. And to him he like, this guy's giving me exactly what I want you know. So that was cool. It was a it's good experience.
speaker-1: I love that. Yeah, exactly like you say, you know, you're you're you felt like you were just being dragged through you know, dragged into the right place and that was exactly what they they wanted to know that you could be, you know, directed. That's that's fascinating. And and and so you get the visa, you move out to California, you know, you're in another country now, and you're working on the the sort of the foundation of what makes Wow Wow, right? Like you say, the unreal of of of WoW. And that's you you sort of stayed prom primarily in that domain, yeah, primarily in the tools suite. Why was it was it what you expected when you got there and why why has it kept you interested all these all this time?
speaker-0: That's an excellent question. In many ways I've asked myself that question. ⁓ because I thought I would probably be like something like a gameplay engineer or something like that, right? I mean that's what I did on on this the Sonic Team ⁓ game. But this like I didn't expect this at the time, but this this position hooked me in a way I didn't expect. And the reason why it hooked me in a way that I didn't expect is because Tools engineering is the art of integrating like all the disparate elements that go into a game, right? So in my time in my twenty, in my 17 years on the wild team, I guess, ⁓ I've touched gameplay code, I've touched server code, I've touched like I have contributed to like every part of World of Warcraft as a whole, not just like this tool, because when you're making a tool, The tool is is gonna make the workflow that other people use to interact with these things abstractly, right? Rather than ⁓ you know, at the data layer or whatever, like all of that kind of stuff. So I get to learn about and touch and modify all of these things while also trying to make a great experience for someone that's literally just sitting two doors down from me, you know, i me creating the content and all that kind of stuff. And very much in those early years. When the team was much smaller, ⁓ it it just felt good for example, a designer would just walk into your room and be like, Hey, I was using this thing and I don't quite understand how it works, or could it do this instead, or like all of the because another common one is, I just did this thing a hundred times. Is there no way I could just like have that automated? Like all of that kind of stuff. And so it very much felt like every day was It sounds a little cheesy, like every day was a new challenge and you didn't know what that challenge was going to be coming into the day. Right? Sure you would get your own tasks and you would obviously have your own improvements and all that kind of stuff. But that's pretty much what kept me and what keeps me to this day, because like Wow is a constantly evolving game, you know wild features over the years, you know, different demographics play the game and the more the game got prop popular, the more demographics that you got. And ⁓ you know, it's like trying to make a great game just all round. And how do I enable the designers, so this is back to me, how do I enable the designers and the other engineers to make the greatest experience that they can give the players, like like I stuff. So there's a little bit of abstraction. But if I do my job well then they make a better game and they make that better game faster. And so on and so forth. Stuff like that. So I think that's what it is. ⁓ I think what it taught me was perhaps if I were in a more focused role like I was in Japan, I would grow to hate it or resent it or I just would get bored, perhaps. That's probably the best way to put it. Whereas in this way, it's just like, yeah, I touch so many different things and I've done so many different things that It's just kept me interested and I don't I've never really felt that wonder lust anymore of like maybe I should be looking for something else. It's always just felt like this is fine. It it's like engaging and interesting and I guess that's one of the best things you can ask from a job, you know? ⁓ so it's very much that. And then of course everybody at Blizzard, ultra professional, ultra excellent, really great people. And I'm not not not just blowing smoke here. It's just an awesome experience, I guess, overall. It's one of the greatest teams. You'll hear this a lot from Blizzard people, but it's one of the greatest teams that you could be involved in, I think. Just the wealth of experience alone. I mean, here I am today, twenty years at Blizzard, right? Like that's twenty years of institutional knowledge about how World of Warcraft is made. So I don't know, it's kind of like pass it on, you know, a little bit, like who can I teach? I have actually started to take on like more mentor roles. The last few years I ⁓ have trained up the interns, right? So usually each year we get some amount of interns. I've happily volunteered for that. ⁓ and so on. I don't want to get ahead of myself, but ⁓ yeah, that's what led to me being a lead because obviously you've got the experience, maybe you should be leading a team of people and so on and so forth. ⁓ but anyway, don't want to get ahead of myself.
speaker-1: No no no no that's that's a great answer. And I I think in many ways, you know, t tool working in tools is almost kind of like an altruistic role, right? Like you're so focused on supporting other people. And although I think game developers are trying to make the best game for their player, I think the layer that you sit at is so much closer like you said, so much closer than that, right? Like you're enabling the people that enable the thing for the player and And and is that a mentality that you have outside of work, Steve? You know, that kind of that desire to help and support other people. I mean, you know, you mentioned what sounded like a slightly long question, you mentioned what sounded like a a rough period as a child, right? It sounded like maybe you're a little bit introverted or a little bit in sea like I was. ⁓ but you've grown into a role that is very much about helping others and supporting others. Does that ref does that reflect out in your everyday life or is that something that You know, just comes out of you that blizzard you know, this blizzard roll brings out of you, I'm curious.
speaker-0: No, that's really good question. ⁓ I have thought about that myself and yes, I do tend to try and help people outside the work in whatever way I can. ⁓ I'm not gonna say it's like empathy or anything like that. I think there's just maybe it is. There's just like this understanding if you have difficulties in your life, you have a moment, let's say, where you're just like you you look at someone, it's probably a German word for this, right? Yeah, but you look at someone and you realize that that person might be going through like a ton of difficulties that are completely invisible. And it's like I am just gonna try my best to not make that person feel worse or s and so on and so forth. ⁓ so I'm not like some huge altruistic person that does like goes down to soup kitchens like all of that kind of stuff, right? But like whenever I feel like someone's struggling or see someone struggling, or even just reaching out and chatting to people and Inviting them over if they're having a bad time ⁓ and so on and so forth. I yeah, I just find I tend to naturally do that and I don't feel like that's draining in any way to me. And who knows, like maybe working on tools and ⁓ constantly having to do that outreach has like maybe it's a double double-sided thing, right? Like maybe that has trained me professionally to reach out and ask Is something not working for you? Is something working for you? And so on and so forth. How can I make it better? Maybe that bled into my personal life. And maybe there's a part of my personal life which is like I understand what it's like to have emotional or you know, mental difficulties or whatever it is and I will therefore try and, you know, make sure that I can lighten your load somehow, some of that. So I guess it on both sides there's a lightening the load kind of feel.
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, like you say, one's taught the other and and you know, if you've if you've been in that place where it you know, you felt like you need an escape, you know, and maybe you it's easier to empathize with someone and and spot someone who needs that too. And even if that escape is just like, you know, a chat and just say, like, hey you doing mate, like, you know, that can be enough. Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-0: Connecting over a video game.
speaker-1: There you go. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ so so twenty years to the day in in one company
speaker-0: Yep. Crazy, right? When you when you look at the industry.
speaker-1: It's crazy and it's rare. I mean I spent seventeen years with Sony, but that was across two different I guess, you know, you have some time across in a different site, so I guess it's kind of similar, but ⁓ What do you think it's being at one place for so long, what do you think it's taught you?
speaker-0: Wow. Being at one place so long or what do I feel like it has taught me? I feel like day to day, especially as a as the tenure has gotten longer and I've got longer in the tooth, I feel like there's a deeper appreciation for people that have been doing a thing for a long time. So what would I call that? It's a it's a very good question 'cause I haven't actually thought or framed a specific answer to that before. But I feel like it's something along the lines of There are people who have been in an industry, it doesn't just be have to be the games industry or anything like that, but there's people who have done a thing for a certain amount of time, then naturally they know the ins and outs and the foibles, the pitfalls, and all of that kind of stuff. And there's a class of person that wants to make sure they can shortcut everybody else around them to not make the mistakes that they made and to be successful faster. So this thought's gonna be all over the place, but I feel like Blizzard is that. So the thing I've learned about being 20 years in the same place is There are more there are more than me, right? I look at the ten year board and I see there's like thirty odd people celebrating their twentieth anniversary th this year, right? There's one guy that's like thirty years and I'm like, Wow, thirty years of blizzard, amazing. So I know some of those people, obviously, and ⁓ just the wealth of their experience is just amazing and it's just like it gets to a point where Professionally, they're like a professional big brother or big sister or something like that, right? And it's like s people that you can go to, they're true mentors. I think that's what being in a place a long time develops. It's like a deep mentorship, a deep knowledge base, like the institutional knowledge at Blizzard, not just from the World of Warcraft perspective, but just from an like for example, an engineering perspective, right? There's people that have been working on I mean, World of Warcraft is essentially like the top tier client server infrastructure system, right? Like people would kind of dream to see how efficient and how fast everything is and how polished it has been over the years. I mean, that doesn't mean it's not occasionally like the you know, the Winchester mystery house where it's like there's some things, you know, s tacked on here and there or where for brevity or whatever. But overall just I feel like I appreciate the deep knowledge or the people who are deeply experienced and I trust their opinions and they've not done anything that has made me doubt that opinion. Because you know, sometimes you meet people in the the act like they're very knowledgeable, but their opinions aren't very good, like that kind of stuff. ⁓ you know, you've obviously gotta be wary around these people. That's where your own knowledge comes in. But like I feel like a c a game that has run continuously for twenty plus years, it's like thirty years I guess for World of Warcraft if you include all the development time and stuff like that. But I think that has just made a very sp special and specific environment ⁓ about how to make games, be successful at releasing games. Like it's almost like you've got a lot of runway And failed experience and successful experiments and just the the the level of game development and game delivering experience is just like so high that I guess I appreciate that. Like if I were to suddenly go into some other company, I would be taking that, like not just my experience I've absorbed like the 30 years of while making experience. I would be taking that to another company and it's just like, here's all this runway I'm aware of. I don't know, I guess that would just like spread ⁓ proficiency and efficiency about game development around the industry. I'm not sure. I mean, I told you in advance that was gonna be all meandering thought, but
speaker-1: No, I I I feel like the two sort of things r to reflect that back are like you say, that sort of established institutional knowledge that everyone benefits from, right, that everyone on site benefits from. But I also love that sort of glasses half full version of, you know, the pitfalls, the foibbles and the shortcuts, right, to help others to be successful, not to complain about and be grumpy about and you know, make every w remind everyone that it's been like this for years. Your sort of glasses half full version of that is like, no, I I have these things that I can help others to accelerate their way through. Again, that sort of altruistic, you know, ⁓ line of of, you know, trying to use that knowledge to help others grow faster, I think is is a beautiful way of framing it. And
speaker-0: Yeah, I sometimes wonder if these So tha that's the interesting thing. I have one short lived game development project, right? And then I have one twenty year game development project, right? So in no way do I see myself an expert in like working in the games industry, right? ⁓ so I often wonder like what would it be like if those twenty years were split up into one and a half to three year chunks just continuously throughout my career. Like Would I I mean obviously I would be different, right? But like what kind of different like I feel like being able to explore a space so thoroughly is a different experience from gaining your experience. Maybe maybe you come a better firefighter, so to speak, where it's just like I go from fire fire to fire, like all of that kind of stuff, versus you know, one thing I can do is like I can sit down and like work for Weeks, if not months, on like the same thing. ⁓ you know, obviously you want to do your little palate cleansers here and and and stuff like that, but like I can get dug into pretty big projects and all of that kind of stuff. And now that you've posed the question, I'm gonna wonder after this if like was that a developed skill, right? ⁓ I don't I don't know if that was an an innate skill. Would I have developed that skill if I had worked in these s shorter lived projects, you know? I don't know. I'll have to think about it.
