So You Want To Enter The Game Industry?

So You Want To Enter The Game Industry?
Author:    Ben "Digiben" Humphrey

Ever since I was a boy I wanted to make games.  To be more precise, ever since I gathered around the Nintendo Entertainment System watching my older brother and his friends play Super Mario brothers 3 - I set that goal.  Though most kids might have said or thought this, I actually did it.  For those of you who have a desire to get into the game industry, but don’t know where to start, I can offer my experience of what worked and what didn’t.

    Starting in the mid 1980’s, the video game market seemed to be dominated by Japanese companies including Nintendo, Sega, and NEC.  It came to my mind as a youth that if I could speak Japanese it would drastically increase my chances of getting into the industry.  It wasn’t until I started looking for a job that this didn’t make much difference unless I wanted to go live in Japan.  On the other hand, while I was learning Japanese I was learning to program using BASIC on the Apple ][ GS.  This was my first experience with programming.  Soon I moved on to PASCAL, then in High School I learned C.

It wasn’t until my senior year in High School that I found out about my dream school.  It blew my mind to find that there was actually a school that taught game programming.  Based in Canada, the name of the school was DigiPen.  Upon hearing that they only accepted 100 people a year I went to a normal year of college, received good grades and was accepted shortly after.

Before classes started and DigiPen we were warned that this was not a school where students play games all day, but a school or intense learning and siphoning out the elite programmers.  I soon found out that this was an understatement as the workload was at least 14 hours a day and we were at the school from 9am to 10pm.  Saturdays and Sundays were spent in our groups working on our game design and code.  If you hate math, you would hate this school.  Imagine sitting through 3-hour lectures for each subject, then getting a half an hour break to go to the bathroom or get something to drink.  It was impossible to have a girlfriend (at least one that would stay with you over a week or 2) or even think about a part time job.  Some might say this would be hell, but for me it was a heaven.  15 people dropped out the first 2 weeks, and by the second semester we lost dozens more.  Just one year of DigiPen teaches you just as much if not more than what a computer science major knows when they get their degree, plus it’s all related to the game industry.

Sure you eventually start to get burned out, but this is nothing from what the mainstream industry dishes out.  If you can’t sit at a computer for 16 hours a day you probably won’t enjoy the game industry.  Though not all jobs in the game industry are like this, that is what you should expect going in.

Eventually I found a job in the game industry, published a couple titles and here I am currently ramping up for the Nintendo GameCube.  Below are answers to some of the most popular questions from those interested in getting into the industry.

What Should I Do Now To Prepare?

If you are still young and in school or already have a career, but want to change, I recommend learning to program.  It isn’t so important in the beginning which programming languages to learn, but that you understand the concepts.  Just like any spoken language, most of the concepts are the same but with different words attached to the same