Back in 1994 I applied for a job at Epic MegaGames. I sent them a bunch of my digital art and a resume.
I was 15, and very naive. :-)
It seems the guy who read my application took some pity on me. He sent me back some constructive criticism and gave me a few pointers on how to produce things they could use. He also included a 3.5 inch floppy disk, with the "PCGPE" software on it. This was the PC Game Programmers Encyclopedia. I'm very grateful he did this. He saved me from a lifetime of producing second rate game art!
It a shame that kids are no longer taught this kind of stuff. I doubt many of the new generation of graduates can actually explain how a computer works. I owe a lot to Denthor of ASPHYXIA, his VGA tutorials really got the ball rolling. I had to convert all his code to C from Pascal, as I did not have a Pascal compiler. In the end I had quite a collection of my own demo/intro programs. Horizontal Parallax Starfields, Fire Effects, Sinus Plasma, Scrollers, Lightning, Fractals... I guess a lot of this knowledge is now used in shader programming, and isn't entirely obsolete.
None of this would have happened if someone at Epic hadn't sent me that 3.5 inch floppy disk. I think it was Tim Sweeney. Could it be? I'm going to hunt through my old boxes of junk and see if I can find the letter...
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