speaker-1: Yeah, it's hard to know. It's the perennial question, right? Is it better to jump around or to stay in one place? You know, I don't think that's there's a right answer for everybody there. I think it varies. You I spent seventeen years at one place, learned a lot, you know, grew a lot, but then when I did was forced to move, you know, through layoffs, I do feel like I learned a lot very quickly. is that good or bad? I don't know. Did I become too much of a drack of all trades? Maybe. ⁓ yeah, I think it's sort of horses for courses all depends on your mentality. And it sounds like you've got the mentality that is very good at like, no, this is the problem. I'm going to solve this problem. I'm going to focus on this problem for as long as it takes me. And it sounds like maybe that being able to do that in one place suits your mentality more. But like you say, difficult one to one to to bake your noodle on for a little bit. ⁓ I I'm going to pose one other thing. Do you think that being one place for twenty years came from spending time in Japan where the traditional model has been more certainly at the era that you were in Of this is your job for life. Do you think any of that rubbed off one of you or do think that's just coincidence?
speaker-0: Yeah, I think that's just coincidence. I don't think I don't think the Japanese salaryman mentality is kind of like the same as the the twenty years twenty years of blizzard. There's one Now I say this as someone who was steeped in Japanese culture for for like two and a half years. But I feel like the salary man culture is not a culture the Japanese would choose if they could, right? ⁓ it's a necessity almost. ⁓ it's it's it's just the way things have been set up. If they want to change that, yeah, they're they're gonna have to they're gonna have a long row. I think it's probably changing right now. I mean it's been twenty odd years since I lived and worked in Japan, so I don't know what it's like now. But ⁓ I'd like to think that they're they're improving and they're changing. But yeah, working on wow, very different feeling, I think. ⁓ I don't feel like a salary man, basically. So I I I feel that's probably what it is. It's the difference between doing a job because you must versus a career, so you speak. Yes.
speaker-1: Exactly. Indentured servitude almost versus, you know, career by choice kind of thing. Maybe that's the dark way of putting it, but
speaker-0: There's a there's a part of it yeah. I mean there's a part of it I wanna touch on which relates to you as well, ⁓ as someone who has lived and worked and travelled and worked and so on and so forth. The thought I had when you were describing that, and you know, obviously the layoffs are awful and they're just getting worse. You know, that's a whole topic in it on its own right. But ⁓ when you push yourself and you move out, like I can't say like I thought that mentally, I'm gonna push myself and I'm gonna move and move out, right? Like there were clearly just a series of events that I allowed to happen and I ended up where I was, right? But then at some point Maybe it was in France or maybe it was after I came to America, but there's a point where you stop thinking about I need to go there and I need to do it to do this to be successful. You just start trusting that wherever you go, you'll be fine. And I think just mentally or psychologically, when you're in that state, it's like I I can do anything kind of kind of feeling right. So I think that's kind of what I gained Doing that traveling you might be feeling a little bit of that yourself, like, yeah, sure we worry about where's the paycheck coming from if I get laid off or whatever, right? But there's also this I've moved, I've lived and worked, I've survived, I've survived this, I've survived that. Everything was fine, I did well, I trust myself to do well, so there's a comfort in that and so on and so forth.
speaker-1: There is, there's a there's a freedom to it. I think there's a there's an unshackling of some of the constraints that I think could I don't hold you back's the right word, but could could shape the way you think that once you've made that break, like they just don't contain you anymore. You know, that one of the layoffs I had, you know, my wife and I looked at each other and we're like, Well, where do we want to go? Because luckily this industry is global. You know, we could look where ev sort of wherever we want to go and you know, we ended up back in the UK and you know, that's you know, I think Because to you you you put it great, yeah, once you've you're just you're just free to go try it and and ⁓ you you've done it, so why not do it again? ⁓ Yeah, so I think I that's ⁓ I like that that's a good way to end it. And ⁓ it's a great story. I really appreciate you digging into it. Some definitely some pieces I had no idea about where you've been or what you've done and ⁓ I appreciate you sharing them and ⁓ you know, that was that was an awesome conversation, thank you.
speaker-0: No, thank for setting this up. ⁓ it was good. You and I'm gonna be going away from this thinking about all sorts of new philosophical things to to ponder ponder my orb. Have you seen that meme?
speaker-1: Yes. Yeah yeah. Yeah.
speaker-0: That's what I'll be doing after this.
speaker-1: Perfect. Success.
speaker-0: Yeah, one time they'll see. wow. I mean it goes way, way, way back. ⁓ so I'm obviously no spring chicken now. I remember my first interaction with anything that would resemble games was almost like this proto console called the Grandstand. Do you know that? I Yeah, there you go. And ⁓ yeah, so the grandstand it had physical switches. ⁓ you would switch the game like that kind of stuff. ⁓ but obviously the the the goat, as they say, was Pong, which was on the grandstand, and it still used the ⁓ you know, the potentiometer style thing and that that was literally it. And I I would sit there for hours hitting a bat to the other person and it just flying off the end of the screen 'cause I didn't really have anyone else to play with. ⁓ so then I ended up like trying to do it with both hands as everybody eventually experiments that kind of stuff. And like my mum saw me doing this and she was like, Well, this is interesting. And obviously back then no one knew anything about where games were going or what these things were, right? ⁓ so she got me this. ⁓ you know how you've got the old ⁓ it was liquid crystal displays, you know, like the the old kind of game and watch style stuff. ⁓ but prior to that there was ⁓ you Little ⁓ just l like digital watches, right? You would have these little light up displays ⁓ of these small little liqu liquid crystal things. And she actually bought me there's a yellow circle ⁓ that it was kind of flat, it was like squished and it had a tiny little screen on it, and that was Pac-Man. So she bought me Pac-Man shortly after ⁓ I played on the grandstand, and that just started like a fascination with me. You know, I I'm sure most of us have a similar history in the sense that I would go out if I was forced to go out. Go play with your friends out in the street, right? But if I were left to my own devices, I would just sit in front of the the the screen and, you know, do all of this stuff. ⁓ so that basically developed into Being forced outside, finding out that my friends had some other system or console, right? So we're going now into like your Commodore sixteens, some people had acorns, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And I would find these people and I would go to their house and sit in their house where I wouldn't be nagged by my mum and play their computers. ⁓ so it was just like from day one, as soon as that ended up in my hands, it was just like this is the only thing I'm really interested in, right? So that that's how that happened.
speaker-1: Right. So it it just hooked you immediately. And what was it? Was it the yeah, what was it about it that sort of captures your fascination, do you think?
speaker-0: I think it touches a little on I mean, how dark do you want me to go, Alex? It touches a little on, you know, your upbringing. I won't go too dark, but it's like if you if you had a hard time at school and ⁓ you know, maybe you would come home and you would just like look for an escape from reality almost, you know? And you don't know how you process that as a kid, right? You're just doing these things. ⁓ but I'm sure a lot of us have have that kind of similar thing, which is like being here is a system that I is simple and I can understand and I can get good at it really fast and it's like a skill I build and no one else seems to have the skill. ⁓ all of these things together, and obviously you can't frame it in those words when you're a kid, but it's like it's just like that, right? Like I I think it w it was a very much a quite a bit of that. Which was like hard time at school, come home, escape into the the video game universe. And I'm gonna be honest with you, I don't know if much has changed. Necessario. Mu much has changed, but yeah, we we all love video games for the escape, right? So I think I was in like the pro version of that when I was younger.
speaker-1: I can relate to that a lot, very similar, you know, for me that, you know, video games validated me, right? They gave me confidence that I could do something good even if people around me told me I couldn't. And I you know, I I think it sounds like maybe similar for you, you know, like just picking up this control, like you say, getting good at it and feeling like, wait, am I can I am I good at this? Can I do this? ⁓ gave you self confidence, right? Gave you belief almost.
speaker-0: Yeah, I sometimes wonder like if I were born sixteen years ago or something like that, right? And I'm in this world now where you have esports and you have competitive online play and like all of that kind of stuff, like what how would that have changed the tr trajectory of my life, right? Like would would that be what I'd be doing right now, right? Like I think it was because there wasn't that avenue. I feel like I mean that I might be jumping ahead of myself here, but I feel like that's why I got into game development because there weren't really avenues like that. Like if I were just playing a video game and there was an avenue for me to play video games professionally, I very well may have gone that way. Right. But because there wasn't, I was like, well I want to know how this works and how do I make these and I've got so many ideas like can I make these? And that's how I basically I got into game development.
speaker-1: Interesting. Yeah, that's that's definitely a teaser, 'cause I definitely want to dig into that. I'm I'm curious where where did you grow up?
speaker-0: Glasgow and Scotland.
speaker-1: Okay. And you said there were some gamers around you, you know, some some you know, other kids at school. Did you have any siblings or any other family members that played?
speaker-0: no family members that played. I mean, this was I mean, as you know, this was back when this was nascent, right? Like there was so few systems like that around the video game arcades were yet to come, you know, like that kind of stuff, right? So this was very much just a curiosity that her son seemed to be interested in from my mum's perspective, right? ⁓ my sibling, yeah, I've got a sister, but she didn't come along for another nine years, so that was much later. But yeah, the kids in my neighborhood, they were in a similar situation. They'd been bought a s ⁓ a proto system, ⁓ and there was just so many at the time and they were all weird and they were all bespoke. and so it was a matter of just, you know, you're out there playing and one of your friends starts talking about this weird game that they've got and you're like, ⁓ can I come around and see it? And then, you know, that's pretty much it went. So I'd say like maybe two, two or three of my friends had a different system. This was Glasgow, Scotland, yeah. So sorry to talk of you, but this was Glasgow, Scotland, yeah, so
speaker-1: Do you think gaming was you know, I ⁓ I've spoke to a few different people, right? And some people you know, I just spoke to Luke yesterday, ⁓ last week who grew up in ⁓ you know in a remote part of Ireland and then was like video game development or video game anything just wasn't a thing there, right? It was just there were a few people that played and that was it. Was do you think I mean, you know, Glasgow, did you was there any concept was video w were video games and game shops and that kind of thing? Was it part of the culture there or was it still v I it's like you say, it's proto period, but Was it still very underground or or was it starting to become more popular?
speaker-0: Yeah, it was it was not I mean Especially when it comes to games. I think people were starting to get that so the collective consciousness was starting to kinda understand that computers were making their way into the the homes for for certain reasons, right? ⁓ like one of my friends, he had an ⁓ one of the OG IBM PCs, right? I used to go around and play this might have been a bit later, but I used to go around and play it was ⁓ the one of the original 3D games. ⁓ and it was just all ⁓ primitives, made up of primitives, right? There wasn't any any Definition. ⁓ so he had a PC, but he had been using it to to do word processing and and spreadsheets and like that kind of stuff. so I think people were getting used to the idea that these things were coming, but when it came to like games, like that was still a way off. He when I when I was playing the grandstand, right? Like yeah, the idea of like a video game arcade was just so far in the future that I don't think anyone had even thought about it at that point. So yeah, Glasgow was I mean, I'm going to say Scotland is remote. It obviously is n not by global standards today, but like back then in the I was born in 79, right? So like I was coming of age, mid eighties, and you know, that's when all of that stuff was just starting to kick off. And I think in the major cities, you know, you would have a lot of options. But as you go further north or further out, I can imagine Ireland as well, right? Like takes a little longer for those things to arrive. So ⁓ I think that was the case.
