Black Rock Hiring For New Game

Some development studios release a great product and makes sure they let everybody know with unprecedented levels of hype, and other studios sit there relatively quietly letting their quality do the the talking for them, Brighton’s Black Rock Studios are one of those studios.

Developers of the rather good, but under the radar, Pure and the adrenaline filled excellence that is Split/Second look to be hard at work on their next project. A vacancy on publisher, Disney’s website shows that they are hiring for an as yet unannounced PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game.

So if you’ve spent years studying and are now a Bachelor of Science you’ll be able to stop stacking those shelves or working in a call centre and actually put it to good use helping to make a great game. However, they do say you also need a couple of years experience working on AAA blockbuster games and some other stuff, but I won’t let the facts get in the way of  making a rather barbed point.

Whatever the next project turns out to be, Black Rock can be sure I’ll be at the front of the queue.

21 Comments

  1. Pretty much every game job for PS3 and Xbox 360 requires years of experience on AAA games in the description :(. Seems to me bachelors cant get into a AAA game straighyt out of uni CC unless they have a few years in games under their belt which makes sense of course as its a competitive industry. Its just getting that first game job thats the tricky bit.

    • Welcome to reality, we’ve got jackets!

      • Is there a badge too?

        Still, a lot of it comes down to who you know not what you know.

      • ^ think you’ll find all aspects of employment are like that.

  2. Is it too early for them to be making a start on Split/Second 2 (or Split/Second ‘insert name here’ if they carry on with the ‘Velocity’ type tagline)??
    I for one would be a day one for S/S2 (or whatever) as the first one is absolutely awesome!

    • Yes it is.

      there was rumours that there was going to be a pure 2, but that got pulled by Disney, so it could be a whole new IP or S/S2

      Either way, i can’t wait

  3. I understand why company’s want experience, but they do make it way to hard to get your career going. Same as in my industry of web design/development, people as for experience, yet you don’t, as you never get the chance to get it!?!?!

    I hope studios start opening there doors to people with less experiance. I am certain that people out there will take less money to be given that chance to work in the industry. even if its just for one or two games, then they move up the pay scale.

    • To be fair to them, this is a directors position, which they aren’t going to hand out to any tom, dick or harry – the way in is to start at the bottom, but as the industry is declining at the moment chances will be few and far between for some time to come, maybe 3 or 4 years when the recession is behind us people start making luxury purchases (like consoles) en-masse again

  4. Finishing my Bcs next year … hopefully i can work on the sequel ;)

    • Good luck with that, maybe we could get some insider info then?!

      BTW, what is up with the logo beside ‘thesixthaxis’ title changing all the time over the last couple of days?!

  5. I got my degree in 2003 and some years before that I already realised it was a waste of time and money and not worth the paper it’s printed on. I’ve never shown my degree to a single employer, I just send them examples of my work instead. If you want to get into the industry, build a portfolio and don’t bother going to University, it doesn’t prepare you for real world development in any way and really, if I was hiring a developer, I certainly wouldn’t take a degree as a credential either because the vast majority of the 180 so-called ‘programmers’ they churned out on my course didn’t know what the f*ck they were doing, it’s a disgrace.

    • The EXACT same reasons why I chose the courses I’m going to carefully.

    • I have a degree, (not anything to do with computers etc, its in business and marketing) i have never used it, unfortunatley these days, so many people have degrees, that they dont really separate you from the croww. as katy said, your better off trying to sell yourself other ways, or start from the bottom, fresh from school and work your way up. even junior roles these days require 2 years experience. where the fuck are people meant to get the experience from. arseholes. This is a topic that really winds me up lol

  6. In all honesty, I’ve only signed up to two courses that involve computer games development. After some digging around and sifting every drop of information out of them, I can say this for certain; anyone that signs on to a courses that’s relatively new or doesn’t have ANY connections to the industry are in for a shock when they leave. I’ve heard horror stories of people using softimage 3D tech in their courses, which is at least 15YEARS OLD. Really, either you research the courses carefully or you’re screwed.

    • Most University degrees are like that. In 1998 they were teaching students in my class Delphi and Prolog in the first year. I asked them why they didn’t teach C++ as per what’s used in the real world, their argument was that Pascal had a simpler syntax and the principles could be applied to other languages. They are right, but my view is if you can’t handle curly brackets, pointers and references you shouldn’t be a fucking programmer in the first place.

      • Are you serious? Actually in both of the courses, we’ll have to learn C# before we’ll be allowed to type in C++. Also, we’re going to work on project with commerically available engines, and each course has us in work placement for 6 months at a proper development studio.

      • Yeah I’m serious, and that is also bad they are teaching you C# first. Even though it’s an excellent and ECMA-ratified language, it is essentially only useful for writing Windows applications and will exclusively teach you MS APIs. They should be starting you on procedural C, then moving you to C++ and adding in things like STL once you get to grips with the basics. You will also want to make sure they are teaching you to use real IDEs used in the real world like Visual Studio and Eclipse/NetBeans, a range of common APIs and that there is a significant design aspect to the course as well using proper design tools like Visio to derive UML diagrams, not pieces of paper.

      • Now that you mention it, a tutor for one of course actually works for microsoft and talked about the several dev kits that people on the course worked on. He also mentioned of people having to make their own games with the very same tools used in the engines for the course.

      • Then he’s fail because PC games aren’t written in C# usually, it’s too abstract and high level.

      • Actually katy, to be honest, I’ve just looked at the list and realise we’re typing in C, not C#. Sorry about the mix-up.

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