This is an interesting story that is all too common in the games industry. It does seem as though perseverance and 'blind' passion are the most important charac

This is an interesting story that is all too common in the games industry. It does seem as though perseverance and 'blind' passion are the most important characteristics of game developers. I wonder if other roles on game development teams, aside from programming, are nearly as rigorous. Obviously, they are all worked to death, but there seems to be something about furiously debugging for a prolonged crunch mode that sucks the life out of programmers. During college, I was fortunate enough to take a class from gaming legend Warren Spector (of Deus Ex/Thief/System Shock/Ultimate fame). What impressed me most about him was his sheer, infinite passionate for the games industry. He knew gaming so intimately that I would go so far as to call him a genius. At 50+ years old, he is still going strong in the games industry. This class brought several guest speakers that were HUGE names in the industry, notably Richard Garriot (Ultima/Tabula Rasa) and Michael Morhaime (Blizzard co-founder). These two guys entered the industry as programmers, but quickly moved onto higher roles in their respective organizations. I think that playing the position of a non-coder is crucial in their career success. There is simply no other industry that can foster the immense inventiveness and creativity required to produce successful games.