Inside the Vault - Mike Dulany

[Brother None]

This week's Inside the Vault features QA-dude-turned-programmer Mike Dulany. Did you ever play Fallout, Mike? We'll never know.<blockquote>How did you get into the industry? Do you have any tips for breaking in?
I used to old cliché “I know a guy who works there.” Though to meet “a guy” I was an active member of the IGDA ( International Game Developers Association ) and met him (and a number of other interesting people) by attending the local chapters meetings. He informed me they were hiring QA staff and I was more than happy to leave my job at the time to join the team.

Advice? I think my advice is best put forth in these easy to follow steps:

1) Be good/extremely motivated in a particular area of game development.
2) Know a guy. (Optional, but recommended)
3) ???
4) Job!</blockquote>Inside the Vault - Mike Dulany.

 

[Moving Target]

He seems like a decent enough fella. My question is- can he deliver? I'm a bit worried about how he listed as his favorite games the Super Smash Brothers series. I mean, yea, the games are fun... but how about something with some depth? Hell, Dungeon Siege has more depth than SSB... *grumble grumble* no mention of cRPGs *grumble grumble*.

 

[iridium_ionizer]

What makes you get out of bed in the morning?
The desire to ingest caffeine.

Hopefully that means a proper addiction system will be implemented in the game.

Worse job you’ve ever had?
I’ve been lucky enough so far to never have held a job that I considered that ‘bad’. I guess the worst experience I’ve ever had at a job was as grocery store employee. One day the manager asked me to work overnight and remove the guards at the bottom of the aisles, placed so items don’t roll under them, to clean the ‘dust.’ Upon removing them I found the prescribed dust… and sprawling metropolis of fungus. The guards, to their credit, did a great job at keeping the merchandise from rolling under the aisle, unfortunately they also excelled at denying entry to mops, so whenever there was a spill or broken jar in the area any of its contents that was able to slide under the guard remained there. To look under the guard in the spaghetti sauce aisle is to stare directly into the heart of madness.

If he were an artists I could say that this might be the root cause of all of the fuzzy, brown textures, but since he isn't, I can only think that staring directly into the heart of madness has prepared him for working at Bethesda.

Any other hobbies and interests? What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
I enjoy reading, playing games, long walks on the beach, holding hands, and puppy dogs.

Long walks on the beach and holding hands will only get you shot in the Wasteland. Unless you are one half of a gay Supermutant couple - in which case you'll have plenty of peace and quiet while enjoying the sunset.

 

[Godwin's law]

Did you ever play Fallout, Mike? We'll never know.

Are you going to keep mentioning this every time? It's called inside the vault because their office is a vault. They're not even meant to be interviews about fallout, but about their crew. We get it, most of them didn't play fallout. They would've called it 'Inside the prison' if they were working on Oblivion V.

 

[Black]

No, it's totally okay to work on a sequel of a game when you haven't played previous titles. Who cares about style, art or staying true to Fallout. And it's totally okay for Todd to say that they're all Fallout fans. Even though many of them hasn't probably seen FO with their own eyes.
In that case, I'm a Stalker fan. The fact that I haven't played it isn't important.

Are you going to keep mentioning this every time?

Please do. It's nice to know who's working on a game SEQUEL.

There is nobody [here] who hasn't played that game and enjoyed it.

By Todd.
Y halo thar.

 

[Brother None]

Are you going to keep mentioning this every time?

Yes.

In case you missed the history of that question: they used to ask "Did you play the original Fallouts?" as one of the standard question in the earliest interviews.

Then Josh Jones said no. Since he's the lead character artist (and the character art is bad enough in Bethesda's games), they got a lot of flak and mockery for this fact.

Then they pulled the question, never replied to people's worries about it. Just pulled it and pretended it never happened.

We keep mentioning it every time more as a jibe than as a serious criticism. See it as a 4chan-esque "nevah forget", because it really is too silly to get over.

PS: nevar forget