Since this is an IAM, I’d like to ask a question about you:
Tell us about your career! Where did you start? When? First game? When did you join Activision?
Was it hard stepping into the roll of Creative Strategist?
I’ll give you the short version, but if you’d prefer the long I’ll be happy to elaborate. My first official job was frying chicken at a gas station in Kentucky that also sold chicken - because that is exactly what you want when filling up your gas tank. I was 13 years old and I did it for 1 week. I would get burned by the fryer everyday, smelled like chicken when I went home, and spent 2 hours hiding in the freezer eating the donuts they kept there. It was horribly sad and mind opening all at the same time.
That single experience was enough to make me realize that I wanted to do something much bigger than my hometown of Piner, Kentucky (the middle of the country).
At 14 years old I went to the court house and got my first business license. I knew no one would hire a 14 year old kid to do what I wanted, so I hired myself, by starting a company. I had no clue where to start or what to do, but you’d be surprised what having a TAX ID and DBA bank account can do for you.
I went to the library everyday, learned how to create a website. Made a website for my company. I continued to go to the library after school everyday to teach myself something new. My business grew, kept evolving as I learned new things, changed my mind, wanted to go in different directions. This was my life all the way up to graduation of High School. I had taught myself and have managed to support myself enough to get by but by every sense of the word was poor.
During this time the war in Iraq was going strong and there was mass genocide happening Sudan. I got the urge to do something more impactful than watching out for myself and enlisted in the US Army as an 11B (Infantry), passed by ASVAB with flying colors, enough to be allowed to put in a letter of request for Special Forces. No one is guaranteed SF training or placement, that’s something you earn and are chosen for, but you can show intent which simply means they’ll push your ass into the ground every chance they get to see if you change your mind. My intent to go SF was solely because special forces at the time were the only boots on the ground in Sudan and even that was a limited capacity. All other infantry was being directed into Baghdad.
Long story short, my military career was cut short and I never got the honor to deploy. So now I’ve been out of the civilian world long enough to not have a career, fully trained by the US army (BCT to Airborne) solely as an Infantryman, and ready to take my life in a new direction.
I decided to start a company again, as I was pretty much in the same position as I was at 14 years old. No one would hire me to do what I wanted, so I hired myself.
I did whatever I could to get a paycheck coming in, barely making my $250 apartment rent, playing video games more than working simply due to lack of projects. At this point I was solely playing Call of Duty (the early years) to the point that my wife sarcastically told me “all you do is play that game, why don’t you just do THAT for a living”!
So I did.
Being purely a gamer, I wasn’t fluent in the ways of the industry, nor had I ever been in any industry I worked in. I taught myself, I set my goal on something, I learned everything I could from books and reference, and I just started doing it. I didn’t let things like being broke ass poor and discouraged stop me.
So I look on the back of the box and seen Infinity Ward made the game, so I looked em up and sent them an email. Never got a response, I later found out when I was given control over that very inbox of emails, it hadn’t ever been checked. So I found other ways to reach out and eventually got a hold of the guys who started the company.
I talked for 2 hours with Grant Collier on the phone, talking games, philosophy, and what I thought about things. It was nothing but just an unfiltered conversation about gaming, the industry, and what I’ve done in the past. They flew me out the Los Angeles two days later to meet the rest of the team. I sat down with every lead of the company and talked, from animators to programmers to the studio heads. I spent all day just talking, giving my thoughts, and throwing everything out there.
Two weeks later they called and said “we want you to do what you do but for us full time”.
So I did.
My first title was Call of Duty 2 DLC. I came in a massive fan of Call of Duty but also played Ghost Recon hardcore. So when I started and they said your first real project is us taking Call of Duty into modern days - I shit my pants.
No one really knew what my purpose was, what I should do, or how I should do it. So the first year was me doing as I always did, just talking to anyone who would listen, learning what they did and how they did it. Soaking in every resource I could find and contributing any way I could. At one point they had me seeing if I could come up with the intro credit sequence in Coup for COD4. So I spent two weeks teaching myself After Effects. I was kind of shit at it, but I got a prototype going that ended up being the base for the actual credits, but done by someone much better than I.
My greatest strength and weakness has always been my ability to identify what works and what doesn’t, from a philosophy stand point and (here comes the weakness part) share that unfiltered opinion with anyone who will listen. Thank god there were people in the right positions who agreed with those opinions and I gradually (and I mean VERY slowly) began building more and more respect among those who thought I represented good opinions.
I just kept working at it, doing anything I thought was needed. Call of Duty 4 ended up being the game that it was and was a massive learning experience for me, as every project after that has been.
The lesson of the story is to just find what you want to do and start doing. If you don’t know how, learn it.
Just start doing it and hope that one day someone will pay you for it.
