In 2003, I joined Pandemic Studios as a Designer on Mercenaries. It was released for Xbox and PS2 in January 2005 and received a Metacritic rating of 84.
My initial role was to design and implement several game missions and to contribute to overall systems design. I began to gravitate towards systems design and Lua scripting, creating scripts that supported and provided a framework for all other designers’ work.
Though not my first shipped game, this was the project I cut my teeth on. 2004 was a blur, spent almost entirely in the office, but I genuinely loved the work and the camaraderie. And I’m very fond of the finished game, which had both a deeply satisfying core and enough innovation to change the conversation within the open-world genre.