Jay Sells Out! Or Not!

I left the video game industry in September 2000 (though I kept coming back as a consultant into October). I had a lot of reasons. I was fed up with some of the practices in the industry, and bored with doing "other people's games" that were mainly sequels and clones. And then there was the realization that I could make 10% - 20% more money writing business applications. And the (false) assumption that things were more stable outside of games.

I rationalized that I could write 'boring business apps' during the day, and write my own games at night. Wow, what a concept! And somehow in there I could also juggle the demands of family, friends, church, and so forth. So after six years in the games biz, I checked out. I was one of the "lapsed game developers."

It took me a while to get around to doing "my own games" on the side. It turns out that it takes a lot of hard work and discipline to come home from a grueling day of programming only to start programming some more. And it took me a while to discover that there was actually a thriving "indie" game development community already out there doing what I was doing (and in some cases, doing it much better than me). But eventually, Void War was born. And Rampant Games. It's been slow going, especially as my ability to acquire quality content for the games has been limited.

Meanwhile, the non-game software development business turned out to not be a place where streets were paved with gold, either. I dealt with small companies tanking on the one hand, and big business politics on the other. Sometimes the work was exciting, sometimes it was really, really boring. My wife, Julie, became frustrated with the lack of stability in the non-games side of things (from small start up to big businesses that performed layoffs as a matter of course before the end of the fiscal year). She was also dissapointed with the lack of family-focused Christmas parties at some places where I worked - to the point where she only half-jokingly said I have to make sure a company has a Christmas party before accepting a position.

Julie sometimes asked if I would ever go back to the games industry as a full-time gig. I told her only if I could go in on my own terms. Which would mean either Rampant Games does well enough to take it full time (not likely any time soon!!!!), or if I could find a game company that was very friendly to the idea of me running a game company of my own on the side. Which was, of course, NOT VERY LIKELY. So doing that would pretty much be selling out on the whole indie game developer thing.

Finding myself between jobs again over the last three weeks, I found that the job market has largely recovered (at least here in Utah) for software engineers. The ones I interviewed for were largely similar - the pay was okay, but the jobs weren't particularly exciting. Except for one.

I interviewed at Wahoo Studios (AKA NinjaBee), a small game studio, largely as a courtesy to the friends I have there. I knew they couldn't pay me as much money as I was used to making outside of the games business. But the project they needed me for sounded exciting and challenging, and they offered me tangible, critical resources to help me with Rampant Games to make up for the loss of income. While of course their own needs will take precedence, they are willing to make Rampant Games a priority. This was an offer I could not get anywhere else, games industry or not.

I received a formal offer letter from them a week ago. The letter contained all sorts of formal language concerning salary, start date, benefits eligibility, and additional forms of compensation that we'd agreed upon. And in the middle of all this dry, formal, language, there was the following paragraph (which I received permission to post publicly):

"We promise to have a Christmas party, but we can't guarantee that Julie will be swept away by its elegance."

Well, there you go. As of this morning, am no longer a "former full-time member of the video game industry." Or a "Lapsed Game Developer." I am back in the business as a salaried game development professional. To add icing to the cake, it's an independent game studio with real, honest-to-goodness indie game projects (along with the more traditional, publisher-funded ones). So I'm kinda-sorta a full-time indie now. Six years in, six years out, and now I'm back in the saddle again. And more interestingly, the structure of the deal actually ENCOURAGES me to push the development of games in my off-hours.

So I guess I managed to do it without selling out. Kinda weird how life works sometimes.

Jay Barnson
Rampant Games
Tales of the Rampant Coyote