I bummed around during most of my 20s doing a wide range of things. I was a computer consultant, a graphic designer, a magazine writer, a playwright. You name it. And then I got hit by the "I'm almost 30!" panic and decided I needed to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up.

I noticed an ad for game designers in an issue of Next Gen magazine at Looking Glass, the company that had made two of my favorite games of all time: Ultima Underworld and System Shock. I answered the ad, and around a week or two later, got invited to fly up to Boston to interview. I got hired around a week later. My guess is they were unduly impressed by my brief flirtation with Hollywood, as this was back in '95, during the whole Hollywood/video game/full-motion-video fiasco.