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Shahid Ahmad,
Director, Ultimatum Games
It was a leaflet featuring the ZX Spectrum, handed to him by his friend Geoff Foley, that led to Shahid Ahmad’s interest in game creation. “Up until then I thought that computers were pretty boring,” he admits. “I had not made the connection between colour arcade games and computers in my teenage mind until I saw that leaflet. Within months I’d self-published my first game, which sold zero copies. Still, it was a start.” Ahmad describes himself as “a dirt poor 16 year old son of an immigrant on a council estate” when he saw a fellow teenager, Greg Christensen, win a $25,000 prize for making a video game. “I thought that if he can do it, then so can I,” he says. After a career in development, Ahmad moved to management and eventually PlayStation, where he helped lead the company’s indie initiatives. But after a decade at Sony, he decided to return to development. “At first I felt a bit like an impostor,” he says. “Now I realise I was wasting time when I should just have been going for it from the beginning. Development is a hundred times more complex than it was when I was last involved, but the tools are also a hundred times better. I’m enjoying it immensely and trust that my best development work is ahead of me.”
Cliff Harris,
Founder, Positech Harris has been a champion for indie games in recent years. After the success of his Democracy series, he has been publishing other studios’ titles, such as Big Pharma. He started, however, by working in IT and playing Quake in his spare time. “I would wonder how they made this game,” he says. “That eventually led me to mess around learning C, then C++, and starting to make my own indie games – long before that term was really a thing. I went indie, then triple-A, then back to indie – so not the normal route.” As appealing as the indie life might seem, Harris urges future creators to approach the business realistically. “Some people quit their job – or, worse, never take one – and think they can make an entire game with zero experience,” he says. “My first six or seven commercial games sucked – and that’s to be expected. I bet Van Gogh’s first seven paintings sucked, too. There’s an assumption amongst indie developers that their first game will sell enough to make a living. That’s almost always delusional.”
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