Dev to Dev is back and this first episode of Season 03 is a bit special for me — Steven and I go back, and it was great getting to sit down and finally hear the whole story, not just the bits I already knew.
What gets me about Steven's career is how little of it he actually planned. He failed his way out of a computer science degree at Glasgow, and it was his Mum who pushed him toward Abertay's games course — one of only two in the world at the time. He burned out hard on his first industry job in Japan and quit on the spot the day it shipped. He recovered by playing World of Warcraft, and it was, once again, his Mum who pointed out that people actually make that game for a living. Twenty years later, he's still there.
Every "failure" in his story turned out to be a redirect. I don't think you can plan for that — you can only trust it when it happens.
Highlights:
- Growing up on a proto-console called the Grandstand, and a Pac-Man handheld that started it all
- Failing nearly every class at Glasgow University except geography
- Landing at Abertay — one of only two game-specific computer science courses in the world
- A year in Japan, fifty cold applications, and a job on Sonic Riders that ended in burnout
- The unforgettable Blizzard interview: handwritten algorithms faxed into a grainy video call
- Seventeen years on WoW's tools team, and what it's taught him about institutional knowledge
Go give this one a listen — Steven's honesty about the parts of his career that didn't go to plan is exactly why I wanted to have him on.
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