Tim Bell Vigil Games Timothy.B.Bell@gmail.com What company are you currently working for? I work for Vigil Games. Vigil Games was acquired by THQ in February of 2006, so we’re now one of their internal studios. What is your current position and what kind of duties does that entail? I am the Project Manager for Vigil Games. My duties include: Creating and maintaining the project schedule. Budget planning, expense tracking, and long term studio development forecasting. Working with the THQ recruiting team to define qualifications for open positions, review resumes, coordinate interviews, and make job offers. Ensuring each member of the team has the proper tools necessary to complete his or her assigned task. Preparing materials for corporate review, including monthly status reports, product review slides, etc. Managing the day-to-day human resource related issues on the team. How long have you been in the video game industry? 10 years. What was your first position in the industry? Can you describe the timeline to get to your current position? My first gig in the industry was as a Customer Service Representative for Origin. Origin had a policy of rotating employees from CS to QA and back again. The goal was to sensitize employees on the issues customers really cared about so that potential problems were identified early in the QA process. I was in CS for about 6 months before I was transferred to QA. I spent the next 18 months as a QA tester before I was promoted to a QA Lead position. After shipping my first project as a QA Lead, I was promoted to Engineering QA Manager for EA.com. I was with EA (and Origin) for 5 years before leaving to join NCsoft as a QA Manager in 2000. After 2 and a half years as the QA Manager, I was promoted to Producer on an internal title and then to the position of Director of Business Development. In short, I spent about 7 years in QA before landing my first Producer role. What do you think about your experience as a video game tester has helped you the most in getting to and performing your current position? To be a good tester, you need to have a very good eye for detail and you have to be able to communicate well. Those same skills are required in the Producer role. The time I spent as a video game tester really helped me hone those skills as well as build on my understanding of game design and how the various roles on the team work together to accomplish a given task. How did you get into the video game industry? I graduated from law school about the same time that a friend of mine graduated from college. While I was busy passing the state bar exam, he was busy getting a testing job at Origin. Practicing law turned out to be a lot less interesting that playing games, so after a few months of heckling from my friend, I decided to apply for a customer service job at Origin. What did you do before you were working in video games? I was a lawyer. What games are you playing now? I’m currently playing Fight Night Round 3 (X360), Titan Quest (PC), Burnout Revenge (X360), Battlefield 2 (PC), and World of Warcraft (PC). What is your favorite game? Single player: Diablo II. Multiplayer: Team Fortress. What is your favorite game to have worked on in this industry? Wing Commander Prophecy. Wing Commander III was one of my favorite games, so getting a chance to work on a title from that series was a great experience. What games do you not like to play? I generally don’t care for movie license games. Games that build a new experience out of an existing movie IP are one thing. But once I’ve seen a movie, I rarely want to relive the experience in a game if it’s a direct translation. Can you tell us about one of the greatest challenges you had working in the video game industry? NCsoft had just started their North American branch when I joined in September of 2000. Lineage I was a very successful product for NCsoft in Korea, and the company had an established way of dealing with game testing and customer service. In many cases, those methods were completely at odds with the way we handled QA and CS in the US. Dealing with those differences of methodology and opinion, while simultaneously trying to overcome the language barrier, was very challenging for the first 9 months of my tenure at NCsoft. Ultimately, it was a great learning experience both professionally and culturally. Can you tell us about one of the most exciting moments you’ve had working in the video game industry? One of the most exciting moments in my career happened at 12:01 am on April 28th, 2004. Right after the stroke of midnight on April 27th, we opened the servers for City of Heroes and Lineage II at the same time. To my knowledge, no other company has every launched two major MMO titles on the same day. Given the difficulty of launching an MMO, I don’t know if any publisher will ever attempt the feat again. Both games launched cleanly, which was very unusual for any MMO at the time, and I’m still proud of the team effort across the whole organization that it took to pull off the simultaneous launch. What type of educational experiences have you had and how has it helped you in the industry? I have a B.B.A. in Management from the University of Texas at Austin and a Doctorate of Jurisprudence from the University of Texas School of Law. Obtaining those degrees taught me a lot about how to communicate effectively and how to think analytically. The management degree proved very useful in my role as a QA manager, but the law degree didn’t directly translate to gaming until I took on the role of Director of Business Development for NCsoft. What do you think are three essential skills for someone to succeed in quality assurance for video games? Attention to detail. Getting a game to crash is pretty easy. The hard part is figuring out exactly what steps you took to get the game to crash, documenting the steps needed to reproduce that result every time, and narrowing those steps to the absolute path necessary to reproduce the error. Ability to communicate. To be a good tester, you need to be able to communicate what you’ve found in the game. I’ve worked with many testers who were good at finding bugs, but horrible about writing down what they’d found. A poorly written bug is worthless to the development team. Love of games. If you don’t enjoy playing games, being a QA tester is not the right job for you. Playing a wide variety of games gives you a metric by which you can judge the quality of the title you’re testing. That same passion for games will also help you avoid burnout. You’re going to play the same level of the same game over, and over, and over again. Toward the end of a project, you’ll often be working on the same game for 12 hours at a time. Unless you love games, burnout will set in very quickly. If you could give one piece of advice to someone wanting to become a video game tester what would it be? Play a wide variety of games. If you tend to play only a few titles over the course of a year, you probably don’t have a strong knowledge of the industry, a good grasp on the feature set necessary to compete in a particular genre, and you probably don’t think terribly objectively about the games you are playing. Don’t be afraid to play bad games or games that you don’t really enjoy for the first hour or so. No game enters testing as a completed gem, so it’s good to learn how to work through your initial distaste for a game to try to find any rewarding moments. Once you’ve learned to think objectively about the games you’re playing, you’re one step closer to becoming a professional game tester.