Memoirs of a Game Tester
A personal story and tips on how to break into the games industry
Internships are the next steps that some people choose to take, however in England these endeavors are usually not paid for. If there is an opportunity where a company will pay for you to work there for a month or so it acts like the bat-signal, except about one thousand people in the city are batman and the chief can only take one of you. So attempting to get in that way can also be tricky.
For me an internship worked, I garnered a good amount of experience and got a hand in a few industries but I literally had to knock on the door of twenty-plus companies to get ONE face to face with someone. Einstein once said “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” and you might as well have that tattooed on your sweet behind because you have to live by it.
Persistence is a big part of it, and working hard obviously but you also have to be quite a cynic. There was work in both design and writing that I committed to, for people and companies that gave me their word to credit me or give me a push up the ladder. Time came round when I did the work for them for nothing and they just took it and jumped shipped. Graduates are easy pickings for free work because they have more to gain than the company does so you have to be a hardass and after a certain time you have to demand you get an agreement in writing. That is also a double-edged sword because at the end of the day you have more to lose.
So after a couple of jobs I found myself working for a games company doing testing on a triple A title. They said I had gotten the job then told me the only way I’d really have it (like this was the Matrix) is if I agreed to travel one hour and half to, and from work every day. So I took it, I thought that route was really the best way into the industry... and it was, for a certain path.
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