Elite Dangerous

They were like, "Well, that's..." I think that was just impressive from their perspective.

Um, and at the time, uh, 'cause I worked on Elite Dangerous for seven years, um, they had just been working on importing, um, Elite to work with Oculus, and I think for a really long time, Elite Dangerous was the demo game for Oculus, right? So they had a, a fresh perspective of what it was like working with, like, uncharted territory in terms of hardware.

So again, it was just right place, right time, weird overlap of niche.

Um, so it's just, I think just blind luck if, if I'm absolutely honest.

And I started working on, um, a, a fresh project at Frontier and, uh, at the, at the time, I then got a pop in an, in an inbox sort of saying, "Hey, would you consider a move?" Um, and I just sort of gave it a bit of a-- I, I gave it a go and I pulled that thread and, uh, that's, that's, that was my move.

And the, uh, I think the interesting part of it was I had like this sort of full circle of an imposter syndrome when I got that email come through, because on the one hand, it's like, dude, I didn't have the background that so many of, like, my peers had, especially as, as new grads were then coming in under me and you c- you-- I look at their portfolio work and you see what they're doing and see what they're studying, and I'm like, "I didn't do that." And I was like, "Oh, did I sort of cheat my way in here?" And then you get over it and et cetera.

And then it went round again when I-- and I think the question that came to my head was, am I, am I a, a good designer or am I just a designer for Frontier? Can I only be a designer for Frontier Games? Um, especially when a studio has a way of working and they have a way of seeing things and talking about things, uh, they've got a, a cadence to how meetings run and development works, even if it's cross-project and you move from, let's say you moved from the, uh, Elite Dangerous to the, the Jurassic World games or to one of the Planet games, the, the studio is still very much the same.

There are differences between projects, but the studio is the same.

And it was a series of, like, I think space is cool, let me see if I can find some games.

I found Elite Dangerous and EVE, and like, looking at those two, EVE seemed more interesting.

And I was like, "Let's try.

Let's do that." [clears throat]

I'm going to read Paul Hines real quick, just because this is a man after my own heart with old flight games.

Paul Hines, Lucasfilm Games, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, Microprose, F-19 Stealth Fighter, F-16 Fighting Falcon, Comanche, Maximum Overkill, all the X-Wing, TIE Fighter, X-Wing, X-Wing TIE Fighter, X-Wing Versus TIE Fighter, Wing Commander, and more recently, Elite Dangerous.

Oh, I forgot about Wing Commander.

well wing commander yeah wing commanders but elite dangerous is still because it's space flight combat but

is it like actually like the like i thought that was a different type of flight to combat is that behind the base

it's space space flight

It's, it, like, moves as he's moving, but he did set up-

...

the fans.

Yeah, Elite Dangerous I think is, that sounds right.

Oh.

Uh, so, like, when he speeds up the fan blows in his face even though that wouldn't necessarily be how it w- would work in the game.

Nothing to do with the shit

... some- something they used to say about Elite, Elite: Dangerous.

It's-

Yeah