Welcome to Level 1…

Fallout New Vegas is often considered to have one of the greatest opening’s to a game in history. After surviving your gunshot to the head, you wake up - make your character, and then are thrown into a small quest defending the town you’re in. You can recruit various town members to get their help with the conflict, perform some side content to get the people around the town to like you more, or even abandon them and side with the oncoming attackers. In essence it functions as a scaled down version of the wider game you’re about to play - where you can do all these things but on a much grander scale before the final battle - I honestly don’t think I’ve ever encountered a game with a better example of this.

Which is to say, a good opening is hard to come up with - which is probably why instead of coming up with one I went on a side tangent about a game I really like. But now that’s out of the way, I suppose some introductions are in order.

Still works too.

I remember the first time I ever played a Video Game, it was a particularly wet drive to the south of England and my family and I had just passed through a shopping centre called Gretna, right next to the border of Scotland to England - meaning we still had a good five or so hours to go. I imagine my sister and I’s level of vocal boredom had just hit the level where it was too annoying to deal with, so my Father nipped into a store and came out with a set of boxes.

He handed two of them to me, and I opened them up to see a Golden Legend of Zelda Themed Gameboy Advance, and a copy of Pokémon - Leaf Green. My sister similarly had a bright silver one, and a copy of Pokémon Fire Red (also I think there was some early predecessor to Nintendogs that I cannot remember the name of).

If my Father wanted a brief bit of peace while he drove, he got his wish and then some. From the moment I heard the slightly crunchy first notes of the Pokémon theme, I was hooked and my life (and my familys wallets) were forever changed. As time would go on, I’d try out both the major consoles, the sleek PS2 slim and the beefy Xbox, my family would later pick up a Wii - upgrade us from our Gameboys to Nintendo DS’s, and my father even showed me some classic DOOM from when he was younger.

But everything changed when I picked up an Xbox 360, and a copy of Halo 3. By then I had become aware of the internet, and I had begun to look things up on this fairly new website that had emerged called “Youtube.com.” While on there, looking at Halo videos I discovered a little channel called “Rooster Teeth” who were doing something with the Halo engine I had never even considered.

You see, Halo 3 had shipped with this mode known as “Theatre” which saved your game and allowed you to play it back as a film, with a free moving 3D camera, rewind feature, slow motion - it was a surprisingly advanced system for 2007. While this may have been used a lot to capture sick kills and crazy stunts, another Community had emerged and had begun to use it to make short films.

And thus, I began to explore the “Machinima Community”, and I found it fascinating. It was a way for a fairly lonely twelve year old boy in the Highlands of Scotland to make movies. Eventually I found others like me, and my own small community of friends began to form. Of course just having the game footage wasn’t enough, we’d need to come up with stories, edit them together, direct sequences, apply music - it was a start but there were still many skills to learn.

So we learned them. Using a janky old computer, I taught myself to edit, and then to write a script, and then finally to direct - and all this eventually lead me to leaving High School with a vested interest in the Film industry, and in 2015 I enrolled myself in University where I completed not one, but two degrees in Film - granting me the lofty title of a “Master of Film and Writing.”

So naturally, with a film degree in hand, I began to apply for roles in the Film and Television industry. The UK had a proud history of supporting our artists, and with the wide vistas of Scotland, we even had many foreign projects coming in - there was just one small problem. I graduated in 2019, and March the next year would lead to a year long lockdown,

The problem with the film industry is that if you don’t get in soon and make a name for yourself - you struggle. So despite having a couple of low level jobs, I found it very difficult to advance in the film industry and by the end of 2022 - I was already prepared to pack it in. But rather than resign myself to the 9-5, I looked back at the thing that got me into Film in the first place - and realised there was another key aspect I’d yet to explore.

What if I worked in Video games?

I mean I didn’t know how to code, nor did I have any practical artistic skill when it came to drawing, but I already had a lot of skills needed to help promote games. I’d been creating gaming content for well over a decade now, I could edit videos - interact with communities, and had even been lucky enough to have been published in Polygon.  Of course, more time away from the Film Industry would make it even harder to break back into, but the only thing in my life more consistent than my desire to create things was my desire to play awesome video games - so I took the plunge, I was gonna work in the Game industry.

Now I just needed somewhere to start…