So, uh, I basically started making, uh, weird art games when I was in college. I made like custom arcade cabinets. And I would build the games and build the controllers for them. And they were like really weird things. One was like an investigation into how - uh, there's a genetic allele that has the same name as Sonic the Hedgehog, and I was sort of investigating that topic. I made a arcade called, um, there was - I made a arcade in a computer space, like the first arcade I ever made. And it was a re - a reimagining, I guess, of a like 1970s Bruce Nauman, uh, experimental video. It was Bruce Nauman stamping in the studio. And so like you could go up to the arcade. It had a big capacitive field in front of it, so it would recognize that you're there. And you could walk around, and you could stamp, and it would play the sound of Bruce Nauman stamping. It had sort of like, uh, I don't know, '80s-looking, uh, art. And if you stamped more times than Bruce, then you won. And if you didn't, then you didn't win. Um, and basically like that experience was a lot about, uh, the importance of videogames to my generation. It was just like a really seminal thing in my life. As I grew older, games were getting more and more complex. And they went from this highly abstract thing when I was really young to a pretty representational thing by the time that I was in college. And so that's what I really wanted to investigate as an artist. About the same time, I got a call from, uh, my friend, Josh Randall, who was the Creative Director of Harmonix at the time. He's like, "Oh, we need a production assistant. Like do you want some part-time work?" Um, so, I, I took the part-time work. And we started getting in prototypes for the Rock Band drums and Rock Band guitars. And we were using them to test the game, and they all kept breaking. One of my jobs was to just track where they all were. What ended up happening was I ended up fixing all of them, because I brought in my soldering iron and my glue gun and all that sort of stuff. And like in my desk in a office of like six other people, I was there with like solder, fixing each, each drum kit. And then I started writing up like suggestions for how we could improve the designs. And next thing I knew, I was in China like at giant assembly lines, seeing thousands and thousands of Rock Band drums get built. Uh, so, yeah, that's how I first found my way into it. It's like mostly I learned all the things I knew about hardware design in order to make these art games, uh, and then ended up using it to make Rock Band.
