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Community Management – Vivendi Games – 2005-2006

Learning from the players.

My stints as Interactive Marketing intern and coordinator included some time as the company’s community manager. Mind you, this included keeping an eye on communities that spanned back to games released by Sierra Entertainment in the eighties. Sierra was simply a brand and logo for Vivendi Games in the mid-aughts, but they still tried to support the legacy of the brand and the many games that came before.

Although I made some effort to engage with our communities and regularly posted, this was only a part-time role, and I was not as engaged as I could have been. If I had to do it again I would have initiated more chats, more developer Q&As, and even just MP contests or giveaways. Activities to help the community feel more involved.

Another critical aspect of this role was customer support. We had a dedicated customer support department, but as the primary online voice I was often deep in the forums, particularly after a game released. Console games were light on technical support but those PC games sure needed a lot of attention. This was the first time I’d had to help on this side of a product release and it was certainly an education in organizing huge influxes of user reports.

Interactive Marketing – Vivendi Games – 2005-2006

Some games sell themselves. Most need help.

Although a short part of my career on paper, the year and a half that I spent in the Interactive Marketing department of Vivendi Games was formative. I rapidly moved along the ladder from intern to coordinator to associate manager, and the sudden responsibility helped shaped my capabilities. It also sharpened my strengths, namely a willingness to learn what I need to learn in order to complete a particular task.

The work varied from creating ad banners and updating websites to managing the online marketing budgets and campaigns for the titles I owned toward the end of my time there. Ad buys, website designs, creative agency contracts–all part of a typical day. The scopes also varied. In the images above, for instance, F.E.A.R. and Scarface: The World is Yours had multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, whereas titles such as Ice Age 2: The Meltdown and SWAT 4 were more in the mid-range.

This was also my first exposure to working on game titles based on licensed properties. Scarface and Ice Age 2 had rigorous approvals processes, to say the least, and navigating those turbulent waters was both exhausting and thrilling. Who knew it could be so exciting just getting people to send an email with their approval?

50 Cent: Bulletproof – Vivendi Universal Games – 2005

Playing a different game.

I had been a tester at Vivendi for a year by the time 50 Cent showed up on the test floor. It was the second (and final) game by the developers at Genuine Games, whom I knew well from our previous encounter. 50 Cent was a similarly lackluster effort meant to quickly capitalize on a license.

However, my time on the game was limited. There was an opening as a Interactive Marketing intern within the company, and one my test managers knew that I had experience as a web designer. I applied for the position believing that it only made sense, given my experience. I was interviewed right there on the test floor and offered the job later that week. I had moved to the Interactive Marketing group by the following Monday to begin a new life in online marketing and design.

But there was one more project for me to help with. 50 Cent was in the middle of finishing up and there was test overtime to be had, so in spite of having moved to the marketing department I volunteered to stop by the test floor in the evenings and on the weekend for some overtime testing. It was perhaps two or three days total, but it’s amusing to know that I played a small part in the release of such an iconic game.

Empire Earth II – Vivendi Universal Games – 2005

Real-time strategy testing.

I started in the game industry during the height of Xbox, PS2, and Gamecube. I personally owned two of the three systems and played the most popular types of games for them (3D action and shooters), so my first eight months were familiar territory in terms of understanding the gameplay and system capabilities. This gave me the time and space to figure out the testing process without also having to figure out how to run or play the games.

That all ended with Empire Earth II for Windows PCs. I owned a computer but only played emulated consoles from the 8-bit and 16-bit eras. I doubt my machine could have run anything in 3D. I was also into games that required a controller and instant movement, so strategy games were nowhere in the vicinity of my radar. Nevertheless, getting thrown into the middle of Empire Earth II, with its myriad compatibility and gameplay issues, was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. I learned far more about computers and keyboard/mouse-based gameplay than I had ever learned before, allowing me to contribute much more effectively on later PC projects.

My focus was almost entirely on campaign gameplay, running through historical battle scenarios starting from the stone ages all the way to the near future in which lasers and robots are commonplace. My most extensive experience with this type of game had been a demo of Age of Empires, so getting into an RTS for the first time was a treat.

