Studio Director
Demiurge Studios

by Jay Acevedo (AnodaJay)

What was your first memory of a videogame?

Rogue for the PC. It was the precursor to NetHack. You moved an ASCII character around “dungeons”, fought hobgoblins and drank potions. Until Demiurge started doing console stuff in 2003, I was pretty much a PC-only gamer. Now I split my time across everything.

There’s always something that makes you say: “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.” What made you realize that?

My background is in software engineering. Once I decided that I was going to be a programmer, video games seemed clearly better than all other sorts of programming that were out there. I’ve since been relegated to management…but I really miss programming. The item that hooked me was working on a game called Mind Rover for Cognitoy. I got to do a little bit of gameplay programming – writing the code for different scenarios. The work included just the right amount of game design to keep it diverse and challenging. When that game shipped and I got sit and watch my friends play this thing I had a (small) part in creating I was hooked.

Demiurge has assisted many developers on different projects, but you’re mostly known for working on the PC version of Mass Effect (a game which incidentally was nominated for a GameFocus award for Best PC Game last year). What was the biggest challenge you faced as a small developer porting a high-profile game or working to release additional content for that same game?

Woo! Glad y’all liked it. The biggest challenge is living up to the standard set by the absolute best in the industry. BioWare, Gearbox and Epic are all past customers of ours and they know how to make the best games in the world. Getting our smaller team to perform at that level is the real challenge. We’ve been able to pull it off, but we need to be constantly improving to keep up with those guys.

If you had to create the ‘ultimate game,’ what would it be?

A game that challenged people’s views (whatever they may be) on some sociological or political subject. Other media – books, TV, music, film – tend to present an argument with a particular agenda and we tend to consume media that doesn’t question our own perspective. Games have the ability to respond to your views and directly challenge them. Take the current economic mess for example. What if there were a game that would let you play Treasury Secretary, try different things and the game responded by showing you the effects from the opposition’s point of view? We’re working on something like that now, but it’s tough!

You’re leaving for a space trip and can bring only one video game and one video game character with you. They would be…

If I’m gonna be in space, Roger Wilco is the obvious video game character companion. I’m sure he’d keep me out of trouble, right? I’m gonna assume I’m going on this space trip with someone to play with and say Street Fighter. With a human opponent, I think you could play that forever. That’s what Tom wanted to write anyways, so I’m writing it for him.

If you had one tip to give to someone who wants to start working in the industry, what would it be?

Make something. Stop reading this right now, go get Unreal Tournament, or Warcraft 3, or the Pop Cap engine and make a game, a mod, a map or model a character. Do that and do it well and you go from a wannabe to a game developer.