speaker-1: Yeah, that makes sense. ⁓ and so so so video games sound like they were an obsession. Sounds like you kind of loved them. D and and you just played them all through school and then at some point you decide to go to uni. ⁓ and and you focused on computer science ⁓ initially. So so what what took you in that direction of programming or computer science?
speaker-0: You're g you're giving me that this guy's done his research thing. I can't remember if we talked about this before. ⁓ but yes, How would I describe this? ⁓ so obviously as a kid that plays games and ⁓ and I think in the the nascent age of c computers, your parents might get a little worried. like, is there a career in this kind of thing, right? Is is my son gonna make money doing this? Is that a possibility? You know, we didn't even know things like that at the time, right? How the games weren't being sold as games like like we do now, right? So I think there was a worry, right? So in high school I was good at art. Strangely enough, but not not like traditional art, but like graphic design and stuff like that. ⁓ and then ⁓ what else was I good at? ⁓ I wasn't good at math, which is which is actually the the more I've gotten the career, the more I realize how many programmers aren't actually good at math. It's just it's it's kind of like an interesting side of things. There there's a good split. ⁓ I think the the key I'm getting ahead of myself again. I think the key is that to have a logical brain, not necessarily a mathematical brain. But anyway, ⁓ let me go back. So I think when I was in high school my mum was wondering if there was a career in computer games and she looked at the courses I was good at and they were very much graphic design, computing, but there wasn't computer classes back then. either, right? So it was just like these these weird little c curiosities. But there was a computer science class in like one of my last years at high school and we used the old Apple machines. Like one some of the original Apple machines. And I remember using them in I'm not a fan of Mac these days. In fact I've never really been a fan of Apple's products, but ⁓ I still I find it kind of fascinating back then that this system seemed so alien to the other systems that I was using. And so I was into that. So yes I got to the point where it was like, okay, you're finished in high school. Where do you go from here? So it was very much a choice for me between graphic design and computing science. And so by the time I had gotten to that point, the world was catching up a bit. And so my mum, as parents do, asked, Well, if you don't know which one to choose, which one's gonna make you the most money? Right? You know obviously a a logical A logical decision, right? ⁓ so obviously I answered I think computing is gonna be the the the next big thing. But here we touch against, you know, Glasgow and Scotland being further away than most places again. There was only a few computing science classes available. ⁓ now luckily I was in the largest city in Scotland, you know, like I said, Glasgow, ⁓ and they have the very well established Glasgow University. There. So Glasgow University had a computing science class. That was the only computing class available at Glasgow University. So I basically signed up for that. ⁓ and so that's how I ended up in Gl computer Science and Glasgow University. ⁓ I'll I'll pause for questions because the the spoiler of this story is I did not do well in that class.
speaker-1: Well that was gonna be my next question because you you spend a couple of years there and then you move on to Abertei University and I was curious how that happened.
speaker-0: There's a there's this is the theme of this chat so far, which is when I went into computing science, because everything was so nascent, ⁓ the language the programming language that they were teaching us was ADA in in ⁓ Glasgow University, right? So I sat down with some ADA and it was only years later that I realized that, you know, the military had an interest in ADA and like all of that kind of stuff, right? So that's kind of what we're talking about when we're talking about nascent programming jobs back in the day. It's like these industries that had an early vested interest kind of influencing, you know, I can imagine someone from the university reaching out and saying, We're going to offer a computer science course. Which programming language should we offer the students, right? And, you know, the military's going to say, Yeah, we're using ADA, so you might as well use ADA. And so I used ADA and I don't know what it was about it, but I was just so uninterested in in it. And so I'd be sitting in the computer labs. I mean it could have been product of me being that young as well, but I was sitting in the computer labs and I guess it wasn't games, but I hadn't made that connection yet that it wasn't like programming for s just stuff that I wanted to do. It was gate some something game adjacent I wanted. But obviously I hadn't had formed that thought yet. ⁓ so I was in a I was in a class and because it was the only class available at the time, the class was like three hundred strong. ⁓ so I'd be in this massive lecture hall with three hundred students all trying to learn computer science at the same time because that was the only course or one of the few courses available at the time. And you know, I got I started getting this kind of like sinking feeling, which was like, if I want help for anything, I'm not gonna get it because at the end of the class I would see a queue of like twenty, twenty-five people waiting to speak to the lecturer. And that started like a chain reaction of events where I just started disengaging and disconnecting from from the course in general. ⁓ I managed to pass through through unknown like skill or events or something, I managed to pass the first year. so I went into the second year, but like it was almost like burnout, I guess I would describe it as. But you know, now having experienced a little bit of burnout ⁓ during my career. ⁓ I know that that's what it was at the time, but I couldn't it was the first time I'd ever experienced that, so I couldn't put a name to it. I was like, I don't wanna engage with this, I don't wanna do anything involving this, I can't get the help that I need. I'm just gonna disconnect and I'm just gonna like wander around university campus. ⁓ I guess kind of like you the stories you hear of the Japanese businessmen that get fired and then they just go eat a sandwich in the park. Felt a lot like that, right? But you know, there's a lot of pressure on you as a kid, right? Your parents are expecting a lot from you. You know, he's got he did great in high school, high hopes, all of that pressure, all of that kind of stuff. ⁓ so obviously when it came to the end of second year, so I went through the whole of second year, mostly just failing everything. Strangely enough, I passed geography. So I I maybe I've got a little talent for geography in there somewhere. But ⁓ everything else I failed. Computing science, my major specifically. and you know Piper comes calling, ⁓ you know, I got the failure letters and my mum got them and you know, you know how that goes right, ⁓ you know, anger at first and then questions and like all credit to my mum. She drilled right into it immediately. She's like, Does this just like not interest you? What's wrong with it? Like that kind of stuff. And I was very much like, Yeah. I mean she's like, I see you at the in front of the computer like every night, like what is it about that and why are you feeling here? ⁓ It was very much ⁓ yeah, wrong thing, I think. And she she figured that out. She's like, Why don't we look for something else that's related to computers, but like not this. ⁓ and that's essentially how we ended up at Abertee University. So Yep. They they had a compu they I'll I'll just give you a little brief history of Abertee as well. ⁓ when I did that, when I went to go to Abertee University They were the only university in the whole of the world, except for one, which was in Japan, that offered a game specific computer science course. ⁓ yeah, so Aberti was the first. And when I would have been joining, so they'd been doing that for a year by the time I joined. So when I was second year ⁓ in Glasgow University, they had started that course. And obviously a completely new field. from my understanding, joining in the second year, it was very rough. Like they hadn't quite they hadn't figured out what they were going to teach, how they were going to teach it, and so on and so forth. ⁓ but yeah, that was I don't know. I guess that's it's kind of luck and fortuitousness that ⁓ you know, I I didn't struggle through four years at Glasgow University. I stopped. That course was available, so I went to Haberti University and it was the name of the course was Computer Games Technology. Sounds ideal, right? So my mum and I ⁓ took the hour and a half drive to Dundee from Glasgow and ⁓ we sat in front of a lecturer and I think he just looked at my resume, so to speak, and he was just like, Wow, you've been to Glasgow University, you're in, like that kind of thing. And completely ignored the fact that like I had failed pretty much everything. It's just I had been to the prestigious Glasgow University. So ⁓ yeah, so I got in with no problems there. That was great. ⁓ so that's the start of The Aberti era era, basically.
speaker-1: I love that. And then the fact that you you know, you th I presume at that point you were like, I don't just wanna program, I don't just wanna do generic computer science, I wanna do computer game computer science, that's what I yeah, and that's where you put the the dots connected.
speaker-0: Yeah, and honestly I f I flew through the four years. Like it was that was that was it. The key had turned, the lock unlocked, and I just went through all four years of that course, you know, no problem at all.
speaker-1: That's great. Yeah, and like you say, your your mum spotted that and and put you on the right path. so so so you go through you go through those four years. ⁓ you get to do a year in Japan at some point. ⁓ that which was was that related to the the kind of computer game stuff you were doing? How did that come about? And what was that like? That must have been amazing.
speaker-0: ⁓ well I'll start with the the yeah, so I was coming to the end of Abertee, my Abertee tenure. I was in my fourth year, we were doing our dissertation projects and stuff like that. And I was one of maybe five or six people, and I'm not trying to tip my own horn here, but it was like I was one of five or six people whose dissertation were gonna be near the top, right? I think the the lecturers had identified it as like good. I did facial animation for my dissertation. And this was back when we're talking about games like Max Pain from like the original remedy where it was just like one flat texture. Yeah. Constant grimace. And I actually use that as an example. I was like, well, if you had a lot of facial animation, this like emotional driven story would be like a lot better. So that's what I did my dissertation on. And yeah, so that was highlighted as like one of one of the good ones. And so an opportunity came to us which was like, ⁓ we are partnered with ⁓ you know, universities and companies in other countries around the world, ⁓ and would you be interested in an internship, right? And I I had never heard that word before. I'm gonna be honest with you. Like I didn't know what an internship was. ⁓ it sounded like the vaguely American thing, right? Like what's a what's an internship? ⁓ so I asked more about it and they were like, yeah, so you basically you take your skills, you go out there to where whatever company you join. And naturally you do what they ask you to do, but it will be ⁓ you know, they're interested in you because what you're doing right now and you know it will be related work, basically. It might not be exactly what you're expecting to do, but it'll be related work. And here's the options. So I'll look through the options and at Aberti my minor ⁓ just like you you'd have to do like ten modules a year. And Eight of the modules were probably your major, and the last two were kind of like you can choose whatever you want if you want to have some fun or whatever, like that kind of stuff. ⁓ so the minor I chose was Japanese. Because I I just found that interesting. I I had been watching early like anime and manga. I'm not a huge anime and manga fan, but it interested me enough back then, and I kind of had that logical connection, which is like, well, I found out that this is the second place in the world that Is doing a games course, so Japan obviously has a games industry. So maybe I want to leave myself open to the potential of having that ⁓ job market available to me. ⁓ I mean that all sounds very logical right now, but that I guarantee you that's not how I was processing it in my young brain, but that was definitely part of the part of the process. ⁓ so anyway, Japan was on the list. And I said, Well, that sounds very interesting. What would I have to do in Japan? So they said It's a year-long internship, and you'll be working for ⁓ their biggest co ⁓ their biggest phone company essentially. It's a lot more complicated than that. It's kind of like ATT. ⁓ you know, it's a big phone company. They've got, you know, their fingers in a lot of pies. It's not just telecoms, it's like tons of other stuff. ⁓ so their their company, N NT, ⁓ they do ⁓ a lot of their telecom stuff, but they also have a research division. And here's Another proto thing that I got involved in. The research division was working on natural language processing and speech recognition, basically. This was long before your series and like all of that kind of stuff, right? Like this another nascent thing that they were just trying to figure out, like the the recording and like tokenization and of of the phonetics was still separate, completely separate from the actual natural language part processing, right? And so they had two research divisions ⁓ NTT and one of them was the tokenization, the other one was the ⁓ the language processing, and then so I ended up in the tokenization one. ⁓ so I accepted that because hey, who wouldn't want to go out to Japan on someone else's dime for a year, right? And I just had one of the like the work itself ⁓ wasn't really games adjacent. There's a lot of reasons for that. but It allowed me to clock in and then clock out and enjoy Japan for like a whole year. ⁓ and there were other interns there at the same time, and like twenty interns all there at the same time. So it was like just a crazy great time party attitude, you know, like we were all young, you know, we were all fascinated by Japan and it was just a great experience overall. So yeah, that was a good year.
