Doug Service

It has been difficult deciding what I want to be when I grow up. In my youth, I was involved in both visual arts and music. I did a lot of drawing and painting and played a couple of instruments. I was also strongly influenced by my father's aeronautical engineering background so I took a lot of math and science in high school. After a short stint working on a degree in Physics, I realized I was more interested in the arts. I completed half of a bachelor's degree in art and then settled into a music degree. I graduated from San Diego State University with a Batchelor of Music degree in music composition. My major instrument is the violin.

The music program at San Diego State University has a strong emphasis on musical composition so I was very fortunate to have many of my pieces performed by good musicians. I heard performances of my compositions for solo piano, violin and piano, string quartet, and orchestra. I found the orchestra performance quite exhilarating since I was the conductor.

I became interested in using computers for music composition and proceeded to take a number of computer science classes. Armed with this new knowledge I began writing programs that generated musical scores. The IBM PC had just hit the market and was still quite expensive so all of my programming was done on mainframe computers. One day I discovered that the Tektronix terminals in the lab had a vector graphics mode. I promptly located a manual and in two weeks coded a graphical interface to my music composition program. I received an Association of Composers and Performers (ASCAP) scholarship for one of the compositions generated by this program. I then received a summer scholarship to the Brooklyn Conservatory Center for Computer Music (BCCCM) where I had the opportunity to work with the composer Charles Dodge. The BCCCM had a large Sun3 server with a digital to analog converter the size of an IBM PC hooked up to the back. Writing programs for this system was my first experience with digital sound synthesis and I was completely hooked.

Research on graduate schools led me to the Computer Music program at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). I applied and was accepted into the program as a composition major. I thought graduate school was a time for radical experimentation. USCD thought differently. Needless to say we did not get along very well. The most influential person I met at UCSD was Harold Cohen a professor in the visual arts department. Harold is a painter from England who is well known for his post abstract expressionist paintings and his work has been shown in the Venice Biennale. Harold started using computers to model the process of freehand drawing and painting. I found his work quite fascinating. Harold and I hit it off and I was soon writing control code for one of his painting robots. The drawings and paintings that Harold's computer programs and robots produce are stunning.

Harold used computers as a means to test his theories about art. In simple terms, Harold believed that if his ideas about art were meaningful then his computer programs and robots would generate meaningful works of art. If his ideas about art were inconsistent or flawed, then his computer programs and robots would produce less than acceptable works of art. Working for Harold was a great experience. His ideas and work remains a strong influence on my thinking to this day.

Since the UCSD music department and I did not see eye to eye, I decided to get a job as a programmer. I first worked at Locus Computing working on IBM's AIX version of UNIX. I then worked on telecom applications at Titan Client Server Technologies for Nortel. When Titan shut down, I worked on satellite image processing applications at Raytheon E-Systems. This was followed by a contracting position at Hewlett-Packard working with supercomputer debuggers.

My first introduction to games was at Hewlett-Packard. A few of the programmers played Quake capture the flag in the evenings. I would play with them occasionally, but it was not until Geoffrey Paulson brought in a 3dfx Voodoo1 card, put it in a machine and let me play capture the flag on it that I got hooked. The experience was intense beyond belief. I immediately went out and bought a Voodoo2 card and QuakeII. I played QuakeII all the way through once by myself and twice in cooperative mode. I immediately started reading everything I could find on game programming and started building a graphics engine in my spare time. I also started playing every first person shooter I could get my hands on. Games tied together my experience and love of visual arts, music, and programming. After about a year of work, I had a good demo together and applied for a position at a company that builds racing games. I was accepted for the job and started my career in the game industry. The first title I worked on was a motorcycle racing game. I wrote the sound system, the event scripting system, and added major enhancements to the animation system. I next worked on a game based on the TransAm racing series. We built the game on top of the NetImmerse graphics engine. I designed and implemented the camera system, the input system, and a lot of the basic application architecture.

One day I had lunch with some friends and Steve Nix, the CEO, at Ritual. I guess the lunch left some impression since the next week I started a job at Ritual as a programmer. Everyone at Ritual is superb in his or her area of specialty. Tom Mustaine, Levelord, and Rob Atkins are well known in the game industry for the incredible work they have done on titles such as Sin and Heavy Metal FAKK2. Steve Nix is the absolutely the best businessperson I have had the privilege to worked with. However, the best part of the job at Ritual is that everyone loves games and is very passionate about them. Coming to work in the morning at Ritual is a wonderful experience. We work hard but the shared passion for great games drives the entire company. Thanks Ritual for helping me figure out what I want to do when I grow up.

Selected articles from Ritual Entertainment Official Company Website

http://www.ritual.com/index.php?section=tribe&id=66&ref=tribe