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The well known game developer talks about getting his start in the video game industry.

Today marks the twentieth anniversary of Tim Schafer entering the gaming industry. He is best known for his work on Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, and the upcoming Brutal Legend.

While he has created some unique titles loved by fans all around the world, finding his place in the video game industry wasn’t particularly easy for the young Tim Schafer. In fact, he reminisces about those times, over twenty years ago today on the Double Fine website.

Schafer began by applying to some very well known companies of the day including Atari, Hewlett Packard, and Lucas Arts. Unfortunately for him, Atari, the company that "made the greatest computer of all time" politely declined his request for employment, and five months later he heard a similar reply from HP. He even got denied a job from a company who made library cataloging software. Schafer seemed particularly upset about losing this job as he had "bought a tie" and "ironed [his] pants" specifically for that interview.

Schafer’s big break came from LucasArts after his application for the "Assistant Designer / Programmer" position at LucasArts was accepted. Now years later Schafer jokes about how "unqualified" he was for the job, how "lucky" he was to get it, and how "screwed" he would have been if he hadn’t.

Lucky indeed, as his interview had seemingly taken a turn for the worst at one point. Schafer reminices:

I called David Fox right away and scribbled all the notes you see while I was talking to him. I told him how much I wanted to work at Lucasfilm, not because of Star Wars, but because I loved, "Ball Blaster."

"Ball Blaster, eh?" he said.

"Yeah! I love Ball Blaster!" I said. It was true. I had broken a joystick playing that game on my Atari 800.

"Well, the name of the game is Ball Blazer." Mr. Fox said, curtly. "It was only called Ball Blaster in the pirated version."

Gulp.

You’ve all heard it: Tim Schafer played pirated games, and according to him if anyone has "ever pirated one of [his] games you don’t need to feel bad". However he does add a disclaimer stating if you’ve stolen two or more, then "that’s a different story".

So concludes the story of how Tim Schafer landed his first job in the gaming industry, earning a hefty salary of 27K a year.

You can check out his rejection letters, resume title page, and acceptance letter at the Double Fine website.