Featured Employee: Keith Shetler

Here’s why we think Keith is swell:

Keith is a human Swiss Army knife – the kind with the tweezers and the saw blade and the magnifying glass.   His ability to complete any and every task that would otherwise fall through the cracks is, quite frankly, a bit spooky.

Need a video edited?  Done.  Need someone to build a tool in PHP?  Done.  Need someone to crack open the editor and quick-fix a level?   Done.  Need someone to record a podcast?   Done.  Keith is a runaway problem-solving machine, and his contributions since arriving here at Irrational are too numerous to catalog.  His dedication and immense value to the team have not gone unnoticed by his co-workers.  We are thrilled to have someone like Keith on staff, even if we’re a little freaked out by how many different things he can do.

And as if that weren’t enough, the man wears a mean kilt.

Your title is ‘Associate Producer.’  What does that mean?  And does the job change depending on the department you assist?

The title Associate Producer, or AP, can be difficult to define here at Irrational, but the primary goal is to assist the team with the development of the game. Of course what ‘assist’ means changes on a daily basis and can range from doing things like taking notes in meetings and tracking developer tasks, to flying out to California to hand deliver the game to the manufacturer.

At Irrational, each AP is assigned to a department to assist them with their particular needs, as well as being responsible for general production tasks.  During my five years here I’ve performed my AP duties in some capacity for basically every department (Art, Programming, Design, Audio). Each one has its own specific needs, but I’ve found them all to require some degree of technical knowledge in that department’s specialization. I think Irrational is unique in that, as an AP, I’ve actually done a great deal of development work that has made it into the final game.

What games have you worked on?

I playtested The Lost for a few weeks when I was in high school… does that count? My first full development game was BioShock. I’d say it was a good start!

Describe Life at Irrational in three words or less.

Challenging but rewarding.

What is your favorite game of all time?

I have a soft spot for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.  It was the first RPG I had ever played.  I just wasn’t aware prior to playing it that that kind of depth could exist in a game.

Name a game everyone should play once in their life.

I can’t really suggest one because games are highly subjective.  Play one that your friends, kids, or significant other enjoys playing.

What is your favorite movie?

Movies are like games for me, in that I don’t internally rate good movies over others; they just exist in a mental list of movies I liked.  If you force me to choose, I might say Spirited Away, No Country For Old Men, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, or Garden State, depending on the day.

What are your hobbies outside of work?

Other than gaming and watching movies, I enjoy spending time with my fiancée Heather and beagle-basset named Hazel. I also dabble in web development and aspire to ride my bike more.

Can you tell us about the joys of web development for fun?

Web development is a lot like game development: you get to create something that a wide audience can interact with.  I have a CS degree so messing around with Ruby on Rails is a good outlet for my technical abilities, and the design side feeds my visual creative needs.  Also it’s just fun to pull something from your head and have it exist in the real world.

Inquiring fans wants to know: when do we get to see a picture of you in the field hockey outfit?

Haha… well I scoured photo albums for some, and couldn’t really find any images better than these:

I think the picture on the left is the one they used in the year book so it ended up being a 20th of the size of the other player pictures. I regret not having had more pictures taken of me at the time.

What’s your favorite Irrational story?

Our original office space flooded about two winters ago while most of the office was out on vacation. It created a bit of a headache as the space was practically unusable.  But in classic Irrational fashion, we didn’t let that stop us from working on kick-ass games.

Many of the crew moved into a make-shift office space at a nearby hotel for what was only supposed to be a short stay. It took much longer than expected to repair the original office space, so we decided to take over a recently vacated space on the floor below while we waited out the repairs. Once the office was de-funked and inhabitable again we moved back upstairs. We liked the lower floor space, and because we were growing, we decided to permanently make it part of our Irrational home where most of the Irrational crew now resides.

While the delays, moving and uncertainty of that period might have sunk other companies, we soldiered on and turned lemons into awesomely-styled lemonade.