Thread by @JosephJBroni

A thread about video game job stability by me, Sentient Redwood and Husk of a Man, Dave Lang. Please buckle up.

My first job was at Sculptured Software in Salt Lake City. I started Jan 4th, 1996 and I ended up quitting sometime in 1998. It's here where I had my first close call.

Sometime between me accepting the job and me starting, Sculptured got bought by Acclaim.

About a year into this relationship, Acclaim fired all the Leadership at the studio and brought in some people from Iguana to re-org and run the ship. I had the pleasure of re-interviewing for a job I already had at this time. It was pretty scary for me.

It ended up being okay, I kept my job, as did most people, and they made some smart choices about who should be running the "new Sculptured." That being said I was real mad, because I was loyal to the management team that had been cast aside, and didn't like how things went down.

But regardless I dodged a bullet and had a job. @tcarbone got Acclaim to agree that if we finished what we were working on at the time (NHL Breakaway 98 for N64), we'd get to keep my royalties even after we left . They honored this agreement and I'm forever thankful for that.

Because I did leave, pretty much as soon as the game was approved by Nintendo. The old management team started a company called Kodiak Interactive. I quit, applied there, and had a job the next day. It was cool being at a start-up, I felt important being in on the ground floor.

The beginning of Kodiak was some of the most fun I ever had. We got to build technology and engines from scratch, and I learned so much about what's important for game engineering during this time. Mostly due to making so many mistakes. I guess while I'm talking about this time..

I should apologize to everyone that had to work with me. I was a complete asshole to work with back then. Full of myself and thinking I was the smartest person in the room. If you had to deal with that, well, I'm sorry. But I digress.

After about three years at Kodiak I had helped ship 2 wrestling games, and stared on a 3rd, MLB Inside Pitch. That is, until Kodiak closed overnight on us with zero notice or severance. I was really hurt the management team I followed to this new studio could treat me this way.

I learned a lot, though. I learned to expect a company to always work in its own best interests. That loyalty is a myth. It helped me greatly at Microsoft Game Studios Salt Lake. They hired a handful of us to finish our baseball game.

Suffice to say I didn't like my time there, I didn't like the way the studio treated the baseball team, nor the way it was run. After we shipped baseball, the studio declared they were going from being a 4-game studio to a 2-game studio.

It wasn't hard to see that I was about to get canned, and thanks to the learnings from Kodiak I knew what to do: start applying for jobs right away. It was also about this time me and my wife wanted to start having kids, so I applied in the Chicago area, and got hired at Midway.

The first three months at Midway were rough. I was the lead on Slugfest Loaded, and the old team had been working on a complete reboot of Slugfest while we shoved this latest version out the door. Within a month, the next-gen Slugfest was cancelled, and I feared for my job again

I had a 2-month old kid at home, and a new house, so I couldn't afford to lose my job. I started working 80-90 hour weeks just to be seen as someone who was valuable to the company. I kept this up (with others, for sure) for the duration of the project.

My wife used to bring Syd into the office for lunch so I could see her. It was a pretty sad time.

Slugfest shipped, and several people lost their jobs, but luckily my efforts had been noticed and I was put in as lead of the Blitz team. This changed my life for the better.

We shipped Blitz The League, and somehow it sold like 1.6M copies. I'm still not sure how it happened. Then I got promoted to TD of the Sports Group. Shortly after that I got promoted to Studio TD. As it turns out I missed programming and didn't like that job but it seemed stable

Until Stranglehold shipped, anyway, and it was clear Midway was doomed. I stuck it out for a bit and tried make it work, but without a clear path forward I eventually decided to just quit and try contracting for a bit. It can't be any worse than what I had been through already.

That's when I started @IToTheG. For a long time I wasn't sure if it would ever be anyone besides me. I fantasized about making it something bigger but I didn't know why I'd be doing it.

I worked out of my basement for a bit and got really lonely. I missed my team.

This made me think a lot about why I was doing what I did, what I value about my work, and how I should prioritize my time going forward.

From this thought came the core principle of what @IToTheG is today. It informs every decision we make, and guides us when we are lost.

I decided to build a company where I could work with my friends for the rest of my life. That's it. Super simple.

Making lots of money, getting to work on dream projects, winning awards, it's all nice but I realized it's not what makes me happy.

That vision puts company stability above all else. Nothing gets in the way of us doing what we can to survive in an industry that is volatile at best. I'm happy to say in our 10.5 years in business we've never let anyone go because we ran out of money.

That's not to say it's always been easy or things haven't been tight. They have. Several times. But everyone at the company knows we are doing the best we can to make sure they have a job for as long as they want one. That means a lot to me.

So if that sounds good to you, please consider applying here. We've got several openings /fin

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