speaker-1: That's amazing. And and did you ⁓ did you get kind of a good exposure to the gaming, you know, the culture over there? I mean, you know, I was so inspired by Japanese gaming culture, ⁓ you know, you're right there at you know, good time to kind of explore it.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, very much so. So by the time I got out there, what are we talking about now? So it was a high school, it was just starting out. We're another eight ish years, maybe six to eight years forward. So we're at like the nineties now or something like that. Early nineties, right? So we'd now we've got video game arcades, we've got the early consoles, ⁓ you know, like all of that kind of stuff. ⁓ I think it was like s It was more than SNES era, I know that much. ⁓ I'd have to look at the timelines, but when I went out there there was definitely stores, gaming stores in Japan and you could play the arcades and they had the ⁓ one of the things I'll never forget is I ended up in one of those twenty four seven gaming arcades. It was like a multi floor I think this was in Osaka. Like I missed the last train and you've got a few options, right? To y you either just sit at the train station and wait for the morning train or you can go to like ⁓ twenty four seven arcade. So that's what we did. ⁓ and yeah, you play lots of cool games there. A lot of the ⁓ lot of the games like the you know physical games, they were doing like Fists of the North Star punching games and you could even play bowling there and all that kind of stuff. ⁓ but yes the culture there gaming culture was great. I enjoyed that. That's not what I was working on day to day. And because I was kind of like out socializing with all of these other interns I actually didn't get a lot of chance to kind of express my gaming interest while I was there that first year. ⁓ so that actually leads me to why I ended up staying, 'cause I I got to the end of the internship and I was like, this was a great experience. I feel like I can experience more in Japan, so I want to stay here. So I I applied to as many video games companies in Japan as I could to see if I could actually move into the industry.
speaker-1: Yeah, and that that took you to now production, yeah, to work on actual game stuff.
speaker-0: Yeah, so I did the the kind of desperate foreigner thing, ⁓ which was I had no idea okay, so my Japanese wasn't great. the company, the intern company I worked for, everybody spoke English, even all the Japanese people, right? And in fact, they saw as a chance to practice their English, right? So it was kind of hard to get them to speak Japanese sometimes. But you'd you'd go out, you socialize, you pick up some Japanese, that kind of stuff. ⁓ but overall I think it was just kind of like daily Japanese I was good at. So I was a little worried that ⁓ if I went to an actual Japanese games company where they weren't like this, and everybody only spoke Japanese and maybe a few of them spoke haltingly English, would I thrive, would would I do would I do well? ⁓ and in the end I was like, Well, how much do I want to stay here? ⁓ that overrode any kind of fear about me not doing well. I was like, I'll let them decide. I'll show up, I'll do an interview, and I'll use ⁓ the crappy Japanese that I have. And if they're fine with that, then okay. If they want to hire me, they hire me. It's really on them. ⁓ that was an expensive process because I basically applied to fifty different companies. I just shotgunned it. Like I I basically found a list of all the game dev companies that I could, from Hokkaido all the way down to I think the farthest I went was like Hiroshima or something like that, but Just fifty companies and I got back five responses from the fifty. So we're, you know, we're we're at ten percent. And then ⁓ from those ⁓ three of them were like, Why did you apply to us? Like we we don't get it. Why did you apply? And then the last two were like, Why did you apply to us? Please come to an interview so that we can talk about it. Like that kind of stuff. Wow. Strange, right? So one of them was in Osaka and one of them was in Tokyo. I was living in Osaka at the time. That's where now production is. so now production is Osaka. NTT research division was in Kyoto, but that's really close to Osaka. I was commuting to Kyoto pretty much mo ⁓ most days. So that was a good choice. And then the one in Tokyo I was interested in because Tokyo is Tokyo, right? It's like this massive city. That but that might be an interesting place to live. So I went to both interviews. I went to the Tokyo one. And obviously got lost in Tokyo because it's like a megalopolis, but I managed to make it to their studio and I will describe it as a curious experience. And I think most of that is just like my language skills weren't that good. So it's hard y you can only really pick up on vibes when co c conversations get to a certain complexity level. ⁓ the vibes I got, and this could just be me being paranoid and uncomfortable, ⁓ was that I was gonna kind up kinda end up like their pet foreigner. Right. ⁓ and you know, after a while in now production, looking back, I think I kinda understand that position from the Japanese mindset. But it was very much ⁓ they looked at my stuff. I had a demo game and a demo engine and all of that kind of stuff. And they looked at it and they're like, Yeah, I mean that seems interesting. You know, if you wanna work for us, we'll we'll find something for you to do kind of thing. So I was like, okay, great, I'm gonna go back to a second, I'll think about it. And I went to the interview at and now production and ⁓ it was just kinda like night and day. I think ⁓ you know, the CEO ⁓ of the company or the president of the company at the time interviewed me, right? So it wasn't like the game team. He was just very curious and I think he like their their company, so let me explain now production a little. Their company, ⁓ made a lot of really cool games in the in the early era of the consoles themselves. And then as they kind of transitioned and the the industry and industry transitioned into something larger, ⁓ they were getting kind of like contract work. So they would get bigger games companies, kind of like Nintendo and Sega, would say, hey, we want you to make this little project for us. And they would take that on. And then they would just be named under the Sega banner as as it went out. So they showed me the pro when I showed up the CEO like, Let look at our prospectus, look at this kind of stuff. And it just felt like he was trying to sell me on working for them, right? So it was like kind of a s much stranger dynamic. And he's Yeah, it'd be really great if he'd work for us because we think just a different, you know, mentality than the than the current, you know, folk there have might be more creative or something. I don't know. I can't say exactly what they were thinking. But that's the vibe I got. The vibe I got was that he was trying to sell me on their company and he would just like love to have me there. And so just immediately on that feeling I was like, Okay, I'm gonna go back, think about it. But I pretty much already knew. I was like, Yeah, let's do this. So I started working at Now Pro shortly after. So I had to go home, get a new visa, come back. Wow. ⁓ so there was all of that in the background, you know, the country admin stuff. Yeah. ⁓ But yeah, that that worked out just fine. So ⁓ left, came back and yeah, started working for N T T.
speaker-1: Yeah, I was gonna say, so yeah, you've made the big so you made the jump from Glasgow to Dundee to to go to uni, and then you make the then you make the jump to Japan and stay there for a while. But you've sort of but you know, as someone that's you know emigrated myself, once you've kind of made that you know made that move somewhere else, like it's it's not it's hard not to want to go somewhere else after that. Yes. So so you do you do kind of a year at ⁓ at now production working on, you know, all kinds of stuff. ⁓ and then you go to Blizzard. So how did that happen? How did you make that jump?
speaker-0: So another moment of brutal honesty. I like to think that like I have a good work ethic, right? Like if I if I if I do stuff, ⁓ I'm gonna try and do it as best as I can, right? and so l kinda like what I was talking about earlier, ⁓ now production was a company where very few people spoke English. And so ⁓ my Japanese had to get good real fast. ⁓ So there was a lot of discomfort there, I feel like, ⁓ for me. I'm not gonna say there was any miscommunications, but just personally speaking, I just struggled day to day of as you would, right? Because you want to have a conversation about, hey, I'm making this effect for this level, right? Like how do you see this playing out? And the only language that they can use is like complicated version of Japanese to describe these things, right? Like how do you how do you describe God rays in Japanese to someone that doesn't like particularly know Japanese that well? So all credit to the Japanese team there and they were very patient ⁓ and you know very amenable to to my needs and all of that kind of stuff. But overall it was a very difficult project. And we actually got ⁓ it was Sonic Team that ⁓ gave Now production the contract for Sonic Riders, the original Sonic Riders game. And that's bas that was basically if we're talking about first games in the industry. I'm looking over there because I have the disc and the thing ⁓ for Sonic Riders. But that was the first professional job, games industry job that I had, basically. ⁓ and it was Sonic Riders. So I mean, right out the gate, being a member of Sonic team was just like huge. Working on a Sonic the Hedgehog game was huge. and ⁓ yeah, a year and a half there, it was a very tight schedule. We were trying to release the game on three consoles, the Xbox, PlayStation, and GameCube, which gives you an idea of what era we were in. and so there was just a lot of issues and problems there. and obviously we had two Sonic Team spokespeople with us and they were you know telling us what their expectations were and all that kind of stuff. And it got to the point where, ⁓ because of my work ethic and my struggles, I think, with language and things like that. ⁓ the last half year, maybe three quarters of a year, was just like super tiring in the sense the Japanese work ethic sense. In a the Japanese work ethic sense, ⁓ I mean then I know there's a lot of like stereotypes and all that kind of stuff, but when you're in it, it just it kind of feels natural to like get you stay with your whole team late into the night trying to get this thing done. So there's definitely that this team kind of peer pressure aspect. And then sometimes, yeah, I'd I I c literally fell asleep on my keyboard sometimes. ⁓ stuff like that, right? So major exhaustion, major burnout, like all of that kind of stuff. ⁓ so I got to the end of that year and a half. and when our manager came over and says, I think it was Nintendo we were trying to get the last approval for, right? Because you send them the gold master back then. And then they obviously play it and they're like, Okay, this is good enough, we accept it. and so we had PlayStation and we had Microsoft and we were just waiting on Nintendo and ⁓ yeah, the manager came over, I was asleep at my desk and he got got a ta tap on the shoulder and he went, You know, Steve Son, ⁓ Nintendo's accepted ⁓ our game. You you know, go home and rest. ⁓ you know, you've done well, team's done well, great job, all of that kind of stuff. And I was still like half asleep, so bleer blearily eyed, like, ⁓ okay, okay. And he went back and like within ten seconds, almost like involuntarily, I h had stood up, wiped the drill off my face, went over at my manager and went I quit. Yeah. So there was part of me that was like that knew like this is not sustainable, right? So all of this to say like this is how I ended up in France. ⁓ for for Blizzard was this was my first programming job in the industry. And of course you don't think that you've got no framework for comparison at the time. I just knew that if this was the experience, I'm not sure I want to be involved in it. Right. Or I don't think I'm gonna survive it. It was almost like an up lower on the Maslow's hierarchy of decisions, right? So I just thought, hey, if this is what it's gonna be like, maybe I made a Bad choice. You start getting all these existential crisis moments, all that kind of stuff, right? You're in a foreign land, you don't speak the language, even though I did speak the language, and I was enjoying living in Japan, all that kind of stuff. All of these things when you're exhausted just start to build up. They seem much larger than they are. ⁓ so I was like, I don't know, maybe I'll just go home for a while and see see what's up, see if I can think of something else or do something else. So yeah, I quit and I was out of Japan two weeks later. You know, I had gotten rid of all of my stuff, gotten out of the apartment, and so on and so forth, closed my bank accounts, and I was back home ⁓ within two weeks and one of the eye opening parts for me, I'm gonna keep crediting my mum throughout this whole process, was I got off the plane and my mum as soon as my mum saw me, she started crying. And so I just kinda must have looked so gaunt and so white or something like that, right? ⁓ and to her credit she didn't bother me for like about a month. And I basically I mean I look back at it now, I didn't feel it at the time, but I look back at it now, I was recovering for a month, right? Just like trying to get energy and strength back and all that kind of stuff. And during that month, ⁓ back home I found a little game ⁓ and played a little game called World of Warcraft. ⁓ so World of Warcraft I credit for my recovery in that regard, right? So Vanilla WoW had just been released. Massive success, huge success. became a global phenomenon like over the course of that first release up until the Burning Crusade expansion. ⁓ but I was we were still very much in initial launch phase and so I was playing that and I was just I mean, I used to play D and D in high school and things like that, and so it was just right up my alley. This, you know, fantasy world game. ⁓ and I just felt good to play that and make progression and and all of that kind of stuff. All the things that I wasn't feeling I was getting in Japan, I guess. ⁓ and so I did that. But you know, after a month of living at home with my mum, you know, God bless her, she walks in and she's like, Maybe you should start looking for a job, Steven. You know? I think in the two and a half years I'd been away from home, she kinda had started to enjoy the freedom of the house to herself, like that kind of thing. ⁓ and now I was imposing on her, so she was like, Yeah. How about you you go look for a job? So I I reached kind of like a crisis point ⁓ where I was like, I don't want to work on programming because in my mind was this thing that I just went through. And and so she again with the wisdom, she was like, Is there not something else in the games industry that you might be able to be able to do? ⁓ that would, you know that wouldn't throw away all of this stuff that you have and that you've been learning and and that kind of stuff. And she just turned I remember a moment where she she was saying something like that. She had that we had this conversation many times, but she was saying something like that and she turned around and I was sitting there like this, you know, like the the you know the the typical player of WoW ⁓ back then and she was like, Why don't you see if they're looking for people? And I hadn't I hadn't even made that connection. It was weird actually, because I had just made a game and I was playing this game and I hadn't made the connection that people made that game as well.
