Today we’re proud to introduce the newest member of the Cloud Imperium team, Pete Mackay! If you’ve queried our customer support channels in the last few days, you’ve probably already met Pete… he jumped right into the post-campaign support backlog and helped us catch up almost immediately. Since he’s working with the community, you’re likely to be seeing a lot of him in the coming months!
How did you get started in the game industry? I’ve wanted to make games since the early 90s, but there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for a career in games in Salt Lake City (especially for someone who didn’t know the business end of a for loop!), so I ended up at a cool regional ISP called XMission. I was there for about 10 years when I decided a change of pace was in order. So I gave my notice, put my stuff in a truck and moved to Austin with nothing more than a place to crash when I arrived and a vague idea of my plan for for world domination. Shortly afterward I got a job with a great studio called LightBox Interactive doing QA in downtown Austin. A couple of years later I moved into a production position and took up the mantle of Community Manager, which ultimately ended up in an offer to work for Chris at Cloud Imperium.
What will you be doing for Cloud Imperium? He didn’t say it in the interview but I think Eric hired me to be his meat shield when the robot uprising begins. Until that fateful day I’ll be interfacing with all of the fans through the various channels: the forums, Facebook, Twitter and whatever else we come up with during this project. Are you familiar with Chris Roberts’ past games? Oh yeah. I won’t say I’m the biggest Wing Commander 2 fan there is, but I feel like I would finish favorably in that contest. I spent my entire Christmas Day in 1991 reading a DOS manual to learn how to squeeze enough of that 640k out of my parents 386sx to get it to run. I loved the graphic-novel feel of the art and the various vignettes in the game, and how the writing made me feel like I really was the hero of the story. And I’ll admit it: when I was 14 I sent a letter to Origin asking them to hire me to make games. I think you probably know how well that worked out for me. ;) What are you most excited to see in Star Citizen/Squadron 42? First of all I’m supremely exited to see the return of hardcore space combat simulation. This was my first true love in PC gaming and something that I’d given up on ever returning. I’ve only been on-board for a short time but what I’ve seen so far has convinced me this game is a total love letter to space ships and the romance of naval space fantasy. What are you playing right now? Super Metroid (on an actual SNES!) and The Ur-Quan Masters (The open source Star Control 2 project). Gameography Starhawk (2012)