Nick, how did you [get into games], of everything that you could do with your life?
TL;DRNick Elms got into games through drawing pixels on the BBC Micro with Chris, then training companies on 3D Studio, and joined the games industry when a studio was set up for EA.
Well, I started off working with Chris. We were just finishing school and just playing around with graphics on the BBC Micro. And he was doing his games, Stryker's Run and Match Day, and kind of said to Phil and I, because we all liked doing art, we all did art at school, "Come draw some pixels, let's do some stuff on here." So we did that, and all of a sudden he's driving around in a really flashy car, and Phil and I are looking at each other going, "What's happened here?" And he's like, "Sold this game," and he's minted. So then we cottoned on to this, and Chris hung around for a bit, and then he went to Origin, and obviously the rest is history.
So you've been with Chris for a long time then.
Yeah, well, I went into training. I was on the tech side and I was training companies. I was one of the only authorized Autodesk trainers of 3D Studio. So I was going around to games companies in the area, training their staff how to use 3D Studio. One of them was a company called Rowan Software, which did a lot of flight simulator games, so I was teaching them how to build planes. And I kind of got, "Well, I can do this. I can do this for a living." So Erin came back to the UK, set up a studio for EA and pulled a load of us in, and that was me in the games industry from there on.