Brenda Brathwaite: Cigarettes and Sir-Tech
Brenda Brathwaite, whose development credits include Wizardry, Jagged Alliance, Def Jam: Icon (I forgive her for that one), Playboy: The Mansion (and this one), and Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes, is one of the game industry’s most recognizable women. In an interview with Top Cultured, Brenda provides some background on how she got into the industry, her favorite games, what she expects from the students she teaches, what it is like to be a woman in a mostly male dominated industry and how non-menthol cigarettes helped her land her first gig at Sir-Tech Software.
One of the best parts of the interview is the advice she doles out to students that want to land a job in the industry: play lots of games and design lots of games. To me that says that you have to think of game development as more than a mere vocation, more than just a job where you hang your coat and hat at from 9 AM - 5 PM. Here’s an interesting exchange related to that:
TC –Do you have any general advice for people who are interested game design colleges or careers? How can they get a leg up?
Brenda – Yeah. The absolute single most important thing that you can do is to play games. And make games. The number one weeding out question is, “Have you made games or not?” I don’t really care if you can talk about how other people made games. I want to see that you can do it.
I don’t care whether I see your ability to do this in a digital or non-digital format, it doesn’t matter to me which way it comes…but I need to see that you’ve made games. I need to play your games and then see how good they are. Then there’s what I refer to as the “Question of Death”. That’s when I ask:
“So…what games do you play?”
“Oh well, I’m really busy in school and I don’t have that much time.”
“So let me get this straight. You think SCHOOL is busy, and you wanna come work for me? I can assure you that will be busier because now you’re in the game industry. And if you don’t have time to play games then, what, exactly is going to happen when you’re working for me and on the line? If you don’t have time to play games, then you’re not serious about this profession. And so we’re done. Get out.”
You can catch the entire interview at www.topcultured.com . It’s an excellent read.
Paradox Interactive passed along word today that 