ABSTRACT
Please introduce yourself and your current role. My name is Tim Fields. I’ve been making games for about 16 years now. Currently, I’m the Director of Business Development for Certain Affinity, a boutique software development firm headquartered in Austin, Texas. While we do make our own games, we are probably best known for our contributions to some of the great first-person shooter franchises out there, including Valve’s Left 4 Dead, Activision’s Call of Duty, and Microsoft’s Halo. How did you get your start in the games industry? I got a Commodore 64 when I was about 8 years old and really began programming my own games on that machine. When I was 18, some friends and I started working on a game called Smash the Police State out of my apartment near the University of Texas at Austin. This was your classic ‘garage’ game shop, and I taught myself character animation on 3D Studio (the precursor to 3D Studio Max). Imagine my surprise when I learned that companies in Austin would actually pay me to do what I was doing in my spare time anyway!
