"If you make your hobby your career, you'll never work another day in your life". I was told that by a good friend many years ago, and at the time I was making a living restoring classic arcade machines. Runescape accounts 'd been interested in video games for as long as I could remember, and working with classic machines such as Space Invaders, Galaga and Pacman was a lot of fun - it certainly didn't feel like work.

It wasn't what I really wanted to be doing though - what I really wanted to do, and what I had always wanted to do, was to be creating new games as a developer.

Designing and writing video games used to be a one man job. Classics such as Manic Miner and Skool Daze were brilliantly created by talented one man teams who took care of the design, coding, graphics and audio.

These days things couldn't be more different. With huge development teams and equally massive budgets (GTA4 had a budget in excess of $100 million!) the industry is big business, and breaking into it requires both talent and experience.

The traditional approach is to graduate in a computing related college degree, and then get a low level job in the industry and climb the development ladder. That can be a long, slow process though and even with a good computer science degree there is no guarantee of a job at the end of it.

Since game studios are typically looking for both skills and experience, there are other paths which can be taken. Typically these involve getting experience in the industry, and bypassing the degree part altogether.

There are basically 2 ways to gain experience. The first and most logical is to start writing games. By developing "indie" games you can build up a portfolio of work which can help you get a job with a development studio. The second option is to get work as a games tester, which involves working for a games studio, testing games and reporting back to the development team. It's possible to get games testing jobs with little or no prior experience, and while the work tends to involve long hours of repetitive testing with tight deadlines, it does allow for gaining the experience needed to break into the games industry properly.

There is no doubt that for many people "games developer" is a dream job. Whatever path you choose to take in order to get into the games industry, it will take determination and perseverance, but the rewards are more than worth it!