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Podcast music provided by:

• Signal Hill
• Josh Rathbun
• Patrick Balthrop
• Justin Schwenk
• Fillipo Beck Peccoz
• Giancarlo Feltrin

Are you awesome at what you do?

Are you looking for a job at a world-class game studio?

Irrational Games would love to talk to you!  We are hiring talented people for our next huge creation, currently in development.  We’re looking for:

• Multiplayer Level Builders
• Multiplayer Level Designers
• Senior Designer
• User Experience Designer
• Rendering Programmer
• Gameplay Programmer
• Xbox 360 Programmer
• Playstation 3 Programmer

If you fit into one of the roles above and are attending GDC,  we want to talk to you!  Email GDC2010Jobs@irrationalgames.com with your contact information, and we can arrange a meeting at the conference.

For details on all of our open positions, visit our Careers page.

Blogs, Facebook, forums and search engines didn’t exist fifteen years ago, and the primary tool to communicate with your fan base was the local bulletin board system (BBS) or Usenet and newsgroups services.  “You could go through Usenet groups such as comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg or rec.games.computer.ultima-dragons to find fans of your game,” remembers Kay.  “The web now is fragmented with dozens of places to find discussion about a specific product or subject.  Usenet provided a very specific location for fans congregate to talk about a product.”  Reading a long list of discussions and replies provided an experience similar to the on-line communities of today, but on a much smaller scale.

The tools to create games have changed dramatically in the last decade, as have the responsibilities and sizes of departments.  “Photoshop didn’t have layers when I started,” says Lead Artist Shawn Robertson.  “3D Studio was a program in DOS and no game required 3D acceleration.”  Most games at the time were still being done in 2D, but everything started to change with the releases of Wolfenstein 3D and Duke Nukem 3D.  This change accelerated rapidly with the release of 3Dfx’s Voodoo 3D graphics cards at the end of 1996, and glQuake in early 1997.  “As an artist I did everything when I started,” Robertson adds.  “I modeled, textured, animated, rigged, and did FX for those first games.  Now everyone is much more specialized and focused on a specific role. We shipped SWAT 4 with five people in the art department.  We now have over twenty-five artists working on Project Icarus and we are still growing.”

As games evolve, their budgets grow. They require more staff, more assets, and more time to complete.  “My first game was made for the astronomical sum of one million dollars,” Director of Product Development Tim Gerritsen remembers.  “It was considered a AAA title at the time and we had a staff of 12 people to work on it.  Many of us were kvetching over how unbelievable the development budgets and the team size were.”  It isn’t uncommon today for games to have staffs of well over 100 people working for two or three years on a single game.  “We had to change the way we worked and some of us had to become managers,” says Gerritsen on how growth has changed roles for people on the team.  “We had to learn how to be a business.”

It wasn’t long ago that games were shipping on 3.5” floppy discs.  “I worked on a game that fit on three floppies,” says Gerritsen.  “That is a whopping 4.32 megabytes of compressed data.  We’d have programmers working on fancy animation systems for weeks to cull every extraneous bit of data to fit our game into those 4.32 MB.”  For perspective, a typical mp3 file is around 5 MB.  Games today can ship on a dual-layer DVD holding 8.5 gigabyte (8,704 MB) and sometimes even using a 50 gigabyte (51,200 MB) Blu-ray disc.  The amount of data is staggering, and all that data needs to be processed to fit onto that disc.  “The build process on The Lost took about 20 hours to complete,” says Lead Programmer John Abercrombie.  “It was a ridiculous setup that included a script that automated mouse movement and button presses since the application didn’t have a command line interface.”  A build process involves taking all the raw assets such as models, textures and sounds, and converting them to a format the game understands.  Depending on the game, this could be tens or even hundreds of thousands of assets.  “There is nothing worse than going through a 20-hour build process to find a blocking bug once you load the game up,” says Abercrombie.

As the amount of data in the final game grows, so does the revision database.  “I had a meeting with the IT department to discuss how large our Perforce server should be for our first next generation game,” remembers Senior Technology Programmer Steve Anichini.  Perforce is a program that builds a database that stores every revision on every asset in the game.  “We estimated it would take one terabyte (1,048,576 MB), which at the time was unheard of.  The IT department was rather skeptical the project would need that much space, especially compared to games from the previous generation which were only a couple hundred gigabytes.  By the end of the project the Perforce database was well over two terabytes,” says Anichini.

As for my own experience … when I started as a game tester back in 1998, I had to write all my bugs on sticky notes, as the company didn’t have any extra computers for the testing department.  The sticky notes were handed to the test lead, who would then add them to the bug database — which at that time was an Excel spreadsheet.  Compare that to the 35,000 bugs written up on BioShock, which would span 1.5 miles if they were to be written out on sticky notes!

Funkenstein

Robb made this oil painting in his spare time. Art Director Nate Wells liked it so much, that he built a pinball machine in SWAT 4 inspired by the piece.

