The Origin Story of a Game Tester

I was commuting to work on the LIRR, during the first week of October on a Thursday, when I received word that my entire department in NYC for Connected Devices Quality Assurance was being shut down, and I was getting laid off from work at Disney Streaming Service (formerly BAMTech Media) the following day.  That was supposed to be a great day, as it was the first day of New York City Comic Con which I was planning to attend after work via my 4-day Professional registration badge and had scheduled the next day as a vacation day.  Instead, I just became Craig from Friday, and was losing my job on a day off. 

I was upset, scared, and felt very hopeless at first.  How am i going to feed my family?  How will I keep the roof over our heads?  These questions and a million other things were racing through my mind.

Eventually I just closed my eyes, and stopped...

I thought about how this all started.  'This' being my career, and how I turned answering a simple newspaper ad into the opportunity of a lifetime.  I was not going to let this temporary setback, no matter how unexpected and devastating define me.  Sometimes in order to move forward, we have to look back.  So I thought about how I got on my career path.  It's a story that provides the kind of balance and focus I need to get through this transition  while also has empowering me to share what I am going through right now.

Rewind back to the summer of '98 when my homeboy DJ Parlay hit me up and told me he saw an ad in the paper that simply said, "Do you want to get paid to play video games?" for a company called Acclaim Entertainment.  I was only slightly familiar with the company by their name.  They weren't EA or Squaresoft, but I was definitely familiar with some of the games they put out like NBA Jam and NFL Quarterback Club.  Little did I know they were actually based out of Long Island in a city called Glen Cove, which was not too far from where I lived at the time.  A video game company in Long Island?  This was news to me.  Plus I wasn't even aware of what a job making video games even looked like.  If you asked me I probably thought it was something that only super smart people did, writing computer languages or something, which I didn't know how to do.  Having a job as described in this ad did not sound like an actual job, it sounded more like fun and playing video games was already a big hobby of mine going back to the days of the Atari 2600. 

As far as I knew then video game companies were either in Japan or on the West coast, and being a product of the east coast, those places were just so far away to me.  My peer group at this time was either in the music biz, or trying to make it in the music biz, and I was right along with them trying to make my mark in that industry as well.  I did not know any black folks who were in to the actual business of making video games other than playing Madden football, NBA Live or fighting games.  If I was going to do this "getting paid to play video games" thing, it was going to be uncharted territory. 

So Parlay and myself decided we would try to get this job.  What we had to do next was go to an Open House at Acclaim Entertainment on an early Saturday morning to get interviewed.  Unfortunately every other young adult from Long Island must have seen the ad too, because it seemed like there were hundreds of other folks out there.  Parlay and I got on line and we were given numbers which were in the 70's.  Shortly after receiving our numbers though, the person from Acclaim who was in charge of everything announced they were only taking numbers through the mid forties.  They thanked everyone for coming out, but told the rest of us to go home, and keep an eye out for another announcement of an Open House.  I was not going to let this setback deter me from what I felt was a dream job, so instead of going home right away, I came up with an idea. 

I told Parlay we should just wait around for a bit and let all these other kids go home, that way when these Acclaim people come back around and see it was only two of us left, we could convince them to do our interviews.  What did we have to lose?  Parlay was with it. 

So we waited.

If I remember correctly, we went to a deli down the street, got ourselves some sandwiches, re-entered the building, sat in the conference room, and even made some long distance phone calls if you can believe it!  We must have been in that conference room at least an hour before an HR representative came back and realized we were still there.  She asked us who we were and what we were doing.  I explained the 'scheme' to her, and asked her very nicely if she would interview us for the job.  I felt like I really pleaded our cases well to her. 

She politely told us both to go home.

BUT

She did acknowledge that this plot was a first, and admired the initiative it demonstrated.  She promised to give us a call the following week.  True to her word, the following Tuesday she called me and conducted a phone interview which went well.  I was asked to come back for an in-person interview a few days later where I was asked such questions as, "what are your favorite video games?" (Answer: Final Fantasy VII), and "how would you improve a game that you played?" (Answer: NBA Live - I would add the ability to play with using older players and teams from the past). 

A few days later I was hired as a Game Tester for Acclaim Entertainment in a temp to hire position getting paid hourly working on the day shift Thursday - Monday 7-3PM (weekends were MANDATORY for this position).  My primary job duty was to basically "write up anything wrong that you see" on the soon to be launched NFL Quarterback Club '99 for the Nintendo 64.  I was being paid to play video games, for the purpose of finding "bugs" (malfunctions) in the software code or as I liked to tell folks, I was paid to break things so that the product worked as expected when they were released to the public.  Trust me it is a real job, and is not as easy as some may think, but I have ALWAYS had fun doing it.  Perhaps in the future I'll write more about this. 

That's my origin story so to speak when it comes to how I got started in my professional career which has primarily been that of a Senior Quality Assurance Analyst.  Acclaim Entertainment is where it began, but in the years that followed I would go on to work at Rockstar Games, Avalanche Studios, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, and The Walt Disney Company working on projects such as the Grand Theft Auto franchise, Red Dead Redemption, Midnight Club, The Warriors, Just Cause 3, the WWE Network app, HBO NOW, MLBTV, and the ESPN+ app just to name a few.  As long as I always remember to show some initiative by thinking outside of the box, my next opportunity will never be too far away. 

Get Ready!