As Real As It Gets
I started working on FS in 1997 as the terrain texture artist for Combat Flight Simulator, rising through the ranks to become the Studio Art Director, where I lead a team of over 25 full-time and contract staff, in addition to a significantly scaled outsourcing program, one of the first within Microsoft Games Studios.
I worked on close to a dozen titles during that time, gaining invaluable experience from a diverse group of passionate developers, men and women who cared deeply about the magic of flight. Along the way I earned a couple patents for work with our engineering team, and our titles won multiple awards.
That’s the tagline for Microsoft Flight Simulator, one of the oldest software franchises in existence. Continually published by Microsoft from 1982-2009, and triumphantly restarted in 2020. I spent 10 years in the game studio that shipped FS and other software titles for PC and Xbox, and was the Studio Art Director for about three years.
I learned a lot about building customer focused software working on Flight Simulator and other titles in the studio. Fans of the FS series are incredibly passionate, and every product was designed clearly with them in mind.
At the peak, nearly 100,000 hardcore simmers produced user generated content, from simple aircraft texture repaints to incredibly complex code based professional products that simulated weather radar or modeled complex aircraft systems like the Boeing 747-400 to a degree of complexity that rivaled the professional simulator systems at Boeing itself. This meant designing art assets with those users in mind, so they could easily customize nearly everything from the default. Those lessons helped prepare me to lead future creator driven production pipelines and processes.
A global product that was translated into over a dozen languages, Flight Simulator required cultural sensitivity, and geopolitical awareness few games need (ask me about one of the several international incidents FS generated).
Most importantly of all though, my years in the studio was where I began to learn about both leadership, and management, especially under pressure of deadline development. I wasn’t the best of either back then, but the lessons I learned there stayed with me, the most important lesson being that if you want to be any good at either management or leadership, you must be intentional about it.