Rob Chestney Senior Writer for Star Wars: The Old Republic describes how he got the job in the first TOR dev blog.
Working for BioWare and on Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ specifically, stands as one of the proudest achievements of my career and my life. I’m actually still pinching myself, wondering how I got here. I’ll try to tell you the story, but to be honest; I have to think it was some act of divine intervention, because it still seems too good to be true.
Like a lot of you probably, I played every video game I could get my hands on as a kid, everything from Pong to Pitfall, and of course all the good early RPGs like Zork, Akalabeth, Ultima, … the list goes on. Somehow, I wound up taking a break from video games during my college years (I had to get some work done… if you can call it that). Fortunately, though, my escape from gaming turned out to simply be an extended hiatus. One day, after graduating from school and starting my career at CNN, I picked up a collection of the old Dungeons and Dragons-based gold box games for PC (Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, etc.). I thought I’d enjoy playing through these classics once again in my spare time; I thought it would just be a casual pastime for my evenings. On one of the discs in that collection, though, I discovered the demo version of Baldur’s Gate. I think I played the demo for about ten minutes before rushing out to buy the game. I then retreated to my basement during every free moment for about a month, until I had played through Baldur’s Gate about two or three times. My gaming started back up full throttle after that. Eventually, I had to learn a little restraint, and spend a little more time with my family, but I stayed committed to my rediscovered favorite form of entertainment. Since then, I’ve played through every single BioWare game from start to finish as soon as I could get my hands on it. I played a lot of other games too, on both console and PC, but as a fan, BioWare never disappointed. I joined the BioWare community, and when Neverwinter Nights came out, I, along with thousands of others, picked up the toolset and started tinkering around to see what I could create on my own. At one point, even then, I considered applying to be a writer at BioWare Edmonton, but when I suggested this brilliant idea to my wife, she fixed me with a stare that was colder than a January in Alberta. I decided not to push it.
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