GameCity 3: The guys from Harmonix sat down to tell us a bit about what they think of GameCity, the National Videogame Archive and their student years.
What do you think of GameCity so far?
Alex Navarro: It’s pretty fascinating. It’s very different from the kind of festivals that we have in the US. I think the closest thing you’d equate it to is something like PAX, which is a very fan oriented kind of thing, bring developers and games into a place where consumers can come check it out. This is sort of a different environment, but at that same time it seems to have the same kind of spirit going on – “hey, people just wanna come and hang out. Check out all these game developers talking about the stuff they do, and check out these games, and just come and have a good time!”, which is really awesome.
Ike Adams: I think this is the first festival I’ve been to where half the audience are undead [laughs].
AN: But not the last!
Have you seen anything interesting in Nottingham yet?
AN: Nottingham castle is pretty awesome.
IA: We went to Nottingham castle yesterday.
AN: Yeah, that was a fun little tour to take.
IA: And then we did the Ye Olde Trip To Jerusalem, which is off of being the oldest pub in England. It was like having a drink in a national cave or mine dwelling.
AN: [laughs] Good ale too!
Harmonix has taken a pioneering step by being one of the first developers to donate to the National Videogame Archive. What are your thoughts on the new initiative?
AN: I think it’s really awesome that they’re doing that. Keeping [video game] history alive is a challenging thing, because there are so many things that are disappearing. I mean all this technology… you know, I mean the video game industry is so much just about “what the next big thing is,” people tend to toss away whatever was classic – accept for the super retro-heads. So there’s a lot of really interesting history with a lot of developers that maybe isn’t necessarily being preserved in the way that it should be and this is an awesome way to keep track of that stuff.
Can you tell us a bit about your own experience as a student and how you got into the games industry?
IA: Yeah, so starting out I use to play the old school Atari 2600 as a kid – that’s when I made my decision that I wanted to be a video game developer, based on the games that I had already been playing: Pac-Man, Combat and some of these classics. So ever since I was eight I made the decision to start developing my own [games], whether it be building levels on graph paper… that eventually lead to me teaching myself how to program. So from when I was eight till high school I was able to program very basic games. And then I went to school for Computer Science, nowadays there’s actually a video game track that you can take in school, you can major in video game design or video game specifics. At the time that’s something that I would have done, but at the time there was nothing offered like that. So I went to start Computer Science and at every single opportunity that I had an independent study it would always be video game oriented. After I graduated from college I got my first job at a company called CognaToy doing robot simulation games. Then I went to Blue Fang Games, working on the Zoo Tycoon franchise and I currently work at Harmonix.
AN: For me it was sort of the opposite end of the spectrum from [Ike]. I was much more focused on music when I was younger as opposed to games. Gaming began and ended with me with the Nintendo Entertainment System. Of all games, the one that got me to buy one was Hogan’s Alley, I’m just a big fan of that game [laughs], and I like to shoot stuff, I don’t know, I was a very violent child! And I started playing the drums when I was about twelve or thirteen and I actually left high school early. I took the equivalency exam, which is the GED in America, and left at the end of my sophomore year to go be in a band that was supposed to get signed, after blowing about three major label deals we kind of realised that wasn’t going to happen. But after that I started, kind of, going back to games more. I picked up an N64, picked up a PlayStation, started playing more stuff and I got into the journalistic side of things. I knew a couple guys who wrote for a couple magazines and started getting freelance work that way and eventually, after taking some bad testing jobs and what not, I got to work for a major publication, wrote there for like five years. Kind of burnt out on that and said “hey, I really like music, I really like games, Harmonix is pretty awesome, I love Rock Band – maybe I should try and get a job with them?” and after about six months of pestering them they finally let me come work on their community team.
Do you have any tips for aspiring students of video game development?
IA: Well one thing that I had mentioned, I’ve actually given a couple talks at colleges. I don’t know what it’s like in the UK, but in the US there’s legitimate video game development schools, or if it’s not the whole school then it’s just the major – so I think things like [video game development courses] are everything that I was dreaming about [while] looking for colleges when I was a kid. I can speak for the kind of department that I’m in which is the engineering department. There’s kind of this creativity that you have to have. I think for some people it comes naturally, for some people they really have to work hard at it, but it’s something that really has to be proven when you come into the industry. If you want to be a game developer the best thing, regardless of whether or not you’re actually in a video game major, you should have some kind of portfolio which represents the talent that you have or the passion that you have. It doesn’t necessarily even have to be games, but an expression of a passion that you have is something that we take very seriously, to create something that you can show off your creativity. If that is games then I think that really helps, but I think all the technicalities of it are not so important, it’s more about creativity.
AN: On top of that, the one thing that I would add is that, you know, I think the perception that a lot of people have is that to be game developer you have to program, you have to know code, you have to be able to write code or be a very specific type of artist and that kind of thing and that’s not really true. There are all sorts of different positions, especially in a company like Harmonix which is sort of unique in that it has its own community team which most MMO developers have but not a lot of developers outside of that realm tend to really focus on. And then there’s also the PR side, there’s production which is so much more about just being able to manage time and schedules, being and organised human being as opposed to coding stuff. There’s a wide variety of things you can get into in development that don’t just mean “I have to learn how to program.”
Music fans and would-be rockstars should head over to Harmonix for more.
Aaron Lee
[Originally published on Saturday, 6 December 2008]