speaker-1: Yeah. It's almost like you'd you would sort of like refuse to, right? 'Cause it sounds like you had such a bad experience of making games that you were like, I don't even want to think I just wanna consume, I don't want to think about making.
speaker-0: Yeah, it's like I my brain was just like, Yeah, just imagine these things materialize out of nowhere and you'll be much happier, like that kind of stuff. ⁓ so after making that connection I was like, okay. ⁓ and I looked so early internet as well, so I I looked at their website. and because of the success of World of Warcraft, ⁓ they were hoovering up people for their customer support department. ⁓ so ⁓ especially because they were going global, right? Obviously Blizzard American company. ⁓ but around that era ⁓ was the so that there's a there's a there's a long i ⁓ history there that I'll probably munge. But ⁓ there was Vivendi, ⁓ which is an American company, and then they merged with Activision. and I don't know when that was, was that around like two thousand seven, two thousand eight, something like that? ⁓ But they they did that merge and then ⁓ you know, I think that just kind of opened up a lot. I know they were a global company, but I think they got like things were starting to get super global at that time. And so they were looking for customer support in in France to cover all of Europe, and then they were looking for customer support in Asia for for all of Asia and so on and so forth. So that was like, ⁓ my god, the game is so successful, we need this customer support and this these offices around the world to deal with the global success of this game. And so I think they were very much in a snap expansion. ⁓ so when I joined Blizzard, it was customer support because that's who they were hoovering people up for. They were like, Yeah, we need like fifty to a hundred people yesterday, like that kind of thing. And so it wasn't a particularly difficult process, especially not for me. ⁓ and I joined at the same time is like twenty there was twenty of us and then two weeks prior there had been twenty people joined. So we all went to a near so there was the office, there was a nearby hotel. Shout out to all my ETAP people. ⁓ so the hotel was called the ETAP and all of the recent Blizzard customer support employees were put there by the company ⁓ so that we could all get our training. It was like two weeks training or something that but that was a if I thought my first year internship in Japan was like crazy intern parties. The first two weeks at the ETAP and Felizie ⁓ and the south of Paris was just nuts. It was just like crazy. It was a good environment. And I was ⁓ older than everybody else there. So that's that's kind of been a recurring theme throughout my life as well, which is because I failed the two years at university, when I arrived at Abertei, I was two years older than everybody else who was just starting out. And then and so on and so forth. That just seems to have carried through my life. So th ⁓ it's kinda like the when you learn like the the best hockey players are the ones that held were held back I think. Not that I'm saying the best, you know, but like probably for that reason I had more experience, ⁓ was more comfortable with myself. Yeah, and so on and so forth. So anyway, I arrived there, ⁓ yeah, that was the start of ⁓ Blizzard customer support. ⁓ if you asked me if I saw myself moving back to engineering at that time, not a single chance.
speaker-1: No, it doesn't sound like it. It sounds like you took a hard pivot, you know, away from what you've done, but still found a way back into video games. So you find yourself in in France, ⁓ you've pivoted away from engineering and you're into customer service. How was that? How I obviously you're a huge WoW fan, so how was it to sort of you know be on the inside and you know and be be working with fellow players and trying to wrangle all that customer service stuff?
speaker-0: ⁓ yeah, I in many ways it just felt like I was feeding World of Warcraft addiction by also doing it I mean from a different perspective, but ⁓ also doing it during the day. ⁓ th there's a lot of interesting dynamics there as well because this obviously was in France. This was ⁓ Felize Paris, so kind of s thirty minutes ish south of the centre of Paris. So not in Paris proper, but ⁓ down that way and I lived in Versailles, which is the the old capital, ⁓ before they you know lopped everybody's heads off and stuff like that. ⁓ so I lived like down the road from the palace of Versailles, so that was a lovely place to live. and yeah, I would ⁓ I mean so I'm kind of steeped in that environment. I'll I'll give you a quick ⁓ is I'm using it's kind of like a funny, funny sideline story. So obviously living in Japan two and a half years, right? One of the most efficient, well ordered societies that one might have the pleasure to live in. Now obviously that comes with its downsides, as I've already discovered. ⁓ but moving from there to Paris was like absolute cultural whiplash, basically. And it took a could took from that perspective, it took me a while to get used to. very laid back. ⁓ you know, hey, I arrive in I I get my apartment. I arrive in my apartment. You want to get internet right? Plot hooked up, right? Not only are the buildings like four hundred years old with like ancient copper pipes, but if you want to get someone out, it's like just sitting there with a cigarette, you know, hmm, maybe. Maybe I'll think about coming and installing your internet, right? It was just such a very languid, slow pace compared to Japan. ⁓ and then equally ⁓ the things I loved about it, you know, vacations, ⁓ you know, all sorts of stuff. They very much love that ⁓ kind of relaxed view of of work. I'm not gonna say it's work shy because I think that gives the the wrong impression, but it's certainly adjacent. to that in the sense that people value ⁓ I guess it's a big thing these days work life balance. ⁓ and yes the the Parisians and the French in particular have that have that down, I think. And just going from Japan to France. So that was my first ⁓ I well, it was my second experience with culture shock. First experience with culture shock was going to Japan in the first place. Setting culture shock was just the whiplash going from Japan to France and and just the the differences in an entire society and how they deal with things. I mean it doesn't sound like that would be the case, but certainly if you go from Japan to France it is. ⁓ anyway, so I was in that environment, which is you know, I would say if I'm talking about a recovery period is good for my recovery, ⁓ because, you know, I the Not only is the pressure low from the job, ⁓ but the pressure was also low from the culture and society that I was in. And, you know, it was just like, yeah, just start to live and enjoy life again and all of that kind of stuff. In World of Warcraft, I mean, there is a world that you could escape into. I mean, I just don't think I mean there were obviously things like EverQuest and kind of like all of that kind of stuff, but World of Warcraft, when I arrived on the CM ⁓ scene, I think that just opened so many eyes as to like what a living, breathing online world could be like. It deserves a success in that regard. So when I went into work each day, ⁓ yeah, it I mean it's kind of unreal, I guess. Like you you go in and we had these tools which is gonna be relevant to to if we're gonna talk about what I do now. but we had this tool called GM tool, imaginatively named. ⁓ so that was gate so ⁓ customer support were called Game Masters from Blizzard. And ⁓ the idea was I mean you didn't go into the client or anything like that. You didn't you weren't in the game talking to players. That was vanishingly rare. ⁓ there was a whole interface ⁓ for customer support, which is ⁓ a player in the game would have some access to the c ⁓ the ticketing system as we would call it, and they would enter a ticket, hey I've got a problem, I'm stuck in a fireplace or something like that, right? ⁓ Torin always getting stuck in fireplaces. ⁓ so we would get that ticket and then we would ⁓ it would just be like in a big queue ⁓ as you would imagine. I guess it's just like any other customer support tool. ⁓ and so you just get a big ticket in a queue and then you pull the ticket from the queue and you answer the ticket and and so on and so forth. So when it comes to World of Warcraft in particular, sure I felt like I was involved in World of Warcraft. But it didn't feel like I was interacting with it as you would the game. Right. So day to day felt different. Well, I mean, it's sure as sure as hell I'd go home and play WoW. So it was like my almost my entire day would be World of Warcraft. But I th I felt like it kept fresh just 'cause it was like two completely different sides of of the story, I guess. So it was like a two week training period and then we were just on the floor answering tickets, basically.
speaker-1: Yeah, and it's it's they say it sounds like you kind of helped avoid burnout there. It wasn't like you were steeped in well wow, twenty four seven, you had this sort of two sides of it. And and I'm s I'm sort of struck by the parallels of like how you talked about losing yourself in, you know, the pong clone in grandstand on a grandstand, and then you get this incredibly rich, lush, you know, ⁓ fantasy world to throw yourself into. It feels like a and you're coming off of an equal perhaps an equal knock on your kind of confidence and self worth almost, you know, through that crunch period. It's a beautiful parallel there. I think it's beautiful. I think the timing's beautiful. I think, you know, the effect it had on you, it's had such a positive effect on you from what sounded like a very dark, dark time. I think that's that's one of the things video games can do, right? They can sort of pull you from those yeah, from those dark places. ⁓ so so you spend your time in France and you know in customer support for like you know, what, almost four years? and at one point you're sort of managing folks, yeah, you kind of move into a more managing role. How was that? How did that feel?