There was a moment on the project that I’ll never forget. I sat across the aisle from my test lead, who was not the most outwardly friendly person. Still, he was a professional, and I was there to do a job, so I never minded it. I was focused on getting through the Korean campaign when another lead stopped by to chat with my lead. At some point the visitor asked me a question that I completely missed because I was so focused on the task at hand. Finally, my lead said something along the lines of, “Oh, that’s Vic. This is how he always is, and I’m thankful for it.” Shortly thereafter, on a day off that I’d earned after several weeks of late shifts, I won a prize for Best Tester.

It became the first time I became conscious of this ability to focus on the work and shut out the noise, a skill which has served me well over the course of my career.

Delta Force: Black Hawk Down – Vivendi Universal Games – 2005

Assemble the strike team.

It’s strange to consider the time an average developer spends on a project and then compare with a tester’s time on the project. Testers are by their nature only required when a game is ready for them. There’s no point in having them report issues that are simply unfinished work, which means they aren’t usually brought onto the team until the last three or four months to help finish and ship it.

There are exceptions at both ends of the spectrum, of course. Some testers may be on a project for years. Some may be there from inception to post-release support and patch testing. And sometimes, a tester is brought on when a project is coming in hot and has only a only a brief amount of time to ramp up and start reporting bugs. Today’s indie and mobile game market has created more need for testers who can ramp up and do some quick testing, but it was less common then, usually only special circumstances. Such was the case with Delta Force.

Originally released for PC, the Delta Force project consisted of ports developed for Xbox and PS2. My company’s involvement was strictly a distribution deal, so the usual publisher resources were unnecessary. But at some point, someone realized they’d need extra testers to help finish in time, and we just happened to have finished a project and became available.

Although less common now, the ports were developed by separate companies due to the fractured nature of developing for both Xbox and PS2. One small developer could not do both, so a second team handled the other platform. Both versions of the game featured online play through Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Sony’s PlayStation Network. Online multiplayer on a console was a whole other beast at that time, particularly Sony’s fledgling effort. Navigating their networks and login processes introduced the concept of working while waiting for connections to complete. It was also my first experience with coordinating large multiplayer tests and ensuring communication flowed effortlessly as we helped iron out the kinks in their campaign and versus modes.

Brief as it was, Delta Force introduced me to working on FPS games and online multiplayer in general.

Predator: Concrete Jungle – Vivendi Universal Games – 2005

To test, or not to test…

Predator has the distinction of being both the second and fourth projects on which I worked. We were initially assembled to test the game in summer 2004 toward a December launch, but an unwieldy scope and hefty design changes caused it to be pushed out to 2005. This would be my first lesson in missing a projected ship date.

The game’s original vision was exciting, and I felt tremendously grateful to work on a licensed game of this caliber. Having observed the wild success of open world action games such as Grand Theft Auto III, the company decided that they would take the Predator license and create a similarly action-packed sandbox in which players would not fight the Predator, but be the Predator, hunting prey in the concrete jungles of America. There would be roaming citizens, enemies, cool gadgets, side missions, the works. It sounded fun, cool, and just the kind of project to kick off my career.

So it was a real bummer when the production team decided to cancel testing while they redesigned the game to follow a more linear level-based progression. Each of the original elements would still be incorporated, only now they would be scattered throughout the levels.

In hindsight, it made perfect sense. Their open world map lacked most of its structures, let alone any detailed polish. Performance was poor. The state of the game in August just wasn’t where it should be, so cutting on test costs while they rebuilt from the ground up was the only way to go. It was at this point that I was reassigned to another violent but somehow less exciting project, Fight Club.

Though shaky, the Predator project rolled on and eventually reached stable ground. Many of the original test team that had moved to Fight Club were reassigned to Predator to help test the game into 2005. We were given the closure of helping to see it through to the end. I would not realize until later that the hanging axe of cancellation was not that unusual for the game industry.