Crabby Sculpt

Robb sculpted this statue to help solidify the BioShock vision. With a small pitch document and the Crabby sculpture in hand, Ken went out to pitch BioShock to various publishers.

Freedom Force Inking

This piece was hand drawn by Robb during the development of Freedom Force. Back then, a lot more concept art was created with pencil and paper.

Freedom Force Comic Excerpt

Here’s an excerpt from the Freedom Force comic book.

Exorcism

And here’s another Freedom Force image.

Artist

So your title actually gets to be “Artist?” In the videogame world what does that entail?

I guess that entails putting pencil to paper and defining the face of game being created.  I’ve always been drawn to character concepting work.  I know this comes from growing up loving the larger-than-life characters of the movies and comic books.

How is the art you do here for work different from the art you may do for yourself at home?

The art I work on at home is not all that different from the stuff I work on at Irrational in that, once again, it mainly revolves around characters.  The one main difference is that I work in traditional mediums at home.  I really enjoy large-format painting as well as sculpting.  I hardly ever fire up my home computer to make artwork.  Currently I am finishing up a toy portrait series I’ve been working on for a while.  The series is composed of several large oil paintings of some of my favorite vintage character toys.  Most of these portraits are pretty whimsical. They range from a soulful-looking Ben Grimm to a shameless, bubble headed Darth Vader knock-off.  I also really enjoy sculpting little campy characters in clay and then reproducing them in resin.  I’ve always been fascinated with schlocky hit-and-miss qualities of cheaply manufactured character toys.

What games have you worked on?

System Shock, Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri, Flight Unlimited, Thief, Akuji the Heartless, Freedom Force, Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich, The Lost, BioShock.

Describe Life at Irrational in three words or less.

Barrel o’ fun.

What is your favorite game of all time?

Tron the arcade game!  Light cycles!  Electric blue, light up joystick!

Name a game everyone should play once in their life.

Freedom Force.  Ha!

What are your hobbies outside of work?

Art, candlepin bowling, terrible B-movies.

What is your favorite movie?

Alien.  Nothing beats the stark horror or design work in that movie.

I hear tell that you might be something of a collector or fan of classic comics and figures? Any truth to that? If so, what is it that you love about them?

Um, maybe?  Yes, with comics books it’s the nostalgia, the four-color printing, the crazy characters, the classic artwork and the ridiculous stories.  I even love the smell of vintage, yellowed, slightly musty pulp!  And yes, I have a few old dusty, vintage plastic figures.  I love poorly-realized characters the best.  If it’s from the 70’s, goofy looking and of questionable quality, I probably need it.

What’s your favorite Irrational story?

Some friends of mine from work and I used to hold band practice after hours at our work space. Our old office in Southie [Editor's Note:  nickname for South Boston] was a cool three-story building that used to be a school house.  We were on the second floor playing late one evening and we had left the fire escape doors open.  Suddenly a bottle came flying through the open doors and landed at our feet.  We all stopped playing and looked at each other, dumbfounded.  We heard a nasty, bellowing voice coming from the dark below.  “Shut the f–k up!” We took the hint and closed the doors.  We were pretty sure who the voice in the night belonged to as we were familiar with a Whitey Bulger wanna-be that lived across the way.

See, on several occasions, from our birds-eye vantage point, we had witnessed this guy getting ugly and threatening people that were trying to park in front of his house.  People in Southie are notorious for defending their self-proclaimed street parking spots.  This guy used to put out an orange pylon to keep prospective parkers away.  One day, me and another friend I worked with had seen enough of this guy’s chest beating. I dared him to run down and steal the guy’s pylon.  My friend actually went down and snatched it!  He brought it up laughing and we threw it in a closet.  Whitey ended up replacing the pylon with a sad lawn chair.

Getting back to my story… the next morning after the flying bottle incident, Whitey came over to the office and threatened a random secretary in the building, proclaiming if he heard any more music coming out of the office he would torch the place.  A day or so later my friend, the guy that stole the pylon, found his tires had been slashed.  The parking lot was directly behind our building and in direct sight of our ornery neighbor.  He must have been singled out because he often brought his guitar to and from work.  Old Whitey must have figured this was one of the punks making such a racket a few nights before. 

Anyway, on behalf of Dracula 2000, we are sorry about your tire’s misfortune.  Or maybe, just maybe, it was just a little bit of Southie-style karma for the kidnapping of an innocent pylon.

Here’s why we think Robb is swell…

Robb Waters is a fixture at Irrational.  He has worked on numerous titles and has over 15 years of experience in the industry. If you have played the Freedom Force games, you’ve frolicked in Robb’s sketchbook.

Robb’s love of retro comics and vintage toys gives him a unique style that breathes life into every game he works on.  He gave Andrew Ryan a face, lent Sander Cohen his unmistakable panache, and (despite Tenenbaum’s protestations to the contrary) was the real creator of the Little Sisters.  When he’s not raising the ire of the neighborhood restaurants’ wait staff, Robb continues to bring his brilliant and bizarre vision to our (for now) unannounced title.