speaker-0: So the the general path I took, ⁓ so obviously y there's avenues for promotion and stuff like that in in any any job that you take. ⁓ so from Game Master, if you had a specific aptitude perhaps or an interest in doing more in depth investigations, for example, I mean this was the early days, but like people being hacked So speak I do that in air quotes because it was kind of rare that people would genuinely get hacked. It was probably because they shared their details online or something and so on and so forth. The end result nonetheless was some actor would ⁓ some nefarious actor would log into their account and sell all their stuff, d to create gold, and then they would mail that gold to some other bot account or player account or something like that, right? And then you got all of these. That's that's how the whole third-party gold selling market. you know, came about this kind of CD underbelly of of wow as it was in its Haiti and and all of that kind of stuff. So though internally there was ⁓ I won't call it a department, but there was a group of people called specialists. ⁓ and they were from the GM pool. ⁓ and it would be like we would go into the logs and we would pour over the logs and we'd try and find the patterns that would identify these people and like all of that kind of stuff. and, you know Do what we could for our players to try and get their things back. And you know, we went way out of our way, like sometimes I guess it varied from person to person, but in general, ⁓ the people that were specialists were just very interested in helping players out, right? Because we were all like players ourselves. And it was just like, Yeah, these awful situations, the worst situations you can be in, the worst experience you can have in a game to date. ⁓ I mean just awful. Like it Th this is kinda I guess the start of like real world money criminal organizations and stuff like that getting involved in gaming. ⁓ and so we were very interested in trying to like stem that tide and return our players to kind of a great experience that we were having and like all of that kind of stuff. So I was one of those people that was interested in that. So I became a specialist after about a year of being a GM. ⁓ and I was a specialist for a while. I was in a great team there, the team that I had at the time. Still my friends now. I was ⁓ at a wedding just last year. ⁓ you know, like twenty years past this time. ⁓ I was at ⁓ one of my specialist friends ⁓ wedding last year and yeah, that was a lot of fun. And we re out he invited everybody from the team and we reconnected last year. That was a pretty awesome experience. It was almost like we'd never left. ⁓ we just fell right back into the old parents. But anyway, that was my specialist team. We got really close, ⁓ really enjoyed that. And then, of course, opportunities come up. ⁓ you know, maybe ⁓ the teams are expanding. We need more specialist teams, or ⁓ your manager is has been promoted and moving on and all the usual stuff that you get in a corporate corporate environment. ⁓ so I I got the opportunity to become ⁓ what they call a senior. A senior in most jobs is kind of like a mentoring role, I would say, in most jobs, but in the GM department it was a manager. So when when you became a senior, you essentially became the manager of a team and those people reported to you basically. ⁓ so I I became the senior ⁓ maybe year two and a it was like two and a half, three. but I at that time so I did senior for a while and I was managing and that's kind of a that was my first real experience with like proper management. ⁓ So like I had a great team. They were all my friends. So I I basically got the team that I was a part of. So they were all my friends already. A little bit of a dynamic shift there, but it was it was a good experience overall. and so I did that for a while. But here's the important part. ⁓ I started kind of getting the itch that this wasn't enough. Right? Like this is this is I'm not gonna say it was too easy because obviously it was challenging every day, that it was different things and the game was evolving and all of that kind of stuff. But for me it was it it was like the way I frame it is it it started to feel like a little easy or I wasn't being challenged. Maybe that's the better way of putting it. Like the work I was doing was challenging, but for my interests it probably didn't feel challenged enough. So around the two and a half year mark, ⁓ when I was a senior, I kinda started finding myself on on job boards and stuff like that. And I was looking at like engineering positions and things back, right? And perhaps my recovery worked and t enough time had passed that I was like, maybe I made a mistake. I mean, that was only my first job. ⁓ maybe, you know, there were parts of it that I really liked. So maybe I think I guess with another two and a half years of maturity under my belt and maybe managing people and all that kind of stuff, I kinda got that feeling that what if rather than abandoning everything from there. I really analyze what I liked and what I didn't like and see if I can find somewhere that suits me better, basically. And almost as I had like finished those revelatory f thoughts, a job posting came up internally for Irvine, California, Blizzard Entertainment, ⁓ tools engineering, basically. And I ⁓ the it's w what was I talking about earlier? Internship. I'd never heard the the w really what internship was when I was a young lad. And now tools engineering, I'm like, I I I know those words, I can get a vague idea of of what's involved there, but it's not like the game development that maybe I struggled with. Perhaps there's some adjacent kind of engineering that gets me involved in video games. So tools engineering I started to research that a little and I found out that it was Essentially, ⁓ yeah, as one might expect, you're making the tools that help make the game. ⁓ and so ⁓ I found out very quickly that they had a tool called WoW Edit. ⁓ and it's it's kind of like a tool that ⁓ the way I describe it to most people that ask me what is your job, is like, well, the game designers and and all of that kind of stuff, they are using hammer nails, like all of that kind of stuff, and they're using all of these tools to put things together. I'm the gay guy that makes the hammers and the nails and stuff like that, right? ⁓ so we've got this tool and it's a really powerful world editor. Now the convenient thing about this ⁓ nowadays is that there are a lot of tools that are almost exactly like WoW Edit now. There w there weren't always WoW Edit is very bespoke, but now we've got Unreal Engine, we've got Unity, we've got Godot, like all of that kind of stuff, right? Those things are very similar to WoW Edit, except WoW Edit is very specifically designed to make World of Warcraft. ⁓ so that's what Wow Edit is. WoW Edit is the unreal of World of Warcraft, and that's what I work on. So I improve WoW Edit day-to-day, basically. ⁓ anyway, so I found out they were making WoW Edit. there's some more life shenanigans that go on during this period, and that is mostly related to the visa process for getting to America. So I always laugh when I see people like posting videos like I moved to America and I got a job here and like all of that kind of stuff and they don't talk at all about how difficult it actually is to that. And you you will have experienced this as well, right? ⁓ so I got an H one B visa. Is that what you got?
speaker-1: I got an L one B, but yeah, I know I know the H one B, yeah.
speaker-0: Yeah, so I I got the old H H one B and it was touch and go for like a whole year because this was the Obama era, basically. And ⁓ you know, Obama obviously much loved as a president ⁓ in many regards, but at one point during his tenure he decided he was gonna redo a lot of the immigration process, and part of that was he canceled all active and application visas. ⁓ so I was in the middle, so it was about six months of waiting at this point. So I had already moved on mentally from the the the specialist role that I was in, and I had been accepted for this role over there tools engineering, and they're like, Okay, now we need to work on your visa. Blizzard did a fantastic job of mostly doing all that for me. ⁓ I've had very little to do with the actual nuts and bowls of putting that together. So that was great. They sponsored me fully in that regard. But it took about six months to get to the point. that I had gotten to and then Obama cancelled. I'm not gonna say Obama, like he Obama personally signed the thing, but his administration canceled all of the visas. I got a letter saying it's been cancelled. If you want to reapply, reapply. And essentially everybody else is in the same position. So they're all reapplying at the same time. And so I ended up in just this horrific queue and like there was a point where I was sitting there like, well, they in America are trying to fill this role. I'm gonna receive an email any day which is like, look, we tried. We really need someone for this role, so I'm sorry, we're gonna we're gonna cancel cancel the job and go with someone else. But they didn't do that to their credit. That's what's great. The HR department in ⁓ Irvine, California, they were apparently apparently my manager, the the the manager that I would get at the time asked that same question to them and they were like, No, no, no, we'll get ⁓ we'll get ⁓ we'll get ⁓ It took another six months for me to get Into the position where the visa got approved and all that kind of stuff. So total time waiting for a visa while in France was a year. It was almost exactly a year to the day. ⁓ so I was sitting there, I mean, no offense to the job or anything. It was just like I had mentally moved on. I was ready, I had been accepted for this other role, I had done the interview, I had done the code review, I had done all of that kind of stuff. Good to go. but then a whole year passes and you're just kinda in limbo, I guess, mental limbo. ⁓ so it was touch and go there for a while. ⁓ but they stuck with me and ⁓ in the end I managed to come out here ⁓ two thousand and nine. I think that was. ⁓ yeah, it was ⁓ it's gonna be around September two thousand and nine. ⁓ so yeah, it'd already been about three, three and a half years in the job at that point.
speaker-1: Yeah, and amazing they say, amazing that they you know, they were committed to to bringing you over. ⁓ yeah, having been through that visa process I was actually at Blizzard when my visa my L one ran out and I had to switch to an H one for a bit. And I had a similar that they were really the the the the HF department was great. They they they did tell me one day, like, Do you have a girlfriend? Would you think getting married? 'Cause they were like panicking a little bit that that might be the only way out. But ⁓ I can definitely second that they, you know, they did a great job of kind of managing a very complicated and I think that's a great little point to zero in on, right? Like, you know, we're very lucky that we get to do this role in other countries, right? It's amazing that we can have our our career can take us to other countries and let us do the thing we want to do. But it ain't free and it ain't easy. ⁓ I mean you'd already made a move once, so I guess that part of it you are comfortable with, but like you say, never never getting all the visas and all the uncertainty is very challenging.
speaker-0: I mean that's a very good point. People people are like how how do you I guess people have a hard time like how how do you move? How do you emigrate? Like that kind of stuff. How do you leave everything behind and and and end up somewhere else? And you are very right, I had done it twice before. And I was already by the time I was in France, I was traveling light, let's just say, right? Like I kinda lost there's a part of me about like the materialism ⁓ and I just kind of lost that things in me like collecting things, you know, b having tons of things on shelves and like all of that stuff. I guess I just became more and more minimalist as a result of like ⁓ upping roots and and moving. There's the downside to that as well. I mean, there's a whole philosophical debate in here which would probably fill up another three or four hours. But it's like You kinda start to feel like you don't belong anywhere.
speaker-1: ⁓ thank you for saying that. Yes, so true. Yes.
speaker-0: Even when you go back home, right? After you've after you've travelled. So I'll go back to Scotland and I'll look around and it's just like everything's the same but everything's slightly different and it's almost like slightly surreal and you just kinda don't feel like you belong anywhere. But I I think the the antidote to that is ⁓ friends, family, ⁓ people that you build bonds to in the area, right? You will always have those bonds. I mean look, ⁓ going to that wedding last year, right, and we just dropped right back in. ⁓ stuff like that. I you you find that you're Your home is the people and interests that surround you rather than the physical location you're in. Philosophy.
speaker-1: Yeah, no, I I couldn't agree more. Yeah, I've definitely had those same feelings. ⁓ and and and just quickly, I mean, you know, you you taking that switch to tools engineering, you've gone back to programming, you had to d you had to do a an exam, you know, a programming test to to qualify. Like, was that you know, did he have cold sweats when he went back to programming? Like did it just did he just drift back into it without any trouble?
