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Warning, long winded rant….

I think I’ve hit a wall in my life. I’ve recently become very disillusioned with my job, which is very sad because I’ve got a job a lot of people would kill for. Let me give the back story.

About 8 years ago I moved out west and got a job testing video games. It was perfect for me, I never went to college and pretty much did blue collar work so this was a nice change. I worked my ass off for 4 years in test and finally got a promotion to world building. Needless to say about 3 weeks after that promotion the studio was shut down.I found another job in the game industry but it wasn’t something I really wanted to do but it was paying the bills. A guy I play hockey with told me his company was hiring, it was doing game boy color stuff at a very small studio (about 15 people at the time) but it was a job in development so I took it. It was probably the best decision of my life up to that point, I learned a hell of a lot about making games and had a lot of fun. Things progressed and our company got bigger and “upper management” was brought in. I thought nothing of this as I was there to make games….not to make schedules.

Fast forward to now. I’ve worked on 15 games for this company, granted most of them are on GBC/GBA and you’ve never heard of them as most have sold less than 5k copies but I have 2 titles under my belt that have sold over a million copies. I thought this would give me some leverage in getting a raise and it sort of worked. I was moved to a ps2 title as a designer and got ¼ of the raise I asked for with another ¼ 6 months down the road depending on how my performance on this project went. About a month ago the publisher pulled the plug and the game was cancelled. I was moved back to the handheld stuff and asked to help out on some projects that were floundering. Little did I know that this meant I was no longer a designer.(upper management never told me this) So, I’ve been basically demoted to an assistant producer…which is below what I was before I got the so called promotion! I’m filling out spreadsheets, tracking assets and schedules….basic monkey work.


I know what you’re probably thinking. Leave! Find another job. Well, yes, that was my first idea also. The big problem there is I’m on the verge of buying a house. I don’t want to take that chance, sure I can get a much higher paying job at a large studio such as EA or Atari or whatever but that would make me much more expendable, where at my current job I’m pretty secure. I’ve talked to my boss and asked why I haven’t been given the chances other people with less time and or experience have and it comes down to this. I’m known as someone who will get into the dirt and get the game out which is what we need right now. Maybe after this project you can get back into design, but right now we really need you on “insert fucked up project here”.

Thus is my situation now, what do you think? Do I take the chance and go for another job..or suck it down and hope that after my next review in 3 months I get what I feel is coming to me? I feel like Peter in office space, "Its not that I'm lazy..I just don't care"

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- And so he says, 'I don't like the cut of your jib.' And I go I says, IT'S THE ONLY JIB I GOT, BABY! -