Windstorm's Dusty Monk Interview - Part One

14 Apr 2010 at 13:37:52 by Tim McDonald

Dusty Monk has had an interesting life in the games industry so far. From Midway through Ensemble, he's worked on some of the biggest titles and with one of the biggest and most celebrated companies in recent history. Having now gone it alone to start his own studio - Windstorm Studios - we thought it was high time to sit down with the man and find out what led to this point, what's happened in the intervening years, how things are going, and what the future might hold.

This part of the interview focuses on Monk's history. Check back tomorrow for the second part, which discusses Windstorm, the company's current projects, and the future.

IncGamers: Let's start at the start: how did you get into gaming, and what were your first experiences?

Dusty Monk (right): Just to give you a point of reference I'm 45 years old, and I've been gaming since I was 14, so some of the very first, earliest games. [Laughs] I played my first computer game on an Apple II+ back in 1978 and I played Wizardry I and Ultima I when those first came out. Those were the earliest computer games I played, and I was pretty much hooked from that point forward. And I've been mostly a PC gamer. A lot of people define their starting moments with the Commodore 64 and with Nintendo, and I played all of those, but by and large for my entire life I've been a PC gamer.

Was that the point when you actually decided that you wanted to get into gaming and work in game development?

Absolutely. I got a computer science degree at Texas A&M and immediately got a job coming out of college, and worked for ten years at various different real-life companies. I worked for the oil industry for awhile, and I worked for awhile up in San Diego. It was while I was in San Diego I was working for a company that I knew was going to lay me off in six months, and I had six months to myself, being paid and not really being watched, so I spent that time building a game demo. I submitted that game demo to a couple of different companies out there in San Diego and ended up interviewing with Midway Home Entertainment in San Diego, and that was where I actually got my first job working in the industry.

For how long did you work at Midway?

From the mid 90s until 1999, at which point my wife and I decided to return to Texas. Our family is all from Texas and we'd started a family of our own at the point, so we wanted to be a little bit closer to the grandparents. So I started interviewing in Dallas and then that was when I got the job at Ensemble, and at that time Ensemble was about 40 people. I interviewed with a couple of other companies, and an interesting story is that I actually interviewed at Gearbox, which as you know is also here in Dallas. At the time, Gearbox was about nine guys. They called me up and they interviewed me on a Saturday. [Laughs] I was living in San Diego, and they were like, “Yeah, come on up! We're all up here working on a Saturday anyway, so come on up and we'll do the interview.” So I was thinking – I've got a brand new kid, I haven't been married all that long, and these are nine guys working on a Saturday for a very small company which that doesn't have really assured funding. Ensemble has a secure contract, it's a great company, it's well-established, there's 40 people, they're very professional - so I went with Ensemble.

The irony of that is that now Gearbox is still very independent and very well-established with over 100 people working there, and still very much one of the top competitors in the field, while Ensemble – the sure bet – is no more. [Laughs] So you never know!

Considering all of that, do you regret your decision?

Absolutely not. I find it ironic and interesting but I don't regret the decision at all. I still maintain and firmly believe that Ensemble was one of the best places to work at in the industry. Turnover rate at Ensemble was phenomenally low for a game development company. It was pretty much par for the course, for any game development company you worked for, to work for two or three years, get burned out, get a title under your belt, and then go work for somewhere else. That was actually my plan when I went to work for Ensemble! I wasn't a big RTS fan, and Ensemble had two games under its belt at the time when I went to work for them – Age of Empires 1 and Age of Empires 2. But I thought, it's a big franchise and they make triple-A titles; I'll work on Age of Mythology, get that title on my resume and I'll go work for someone else.

I ended up staying there for nine years because the work environment was really good, and they treated their employees far better than just about any other game development company I'd worked with, or from other people that I'd heard of.

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