16. Did you really get paid to play video games?
I did.
I graduated from Chico State December 2000. No company was hiring entry level at the time. All the dotcoms were laying off. I couldn't even get someone at a job fair to look at my resume since I had no experience. The only job I could find was in a market that was growing was working tech support for Electronic Arts. I supported their Maxis line of games which was mostly "The Sims". It's the best selling game in video game history and is the only succesfully selling game where the majority of people who play it are female. The majority of the people calling for support help about it are bon-bon eating, Oprah watching, middle aged housewives who don't know how to use a computer. It made walking them though things difficult. I was a contract employee and after it ran out found a job at Infogrames.
I worked there for a few months as a video game tester. That's where I spent hours a day playing video games for money. The only cool thing about it was the cool people I worked with. Since we were testers by nature all the games were buggy. The hours were long because they forced 12 hour days and they wanted one 8 hour day on the weekend. In addition the pay sucked. I also had no control over what game I was assigned to test. I had to do kids games but the worst was NeverWinter Nights. I've never been into Dungons & Dragons but now I had to be concerned with +3 dragon slaying axes versus a ogre.
I left that job for FriendFinder the day I found out from the temp agency that I was hired.
You can find my name in the
the credits for a few of the games that I got a chance to test.