I used to play a shard called Novus Opiate. It was the biggest early shard.
After it died I went on to run a couple of servers and teaching myself to code. Alphanine and Sacred.
When I wanted to drop out of school I wanted to do 3d animation to make a game like UO. But realised I have 0 talent in design but I love programming. So ended up doing that. Thankfully I never became a game dev tho. The stories scare me.
After spending my entire childhood wanting to be a game programmer I had one short summer job at a big studio during my university years and was immediately put off by the terrible working conditions.
Years later I heard that there were good studios which treat you right so I left my job in surgical simulation and finally started as a game developer. That was seven years ago. It's tough at times but I haven't ever regretted it. There are plenty of good employers out there, these days.
Exact same experience, except I've never gone back to a career in game development... although I've considered it at various points in my software dev career.
While software development in general is fun and continuously challenging there's a very special excitement to looking at what you're actually doing and going "holy shit, we make games!". I've had those moments when I'm in a meeting discussing design details and considerations when suddenly it just strikes me that we're sitting there discussing how to make a game more fun and that's part of our job.
I'm also really happy when people ask me what I do for a living and I can link a flashy trailer instead of trying to describe some web backend thing for a service they never heard about.
edit: probably the biggest advantage in game development is the unique atmosphere brought about by the shared deep passion for games throughout the company.
Nice to know there's good places to work in the gaming industry. I think I'm scared due to the number of bad stories that popup now-n-then and the over-worked scenarios to meet deadlines.
I think the problem now is I would like to build a game similar to UO but unless I did it myself I don't think it will ever happen. Kinda like the plot of Mythic Quest on Apple TV. He starts his own company to make the game of his vision.
I used to play a shard called Novus Opiate. It was the biggest early shard.
After it died I went on to run a couple of servers and teaching myself to code. Alphanine and Sacred.
When I wanted to drop out of school I wanted to do 3d animation to make a game like UO. But realised I have 0 talent in design but I love programming. So ended up doing that. Thankfully I never became a game dev tho. The stories scare me.