matthew-burns
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What's in a Name: Shadegrown Games
It's time for another origin story of an industry presence. Today, it's Matthew Burns who isn't quite sure if choosing Shadegrown Games makes him a hippie or a yuppie: I worked on big-budget titles in the game industry for about 10 years. I was a producer on the Halo series at Bungie, and before that I worked at Activision on Call of Duty. When you work on that games that big, the business really comes down to economies of scale: you have to sell millions of copies to recoup the millions of dollars you spent on making the thing. So people get pretty risk-adverse... there's hundreds of employees and millions on the line, so everyone retreats to tried-and-true themes, proven gameplay mechanics, and so on. When I left to start my own company, I wanted to be weird and make games that people hadn't seen before– explore some of the ideas I had about game design, interactive music and other aspects of development. I had a few dozen words and phrases I wrote down to express these kinds of concepts, but none of them were really sticking.
'The Tester' contestants should probably have read this account first
Ever since Sony first announced its game industry reality show for PSN named The Tester back in 2009, we've been a bit wary of the idea. Can you really blame us? The show pits various personalities against each other in a variety of challenges, all with the end goal of becoming an entry-level game tester -- a job often viewed in the game industry as less than pleasant. And ex-tester Matthew Burns seems to agree with us in his lengthy account of the life of a tester, detailing long hours of monotonous game playing paired with "an often grimly bureaucratic process," that can sometimes lead to subpar products. While offering plenty of gripes with the job, we should point out that he prefaces his complaints with the open admission that "entry-level game testing would not be found near the top of a list of the world's most demanding livelihoods," also repeatedly noting its importance in the development of good games. That said, we can't help but wonder how Sony's reality show winner is going to feel when the reality of their "prize" sets in. [Thanks Matthew!]
