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Passion for games launches Gearbox, career
(Dallas Morning News, The (KRT) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Sep. 6--Plano-based Gearbox Software is one of the biggest independent video game developers in the country, with about 200 employees and multiple blockbuster games in development.
One of those games -- the World War II epic Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway -- hits shelves Sept. 23.
Despite its size and pedigree, though, Gearbox is still a testament to the informal nature of the game industry.
Just ask co-founder, chief executive and president Randy Pitchford, who was studying law in California and working as a professional magician when his girlfriend (now wife) encouraged him to follow his passion for gaming.
"It never occurred to me that that could be a career," Mr. Pitchford said during an interview at Gearbox's high-rise offices.
"I wasn't even sure how the things I bought from the stores actually came to exist. I always thought maybe there was a factory somewhere with Oompa-Loompas in it or something."
Mr. Pitchford, an amateur game programmer at the time, sent resumes to several game studios.
Two responded: LucasArts, George Lucas' video game company in California; and 3D Realms in Dallas.
Impressed by 3D Realms' previous games and its profit-sharing -- a compensation system later copied at Gearbox -- Mr. Pitchford came to Texas.
After cutting his teeth at 3D Realms, Mr. Pitchford and his partners founded Gearbox in 1999.
The company soon was working on some of the most prestigious franchises in gaming, such as the PC version of the sci-fi shooter Halo for Microsoft.
"The reason we're big, relative to game developers, is because we're hungry," Mr. Pitchford said. "There's a lot of stuff to do, and we just can't do it quickly enough."
Gearbox has several titles in the oven, in addition to Hell's Highway .
There's Samba de Amigo, a dancing and music game for the Nintendo Wii, as well as a shooting game based on the classic sci-fi movie Aliens, and an all-new game called Borderlands.
But Mr. Pitchford's contributions to those games are more managerial -- he's listed as executive producer in the credits -- and he's excited to be directly involved in the company's as-yet-unrevealed next game.
"The next project is something I'm actually directing myself," he said. "I'm more involved in the design, the direction and the actual execution of what we're doing on the ground, and I have to, or I'll go crazy."
For all his passion for games, though, Mr. Pitchford said he's a businessman first.
"Are we in the business of art or the business of entertainment?" he asked.
"We view our duty as entertainers. So when we think about what we're doing, we start with this objective: We want to reach a lot of people and we want them to be gratified by what we offer."
Mr. Pitchford does believe that games can be art.
But while titles such as Ico or Psychonauts are definitely art, he said, the relatively meager sales of those games seems to indicate that developers who pursue their visions without sufficient regard for what gamers want have a tough time being successful.
Often, game developers who create purely expressionistic games are fooled into thinking that the tiny cadre of gaming fanatics who populate game blogs and message boards are representative of mainstream buyers.
"Those of us that are really in tune with it, the hard-core people in the industry, those of us that consume a lot of it, that are just dying for something fresh, we actually applaud and get excited about those things that feel more like expression," Mr. Pitchford said. "But if you're a business, you have to be in entertainment.
"If you have the objective of entertaining someone else, there's actually a business model that can be associated with that."
It's a business model that has worked for Gearbox, which has sold around 10 million copies of its games worldwide and has several job postings on its Web site.
In fact, Gearbox has a simple three-word motto printed on its business cards: Happiness. Creativity. Success.
That's why, when Mr. Pitchford and the rest of the Gearbox crew sit down to brainstorm their next game, any concept has to clear a high bar before it can be considered "awesome."
"The way I'm oriented, and the way a lot of us are oriented at Gearbox, is that 'awesome' has to include the promise that we believe is the promise people want to hear," he said.
"The word awesome has to include the belief that there's an audience."
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Copyright (c) 2008, The Dallas Morning News
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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