Once upon a time I wrote this short tip on how to get yourself in the door of a cool company without experience. You can see how crusty our logo used to be 🙂
Since then I can honestly say I’ve never been on the receiving end of anything that I would call exemplary along those lines – until about two months ago.
This arrived in Kirsty’s mail box – no email body, just this attachment:
We laughed our heads off, and got Richard in for an informal interview.
Turns out he was a bit handy with his pencils, so we offered him a bit of work experience on Velocity – we were short on time and needed to get some extra cutscenes done. Rich was delighted, and he turned around some ‘pretty good’ pieces. Then I gave him some feedback, and he did them again. And again. And again, each time getting better and better. Awesome we thought, this guy is one of us.
Then our contract artist went AWOL – literally left us hanging with no word of why, with three weeks until submission of Velocity to Sony. Oh ****!
Rich stepped in, and took over. Rich is now responsible for every single piece of cut scene art in the game except one. He’s worked around the clock to help us out, and the art looks great!
Of course we are now going to pay him for his work, and we’ll also find some way to reward him for the awesome contribution he’s made to our game. He literally saved us when we’d run out of time.
That’s what going the extra mile means, and that’s what he showed in his initial contact – he made the effort to do something out of the ordinary, which got us interested, and now he’s credited on his first game.
Put the time in, go the extra mile.