“When I finally got the job, I was like ‘Dude, I got the job!’ and people were like ‘I thought you worked here already,’ because I was constantly in the building playing games and eating crunch food.”
– Dishonored 2 co-creative director Harvey Smith, explaining what happened after he got his first job at Origin Systems
You might know that Arkane Studios co-creative designer Harvey Smithbegan his game career as a QA tester at Origin Systems, but do you know how he got the job? In an unexpected moment during our livestream of Dishonored 2 with Smith on Twitch, he revealed the true story about he literally snuck his way into the game industry, and how he’d gone skydiving with Richard Garriott before he was even working for the man.
As you can hear in the video above, Smith says that after his time in the Air Force, he made his way to Austin Texas and took an interest in the game development business, but was unable to land a job as a designer or writer. Until that is, he began hanging out with the employees of Origin Systems, and undergoing what may be the strangest path into game development we’ve heard this year.
If you’re a young developer hunting for your first job in the industry, you probably shouldn’t take Smith’s story as practical advice, but rather proof that even if your job search seems nearly impossible, if you keep working at it, something, somewhere will work out (it’s advice he gives later in the stream as well).
And if you’re interested in more stories about games and the people who make them, why not subscribe to our Twitch channel for more developer interviews and gameplay commentary? And of course, you can catch the full stream with Dishonored 2 co-creative designer Harvey Smith here.