Fight Club – Vivendi Universal Games – 2004

Late nights and violence.

Fight Club was the third test project to which I’d been assigned in a span of three months. It was the first of two projects published by Vivendi Universal Games and developed by Genuine Games, the latter of which I also touched in a few different ways. But that would come later.

Fight Club was a big project. I remember that well. The movie adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s book about a lost generation of men was a huge hit, and someone, somewhere, decided that a fighting game based on the story just made sense. Vivendi Universal Games was big on licenses at the time and this was probably their biggest. It’s got a bunch of fighters from a hugely popular novel and movie, let’s put them in a game!

The test budget in particular was so big that the team couldn’t fit in the same space. It was decided to split us into two shifts: morning and graveyard. I, being a new and enthusiastic tester, was fine with the graveyard shift. It meant I could wake up late and in a much different environment than the world of daytime at the office. As happens during such unusual circumstances, the graveyard shift became close friends. I learned much about testing from the more veteran members of the team and because it was mellower than usual, we had room to talk earnestly about the games industry and their experiences. It was quite a time.

Work-wise, testing a fighting game remains a memorable experience involving long spreadsheets and checking every fighting move for every character against every other character in the game. One character that was a big problem for us was a guy who goes by “Bitch Tits Bob.” This character’s backstory was that he was a steroid user in his youth and relied on hormone therapy that caused him to grow breasts. This is employed for comic effect in the book and movie, but in a game where every character except Bob was thin, it was a clipping nightmare. Bob was a grappler, which meant that his moves all involved him bear hugging his opponents. Imagine a big person absorbing you into their body and you can imagine the difficulty with Bob. The developers eventually reduced the amount of clipping but never completely fixed it. This was the my first lesson in the inevitability of clipping.

A computer for every tester was a fantasy around then, so we wrote bugs down on paper and then used a shared computer to enter them. Bug regression tests were run using printouts, on which we would note “Pass” or “Fail” with a pen. Our test leads would then record our results using the computers at their personal desks.

It was a Black Friday release. Things wound down in November, and on my final night, my test lead asked whether I was okay to return to the day shift starting the next day. I assured him I could go home at 3:00 AM and return at 9:00 AM.

Naturally, I woke up near noon.

I profusely apologized when I got returned to the office. My test lead dismissed it, said it was fine. A late start could be forgiven after helping to ship a video game.

Thunderbirds – Vivendi Universal Games – 2004

Start new career?

My first job in the video game industry was as a Game Tester at what was then called Vivendi Universal Games, a company in Los Angeles, CA. I had graduated in March 2004 with an Associates degree in Graphic Design and Multimedia, but quickly realized that the traditional freelancer role was not for me. I preferred stability and a regular paycheck, not to mention avoiding problem clients. I’d decided I wanted to work in video games and that I’d start as a tester.

I remained at my part-time college job for three months while I searched for something that I liked. It was harrowing. I knew I couldn’t continue in a retail job but if something in video games didn’t materialize I’d have to move into some other type of office role. Fortunately, my dad was a delivery driver for a print company and through his interactions with clients in the media industry he discovered that Vivendi was searching for testers. He passed my résumé along and I got the call soon after.

There was a week of training in which all applicants were required to test builds of games that were in various states of development. Test leads reviewed all bugs and critiqued them, guiding potential testers in the basic best practices: write well, provide detailed reproduction steps, be clear about the result and the expectation. And do not write duplicate bugs, ever.

One amusing part of this process was I was given an early build of The Cat in the Hat for GBA. The game left no impression, but I do remember that the cartridge contained save data for later levels that were not meant to be accessible to tester trainees. I took advantage of that to skip ahead and discover bugs that the others would not discover during their time with the build. I was guaranteed not to write any duplicate bug reports. Was it unfair? I wonder to this day.

Once finished with training I was assigned to my first project: Thunderbirds. The project itself was brief. I joined a handful of other testers in helping to test and final a small GBA game with an accordingly small budget. We were done in two weeks, but it was the longest two weeks of my career.