Slacker or Hero?: A Taste of the Life of a Video Game Tester

I thought I wanted to be a video game tester when I was a kid. Back when I was “Student of the Week” in the 3rd grade back in 1990/1991 I clipped an article from a newspaper that featured a big, beefy guy—flat out, staring at the camera with his forearm sitting on the desk saying that’s what he did for a living like a blond “son of the soil”. He said the going was good, especially when you got a game like “Super Mario 3”. And that’s about where my gaming experience stopped. . . . . Yea, brother, I got myself a Super Nintendo and even a used Sega Genesis but after a certain point you get too busy for that “bip, bop, boop” and maybe you get occupied with other things, and you get to old for that shit. I will admit, I have a Nintendo emulator on my computer as I speak and I kick out those games every great once in a while for nostalgia’s sake, but no further than that. Unless you’re talking about the Arcade classics. Can’t beat PacMan or Galaga. Or even “Tetris”, if you want to root around in my dirty linen. Or Super Mario Bros. Fuck man, you never get over ‘em. You talk about the shaky middle circle, the ether, the space between heaven and hell of temporary employment as a tester and the closest experience I ever had to that was tasting watermelon wine coolers in a study. Indeed, we did not have a very pleasing cross-section of the populace—junkies, alcoholics, the marginal, the unemployed—because who else could come in at 2:30 on a Friday afternoon? But we seemed to have functioning taste buds, as we sucked after the samples they fed us in black plastic dishes like lab rats—eating salted crackers in between doses as they blared instructions through a loudspeaker and nurses in hairnets pushed around a cart like antiseptic mint-green cocktail waitresses. Well, I got my $45 and it was “get it while the getting is good”. That is life as a writer. In any case, enjoyed your piece. Keep it up.

Comment by Michael "Lawless" Adams from St. Louis, Missouri — April 4, 2007 @ 3:08 pm

I really enjoyed reading your piece, as I can relate to almost everything you described in there.  A few years ago I worked at Ubisoft doing exactly the same thing, and faced the same ‘cool!’ or ‘well, you must be a slacker’ assumptions. lol.

Comment by arn from montreal — April 5, 2007 @ 10:48 am