I started out at Media Magic in 1994 as a "production assistant", doing odd jobs for the programmers. This involved using in-house development tools to process various script and resource files needed for the games we were working on. Another memorable task was finding lots of sound effects and putting them into the games. Eventually I contributed directly to the programming effort on CGELA, shown below.
Media Magic did "edutainment" - children's games that had some kind of educational value as well. The developers were really cutting-edge, in spite of working on children's games... the programming was top-notch and the artwork was fantastic. We used WinG (the predecessor to DirectDraw) to make games perform well under Windows 3.1. The graphics were done with 3D sprites on beautifully drawn 2D backgrounds, similar in effect to the later Final Fantasy games.
These were the two programmers I worked for, who later went on to work on NHL games at EA Canada:
Here's the credits screen of a game that I worked on with my name in it. (Look under "Additional Programmers" on the left.) I wrote some code to drive one of the mini-games, a little puzzle to be pieced together.
