They drove past the administration building, where employees were trained in the fine art of extortion. Next came the student union. Things were quiet at this particular time; there were only two visible student protest groups marching outside. Arnesto watched them for a moment, then lost interest and resumed his search.
The quad came after that, followed by the library. Arnesto had gone in once for a few minutes his freshman year. As a computer science major, he had little use of the place and never returned. On one side of the library was the buyback area, where if one had managed to keep his eighty-five-dollar textbook in pristine condition the entire semester, the university would happily buy it back for a buck and a half.
On the western edge of campus, and a full mile from his dorm — a long walk during the lengthy Massachusetts winter — sat the computer science building. Inside was the computer lab, where Arnesto spent many evening hours hunting for errant semicolons. Across the hall was the printer area, where after emailing their completed projects, students could wait in line for other students paid two dollars per hour to retrieve their printouts from the row of dot matrix printers behind them.
At last, driving past the soccer fields on the final leg of their loop, Arnesto saw what he was looking for. He eyed the skinny young men jogging alongside the road in their matching uniforms, including shorts revealing far too much of their long, twiggy legs. Arnesto felt a little embarrassed for them, even though it was the current fashion. They passed the bulk of the team before Arnesto saw a familiar mullet on the head of one of the frontrunners.
“Slow down a little,” he said to Katrina as he rolled down his window.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Hey, Terrance!” he yelled out the passenger window as the truck began overtaking the mulleted runner. “Stop shoplifting! You’re going to get kicked out of school, idiot!”
Katrina was almost as surprised as Terrance, who didn’t recognize the person who had just yelled at him. “Friend of yours?” she asked.
“He was once,” he said, rolling up the window. “It’s complicated. We can go now. On to California!”
The cross-country road trip to the Bay Area took about a week. A week after that, he was scheduled for an interview at Smiling Axolotl Games, his old job. He arrived ten minutes early, parked, and walked in.
“Hi, I’m here for my interview. I’m Arnesto Modesto.” The receptionist invited him to take a seat. He was a little concerned that he didn’t recognize her. After all, he had worked for the company for many years. Must’ve been before my time, he thought. In his previous life, he had applied there in 1994 after he graduated college. Now it was almost three years earlier. Of course he wouldn’t recognize everybody.
He looked around the hallway. The walls featured large cardboard cutouts of some of the company’s more popular game characters. There was Doodler Dude from Doodler Dude & the Noodling Noodlers, a puzzle game; Sproinger from the Sproinger series of platform games; and Rock Stone, the no-nonsense, one-liner-spouting badass, whose motto was, “Unused ammo is wasted ammo.” However, there still weren’t any cutouts of Chimp & Zeke, from their ever popular adventure game series — the first game was still in pre-production.
Though he wasn’t quite as excited as he was the first time around, he was still thrilled to be there, about to get his start in the games industry. He hadn’t even considered doing anything else. Why not come back to his first post-college job where he had several great years and made many lifelong friends?
The interviewers were not his friends. They weren’t enemies or anything, in fact, they were great people in their own right. It’s just that they were people who had moved on from Quality Assurance into other parts of the company, as so many people did back then, before Arnesto had arrived in 1994. There was Maggie (who was a hottie back in ‘91), Don, and Isaac. Both Maggie and Don would one day move into the sound department, while Isaac would move into production.
The interview went smoothly enough. There weren’t many nineteen-year-old computer science graduates applying to be testers, which gave Arnesto an immediate edge. He knew all about editing autoexec.bat and config.sys on boot disks, often a requirement to run certain PC games. He knew and loved video games more than Maggie and way more than Don, though possibly less than Isaac. And of course, he was affable, using some of the techniques he had picked up from his many interviews over the decades of his former life.
“I’m sure you already know this,” Isaac said in a tone more serious than he had shown thus far, “but testing does not mean, ‘getting paid to play games all day,’ as many people outside the industry seem to think.” Maggie and Don both nodded in agreement. “It’s like they think we’re in here doing nothing but playing Civilization — if only! The truth is, most of the time you’ll be testing an unfinished, unpolished, buggy-as-hell game—”
“With placeholder art,” Maggie said.
“And no sound,” Don said.
“—that crashes all the time and that you may not even like in the first place,” Isaac added. “And you’ll be testing it all day, every day, for months until it ships.”
“Are we scaring you off yet?” Maggie asked.
“Not at all,” Arnesto said. “I knew some testers from… before who warned me what’s it’s like. I’m ready to do this.”
“Good! By the way, I like your tie,” Maggie said, as the interview seemed to be coming to a close. Arnesto looked down at his tie. He hated it; it was ugly.
“I’m sorry, am I dressed too formally? I promised my dad I would wear a tie, even though I told him the games industry is too informal for that.”
“No, it’s fine. Better to overdress for an interview than underdress,” Maggie answered.
“Do you want to cut it?” Arnesto asked.
“I’m sorry?” Isaac asked.
Goddammit. Too soon. There was a tradition at Smiling Axolotl that when someone wore a tie to an interview, they cut it. The company was about freedom of creativity. Ties were seen as stifling and best left for bankers, lawyers, and the like. The problem was, they hadn’t yet started that tradition. He had to think fast.
“I want to show you guys that I’m Axolotl material. I want to be a game developer, not a member of Congress,” Arnesto said, flicking his tie in disgust. “Game devs don’t wear ties. Axolotls don’t wear ties. Do you have a pair of scissors?”
“I’ll go get one!” Maggie was enjoying the gesture, at least. Don and Isaac merely smiled, perhaps unsure how to react.
“Maggie, would you please do the honors?” Arnesto asked when she returned. She laughed as she cut his tie a couple inches below the knot. Arnesto dropped the bottom parts on the table. “When do I start?” he asked with a great, big smile. They all laughed and told him he would hear within a couple of weeks and if he didn’t, to call human resources and ask.
Four days later, he received an offer letter in the mail. He had been accepted to start as a Quality Assurance Tester, Level One, for eight dollars an hour. He signed and mailed the acceptance letter and started the following week.
When he arrived for his first day of work, he walked into the tester area and inhaled deeply. The Test Pit smelled better than he remembered, perhaps because there were fewer testers. More likely, it was because it was Monday morning, and some of the smell had dissipated over the weekend.