speaker-0: No, that was definitely friction. I mean I think it's an odd person that goes into so ⁓ I'm gonna flail around a little here. So I was a lead here for a while, so I became a lead engineer, which is a manager here. ⁓ and I ended up doing interviews, right? And I would always find not one hundred percent of the time, but I feel that the people that go into interviews a hundred percent confident. There's something not quite right about that candidate, right? It depends on the level, I guess, right? So y I you've got you like principal engineers, they know their stuff, like all of that kind of stuff. But I don't know. Maybe it's just me. It's just kind of like Interviews are terrible. And no one likes interviews, right? ⁓ who would walk in an interview and like an interview? Or at least feel this is their jam? Maybe you can feel like you're gonna nail it, but interviews are just awful in general. And everybody ⁓ one thing Being an interviewer myself, you realise is it's also awful for the interviewer. Mm-hmm. Which you don't really realize. Maybe when you're earlier in your career and you're sitting there and you're nervous and you're like, ⁓ god, what are they thinking about me? Right. I guarantee you they're probably sitting on the other side of the table, like, I'm gonna do my best, but I kinda wish this was over as well. You know, like that kind of stuff. So once you kind of get into that mental frame of mind where you're like, it just kinda becomes more of a conversation. That's what I do now in interviews. these days, like if I'm going for a job or something like that. ⁓ like when I got promoted to to lead. ⁓ I had interviews for that as well. And it just felt a lot more like a conversation like here's my philosophy on management and like all of that kind of stuff. And if you want me, you want me. If you don't you don't and I'm not going to like attach too much to this. So going back to that ⁓ f I was sitting in France and this was long before the Zoom and all that kind of stuff, right? So we had janked together this really awful like video call in like two thousand and nine, right? And when I connected, so they gave me a test, ⁓ their code test, it was a standard like Blizzard code test. They gave me a test and it was printed out on a piece of paper, the code test. And and I was like, okay, what do I do with this? And he's like, Well yeah answer it. And I was like, Who how do I answer this? Is do I put it do it on a computer or something like that? I was like, no just here's a sheet of paper and a pen, write your answers on a piece of paper. And so I was like Okay, right? Like I I don't know, like my Japanese interview when you remember if if you recall was me going in and they were selling on me on their right. So I had never really done a code test before, at least in this regard. And so again, no framework for comparison. I'm like, okay, this is the way it's done. I'm gonna off the top of my dome, try and answer these complex algorithm questions and like all of that kind of stuff and write it down, right? And of course Even by then I was so used to being on a computer I hadn't handwritten in years, right? So I'm writing out this doctor script and chicken scratch with like these algorithms and all that kind of stuff. And then I give it to the guy at the end of it and he's it's so it was going to be followed up immediately by a question answer session. So I give it to the guy and then ⁓ I don't know what he did. He must have went off and like scanned it or faxed it. If faxes were a thing back then, right? So he he must have scanned it, sent it to them because When the video call connected, and this was an awful video call, it was like twenty eight two two eighty p or something like that, right? And there was a table I remember, and now that I know, I know it's one of the the meeting rooms at Blizzard, but it was just like this long table, three people to a side, and then two people on the back, right? And that was apparently the entire WoW Tools team at the time, plus some other people. ⁓ and so I basically was being interviewed by the entire team, not just like the manager. and now now that I know that manager, I know why he did that. And it was a good move, I think, because you know, when you get to a certain point and you're introducing one person into an already established team, you want the whole team to feel good about that like that kind of stuff. But to me, as a young lad connecting internationally to this to this crazy dream job, so to speak. ⁓ and after having just tortured myself handwriting algorithms on a piece of paper, I connected, yeah, I'm sweating bullets. Like I'm already sweating just having to handwrite. Like so now I have to answer these these questions. ⁓ so anyway, we connected to that meeting and yeah, it was to me it felt you kinda go into like a black hole, you kind of like you know, implode a little. ⁓ and they're trying to ask leading questions to Who answers it? I mean, like that kind of stuff. And I know my feeling afterwards was like, ⁓ my god, that was so awful. I I don't feel like I answered anything right. Like all of that kind of stuff. ⁓ but they were asking stuff, they yeah, they they the first thing they said was, We got this and it looks like you've handwritten it. And I was like, Yes. And they're like, Why don't you just type it out on computer? And I was like, I didn't get a computer, and they're like, You weren't given a computer? And I was No. And so it just seemed like everybody was confused about what just what just happened. And I think to their in their defense in France, they're like a HR, you know, they're not they're not a programming or engineering facility by by any means. So I don't think they made that connection. Here, have this person do this test. And I think a s a layman would take that and go, This is a handwritten test, you just write the answers like that kind of stuff, right? But obviously they were expecting ⁓ some sort of type thing. Anyway, so they were like, Well, we just got these like faxes or whatever. And we've we've c photocopied them and the the team's sitting around with them. And they basically just went through and they were just like, Okay, why did you answer this? Why did you answer this? Why do you answer this? And I remember one of them was like a 3D positional sound question. It was like if you ha if you have a player and you have a ⁓ a point in space where the sound is played, how do you calculate which angle that sound is is being played from? Like that kind of stuff, right? I mean I imploded instantly when I saw that question on the thing 'cause I'm like, math, right? ⁓ and I d I I didn't answer it very well on the piece of paper because I was rushing to try and answer as many questions as as I could. But to their credit, they sat there and they went, Okay, now we're gonna give you time to to think about this and answer this, right? And so they they kept giving me leading questions about, all right, so you figured out like
speaker-1: Yeah, there you go, yeah.
speaker-0: You figured out whether it's on your left and right, how do you figure out if it's in front and back? And like they s I'm gonna say that they had to sit and suffer through my rambling answers as I tried to find the solution. But I kind of wandered my way towards a solution at the end. And so to me, I'm just like, ⁓ I was waffling so hard. This was just such an awful interview and all the questions were like that. And of course after they were asking me, How do you do, what interests do you have, like all of that kind of stuff. Why are you here? All the typical stuff. ⁓ and I gave them the history that much of the history that I've just given you here now. you know, prior to that. And ⁓ so I just thought it was awful and I was like, I've I've flubbed this. I was like, okay, that's fine. I actually it was interesting because I was like, that's fine, I still have the job here, I had that security. I was like, I could probably look for something else and I'm not worried about it too much. But they contacted me again and they were like, Yeah, you did great. we would be interested in having you over here. And That was the acceptance that then led to the year visa wait. ⁓ but the point of that was I learned that day and now after knowing my manager for many years, it was during the interview process, that I mean, I was being hired as an associate software engineer, basically entry level software engineer, fine. ⁓ and I learned that he just wanted to know if he could work with me in the sense that if I didn't know the answer is something, could he like lead me to the answer and I would figure out the answer myself? And It wasn't important to him that I would answer the question specifically. It was just that he could lead me to an answer that would arrive at myself. And I had apparently proven that by doing that. So to me, it's funny the lens in which you look through. So to I was imploding in a it was a disaster. And to him he like, this guy's giving me exactly what I want you know. So that was cool. It was a it's good experience.
speaker-1: I love that. Yeah, exactly like you say, you know, you're you're you felt like you were just being dragged through you know, dragged into the right place and that was exactly what they they wanted to know that you could be, you know, directed. That's that's fascinating. And and and so you get the visa, you move out to California, you know, you're in another country now, and you're working on the the sort of the foundation of what makes Wow Wow, right? Like you say, the unreal of of of WoW. And that's you you sort of stayed prom primarily in that domain, yeah, primarily in the tools suite. Why was it was it what you expected when you got there and why why has it kept you interested all these all this time?
speaker-0: That's an excellent question. In many ways I've asked myself that question. ⁓ because I thought I would probably be like something like a gameplay engineer or something like that, right? I mean that's what I did on on this the Sonic Team ⁓ game. But this like I didn't expect this at the time, but this this position hooked me in a way I didn't expect. And the reason why it hooked me in a way that I didn't expect is because Tools engineering is the art of integrating like all the disparate elements that go into a game, right? So in my time in my twenty, in my 17 years on the wild team, I guess, ⁓ I've touched gameplay code, I've touched server code, I've touched like I have contributed to like every part of World of Warcraft as a whole, not just like this tool, because when you're making a tool, The tool is is gonna make the workflow that other people use to interact with these things abstractly, right? Rather than ⁓ you know, at the data layer or whatever, like all of that kind of stuff. So I get to learn about and touch and modify all of these things while also trying to make a great experience for someone that's literally just sitting two doors down from me, you know, i me creating the content and all that kind of stuff. And very much in those early years. When the team was much smaller, ⁓ it it just felt good for example, a designer would just walk into your room and be like, Hey, I was using this thing and I don't quite understand how it works, or could it do this instead, or like all of the because another common one is, I just did this thing a hundred times. Is there no way I could just like have that automated? Like all of that kind of stuff. And so it very much felt like every day was It sounds a little cheesy, like every day was a new challenge and you didn't know what that challenge was going to be coming into the day. Right? Sure you would get your own tasks and you would obviously have your own improvements and all that kind of stuff. But that's pretty much what kept me and what keeps me to this day, because like Wow is a constantly evolving game, you know wild features over the years, you know, different demographics play the game and the more the game got prop popular, the more demographics that you got. And ⁓ you know, it's like trying to make a great game just all round. And how do I enable the designers, so this is back to me, how do I enable the designers and the other engineers to make the greatest experience that they can give the players, like like I stuff. So there's a little bit of abstraction. But if I do my job well then they make a better game and they make that better game faster. And so on and so forth. Stuff like that. So I think that's what it is. ⁓ I think what it taught me was perhaps if I were in a more focused role like I was in Japan, I would grow to hate it or resent it or I just would get bored, perhaps. That's probably the best way to put it. Whereas in this way, it's just like, yeah, I touch so many different things and I've done so many different things that It's just kept me interested and I don't I've never really felt that wonder lust anymore of like maybe I should be looking for something else. It's always just felt like this is fine. It it's like engaging and interesting and I guess that's one of the best things you can ask from a job, you know? ⁓ so it's very much that. And then of course everybody at Blizzard, ultra professional, ultra excellent, really great people. And I'm not not not just blowing smoke here. It's just an awesome experience, I guess, overall. It's one of the greatest teams. You'll hear this a lot from Blizzard people, but it's one of the greatest teams that you could be involved in, I think. Just the wealth of experience alone. I mean, here I am today, twenty years at Blizzard, right? Like that's twenty years of institutional knowledge about how World of Warcraft is made. So I don't know, it's kind of like pass it on, you know, a little bit, like who can I teach? I have actually started to take on like more mentor roles. The last few years I ⁓ have trained up the interns, right? So usually each year we get some amount of interns. I've happily volunteered for that. ⁓ and so on. I don't want to get ahead of myself, but ⁓ yeah, that's what led to me being a lead because obviously you've got the experience, maybe you should be leading a team of people and so on and so forth. ⁓ but anyway, don't want to get ahead of myself.
speaker-1: No no no no that's that's a great answer. And I I think in many ways, you know, t tool working in tools is almost kind of like an altruistic role, right? Like you're so focused on supporting other people. And although I think game developers are trying to make the best game for their player, I think the layer that you sit at is so much closer like you said, so much closer than that, right? Like you're enabling the people that enable the thing for the player and And and is that a mentality that you have outside of work, Steve? You know, that kind of that desire to help and support other people. I mean, you know, you mentioned what sounded like a slightly long question, you mentioned what sounded like a a rough period as a child, right? It sounded like maybe you're a little bit introverted or a little bit in sea like I was. ⁓ but you've grown into a role that is very much about helping others and supporting others. Does that ref does that reflect out in your everyday life or is that something that You know, just comes out of you that blizzard you know, this blizzard roll brings out of you, I'm curious.
speaker-0: No, that's really good question. ⁓ I have thought about that myself and yes, I do tend to try and help people outside the work in whatever way I can. ⁓ I'm not gonna say it's like empathy or anything like that. I think there's just maybe it is. There's just like this understanding if you have difficulties in your life, you have a moment, let's say, where you're just like you you look at someone, it's probably a German word for this, right? Yeah, but you look at someone and you realize that that person might be going through like a ton of difficulties that are completely invisible. And it's like I am just gonna try my best to not make that person feel worse or s and so on and so forth. ⁓ so I'm not like some huge altruistic person that does like goes down to soup kitchens like all of that kind of stuff, right? But like whenever I feel like someone's struggling or see someone struggling, or even just reaching out and chatting to people and Inviting them over if they're having a bad time ⁓ and so on and so forth. I yeah, I just find I tend to naturally do that and I don't feel like that's draining in any way to me. And who knows, like maybe working on tools and ⁓ constantly having to do that outreach has like maybe it's a double double-sided thing, right? Like maybe that has trained me professionally to reach out and ask Is something not working for you? Is something working for you? And so on and so forth. How can I make it better? Maybe that bled into my personal life. And maybe there's a part of my personal life which is like I understand what it's like to have emotional or you know, mental difficulties or whatever it is and I will therefore try and, you know, make sure that I can lighten your load somehow, some of that. So I guess it on both sides there's a lightening the load kind of feel.
