I've been meaning to write this post for over two years. It's about time I did it.
Ever since I first laid eyes on an NES around age 4, I've loved video games and they've been as natural to me as water to a fish.
Everyone who's come across me knows some version of this.
I was reminded this morning that I wrote papers in school - from 5th grade composition class all the way to an undergraduate senior thesis - showing love for games, their creators, their history, and their unique contributions to the future of art.
I'm reminded often that my (perhaps suboptimal) choice of college major was Japanese, out of a desire born around age 10 to learn the language of the place where the games came from.
I tried to enter the games industry a few times and got chewed up and spat out. There was the editorial gig at Shacknews. There was the internship at Realtime Worlds (RIP). I almost found a way in via events staff at an E3. Each time culminated in disappointment and a dead end. Naturally, that got discouraging.
Despite the prior failures, I couldn't stop myself from continuing to try. It was just in my bones. I'd have an existential crisis for the rest of my life if I didn't make it into the world of video games and make it stick.
Quoting myself from 2010, after the collapse of Realtime Worlds:
I had a quick talk with my boss on the way out of town. He asked if, after this experience, I'd stay in the games industry. My answer: "Hell yes."
But each time I tried I sought hints or patterns about who got to keep their jobs. It seemed that business leadership kept their jobs, so I focused my grad school studies in management. Studios closed with a single failure - best to aim for publishers and platforms where portfolio offerings provide job security. Job listings looked for e-commerce experience.
So, off to Japanese e-commerce I went. The intent all along was just to show e-commerce experience, though it'd provide for a good trade to work if the games industry would never work out.
That move, despite a couple detours, proved correct. In Tokyo I established Japanese working experience for real, became established in analytics tools, and started to show signs of rapid development.
As I started a job search in 2015 I mostly looked at e-commerce, but through a grad school alum there was an opening at Sony. I tossed in a resume, and - this is where luck was preparation meeting opportunity - the alum recognized me, knew there was an unlisted opening that was a perfect fit, and referred me to that. "That" was the analytics team at Sony Interactive Entertainment, where they used the same tool as the Japanese e-commerce company and needed a Japanese speaker who was comfortable in an informal US-based tech environment and knew gaming products inside and out.
Once I was called a "unicorn" in my first-round interview, I knew things looked good.
In spring of 2015 I relocated to San Diego, started at Sony, and entered a whirlwind of never-ending releases and new features. There's only been expansion - higher salaries, more PTO, more world travel, larger teams, more collaborations, more celebrations of new releases, more employees-only sales.
I work directly on the PS4 console, which is an amazing thing to say. I have a dev kit - the magical weird-looking console that has secret options and features. If I really want to nerd out, I have four dev kits - a classic PS4, a PS4 Pro, a Vita, and a PS TV (remember that thing?)
In short, I found just the thing: a secure job in the games industry, dealing with Japan all the time, having a meaningful impact on the actual product and platform.
I know exactly when it sank in: E3 2016. I had been in the job for a year by this point and knew it was going to stick. At 31, I finally walked into the trade show I had read about since I was about 10. I've walked into dark and exciting games events before, but never into one so large, loud and well-produced that it was like walking into Video Game Disneyland. The floor's energy is itself energizing - you feel like you could forego sleep from now on and just soak in new games. It only gets better in evenings when you surround yourself with industry friends and their friends. I now have a friend crew that spans all 3 of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Those fascinating, smart, funny people had become a circle I belonged to. I have peers, and they're awesome. That signaled to me that I had made it into the industry for real.
If I could talk to my younger self, the only thing I'd need to say is: it all came true.
PS:
This job is an absolute joy. I pretty much never go to bed or wake up dreading work. I never have a case of the Mondays.
It turns out that you can identify with a company's mission/vision/values. Sony overall stands for respectful attitudes and R&D and engineering and experimentation. Even at a US-based subsidiary that's predominantly American in ways of working, the benefits of Japanese corporate paternalism show up with wonderfully generous health insurance, relocation, training and travel. After a year of this perfect storm of awesome I felt deep down that I really could spend the entire rest of my career with Sony. That's not to openly state a commitment, but rather to say that this good fit is so strong that there's no desire to hop anymore.