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, like you say, one's taught the other and and you know, if you've if you've been in that place where it you know, you felt like you need an escape, you know, and maybe you it's easier to empathize with someone and and spot someone who needs that too. And even if that escape is just like, you know, a chat and just say, like, hey you doing mate, like, you know, that can be enough. Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-0: Connecting over a video game.
speaker-1: There you go. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ so so twenty years to the day in in one company
speaker-0: Yep. Crazy, right? When you when you look at the industry.
speaker-1: It's crazy and it's rare. I mean I spent seventeen years with Sony, but that was across two different I guess, you know, you have some time across in a different site, so I guess it's kind of similar, but ⁓ What do you think it's being at one place for so long, what do you think it's taught you?
speaker-0: Wow. Being at one place so long or what do I feel like it has taught me? I feel like day to day, especially as a as the tenure has gotten longer and I've got longer in the tooth, I feel like there's a deeper appreciation for people that have been doing a thing for a long time. So what would I call that? It's a it's a very good question 'cause I haven't actually thought or framed a specific answer to that before. But I feel like it's something along the lines of There are people who have been in an industry, it doesn't just be have to be the games industry or anything like that, but there's people who have done a thing for a certain amount of time, then naturally they know the ins and outs and the foibles, the pitfalls, and all of that kind of stuff. And there's a class of person that wants to make sure they can shortcut everybody else around them to not make the mistakes that they made and to be successful faster. So this thought's gonna be all over the place, but I feel like Blizzard is that. So the thing I've learned about being 20 years in the same place is There are more there are more than me, right? I look at the ten year board and I see there's like thirty odd people celebrating their twentieth anniversary th this year, right? There's one guy that's like thirty years and I'm like, Wow, thirty years of blizzard, amazing. So I know some of those people, obviously, and ⁓ just the wealth of their experience is just amazing and it's just like it gets to a point where Professionally, they're like a professional big brother or big sister or something like that, right? And it's like s people that you can go to, they're true mentors. I think that's what being in a place a long time develops. It's like a deep mentorship, a deep knowledge base, like the institutional knowledge at Blizzard, not just from the World of Warcraft perspective, but just from an like for example, an engineering perspective, right? There's people that have been working on I mean, World of Warcraft is essentially like the top tier client server infrastructure system, right? Like people would kind of dream to see how efficient and how fast everything is and how polished it has been over the years. I mean, that doesn't mean it's not occasionally like the you know, the Winchester mystery house where it's like there's some things, you know, s tacked on here and there or where for brevity or whatever. But overall just I feel like I appreciate the deep knowledge or the people who are deeply experienced and I trust their opinions and they've not done anything that has made me doubt that opinion. Because you know, sometimes you meet people in the the act like they're very knowledgeable, but their opinions aren't very good, like that kind of stuff. ⁓ you know, you've obviously gotta be wary around these people. That's where your own knowledge comes in. But like I feel like a c a game that has run continuously for twenty plus years, it's like thirty years I guess for World of Warcraft if you include all the development time and stuff like that. But I think that has just made a very sp special and specific environment ⁓ about how to make games, be successful at releasing games. Like it's almost like you've got a lot of runway And failed experience and successful experiments and just the the the level of game development and game delivering experience is just like so high that I guess I appreciate that. Like if I were to suddenly go into some other company, I would be taking that, like not just my experience I've absorbed like the 30 years of while making experience. I would be taking that to another company and it's just like, here's all this runway I'm aware of. I don't know, I guess that would just like spread ⁓ proficiency and efficiency about game development around the industry. I'm not sure. I mean, I told you in advance that was gonna be all meandering thought, but
speaker-1: No, I I I feel like the two sort of things r to reflect that back are like you say, that sort of established institutional knowledge that everyone benefits from, right, that everyone on site benefits from. But I also love that sort of glasses half full version of, you know, the pitfalls, the foibbles and the shortcuts, right, to help others to be successful, not to complain about and be grumpy about and you know, make every w remind everyone that it's been like this for years. Your sort of glasses half full version of that is like, no, I I have these things that I can help others to accelerate their way through. Again, that sort of altruistic, you know, ⁓ line of of, you know, trying to use that knowledge to help others grow faster, I think is is a beautiful way of framing it. And
speaker-0: Yeah, I sometimes wonder if these So tha that's the interesting thing. I have one short lived game development project, right? And then I have one twenty year game development project, right? So in no way do I see myself an expert in like working in the games industry, right? ⁓ so I often wonder like what would it be like if those twenty years were split up into one and a half to three year chunks just continuously throughout my career. Like Would I I mean obviously I would be different, right? But like what kind of different like I feel like being able to explore a space so thoroughly is a different experience from gaining your experience. Maybe maybe you come a better firefighter, so to speak, where it's just like I go from fire fire to fire, like all of that kind of stuff, versus you know, one thing I can do is like I can sit down and like work for Weeks, if not months, on like the same thing. ⁓ you know, obviously you want to do your little palate cleansers here and and and stuff like that, but like I can get dug into pretty big projects and all of that kind of stuff. And now that you've posed the question, I'm gonna wonder after this if like was that a developed skill, right? ⁓ I don't I don't know if that was an an innate skill. Would I have developed that skill if I had worked in these s shorter lived projects, you know? I don't know. I'll have to think about it.
speaker-1: Yeah, it's hard to know. It's the perennial question, right? Is it better to jump around or to stay in one place? You know, I don't think that's there's a right answer for everybody there. I think it varies. You I spent seventeen years at one place, learned a lot, you know, grew a lot, but then when I did was forced to move, you know, through layoffs, I do feel like I learned a lot very quickly. is that good or bad? I don't know. Did I become too much of a drack of all trades? Maybe. ⁓ yeah, I think it's sort of horses for courses all depends on your mentality. And it sounds like you've got the mentality that is very good at like, no, this is the problem. I'm going to solve this problem. I'm going to focus on this problem for as long as it takes me. And it sounds like maybe that being able to do that in one place suits your mentality more. But like you say, difficult one to one to to bake your noodle on for a little bit. ⁓ I I'm going to pose one other thing. Do you think that being one place for twenty years came from spending time in Japan where the traditional model has been more certainly at the era that you were in Of this is your job for life. Do you think any of that rubbed off one of you or do think that's just coincidence?
speaker-0: Yeah, I think that's just coincidence. I don't think I don't think the Japanese salaryman mentality is kind of like the same as the the twenty years twenty years of blizzard. There's one Now I say this as someone who was steeped in Japanese culture for for like two and a half years. But I feel like the salary man culture is not a culture the Japanese would choose if they could, right? ⁓ it's a necessity almost. ⁓ it's it's it's just the way things have been set up. If they want to change that, yeah, they're they're gonna have to they're gonna have a long row. I think it's probably changing right now. I mean it's been twenty odd years since I lived and worked in Japan, so I don't know what it's like now. But ⁓ I'd like to think that they're they're improving and they're changing. But yeah, working on wow, very different feeling, I think. ⁓ I don't feel like a salary man, basically. So I I I feel that's probably what it is. It's the difference between doing a job because you must versus a career, so you speak. Yes.
speaker-1: Exactly. Indentured servitude almost versus, you know, career by choice kind of thing. Maybe that's the dark way of putting it, but
speaker-0: There's a there's a part of it yeah. I mean there's a part of it I wanna touch on which relates to you as well, ⁓ as someone who has lived and worked and travelled and worked and so on and so forth. The thought I had when you were describing that, and you know, obviously the layoffs are awful and they're just getting worse. You know, that's a whole topic in it on its own right. But ⁓ when you push yourself and you move out, like I can't say like I thought that mentally, I'm gonna push myself and I'm gonna move and move out, right? Like there were clearly just a series of events that I allowed to happen and I ended up where I was, right? But then at some point Maybe it was in France or maybe it was after I came to America, but there's a point where you stop thinking about I need to go there and I need to do it to do this to be successful. You just start trusting that wherever you go, you'll be fine. And I think just mentally or psychologically, when you're in that state, it's like I I can do anything kind of kind of feeling right. So I think that's kind of what I gained Doing that traveling you might be feeling a little bit of that yourself, like, yeah, sure we worry about where's the paycheck coming from if I get laid off or whatever, right? But there's also this I've moved, I've lived and worked, I've survived, I've survived this, I've survived that. Everything was fine, I did well, I trust myself to do well, so there's a comfort in that and so on and so forth.
speaker-1: There is, there's a there's a freedom to it. I think there's a there's an unshackling of some of the constraints that I think could I don't hold you back's the right word, but could could shape the way you think that once you've made that break, like they just don't contain you anymore. You know, that one of the layoffs I had, you know, my wife and I looked at each other and we're like, Well, where do we want to go? Because luckily this industry is global. You know, we could look where ev sort of wherever we want to go and you know, we ended up back in the UK and you know, that's you know, I think Because to you you you put it great, yeah, once you've you're just you're just free to go try it and and ⁓ you you've done it, so why not do it again? ⁓ Yeah, so I think I that's ⁓ I like that that's a good way to end it. And ⁓ it's a great story. I really appreciate you digging into it. Some definitely some pieces I had no idea about where you've been or what you've done and ⁓ I appreciate you sharing them and ⁓ you know, that was that was an awesome conversation, thank you.
speaker-0: No, thank for setting this up. ⁓ it was good. You and I'm gonna be going away from this thinking about all sorts of new philosophical things to to ponder ponder my orb. Have you seen that meme?
speaker-1: Yes. Yeah yeah. Yeah.
speaker-0: That's what I'll be doing after this.
speaker-1: Perfect. Success.
