20-year old ATI is a prime
supplier of graphics processing chips to the PC and related
markets. It produces ‘Imageon’ graphics chips for the embedded and
handheld markets as well as the Fire GL processors for high end
workstations. In digital TVs ATI also holds substantial market
share producing DTV decoders used in many high end consumer TVs
such as Sony’s Wega range.
Richard Huddy runs ATI’s European
Developer Relations group. That means that he’s the guy
responsible for explaining and evangelising ATI’s new technologies
to games developers and anyone working in 3D. He’s technical
enough to go into depth with games developers about soft shadowed
parallax bump mapping, best practices for using DirectX graphics
and other tough technical areas. On a good day he can even recall
all the important differences between Shader Model 2 and Shader
Model 3 including the wild and crazy bits like the minimum numbers
of temporary registers exposed in the various pixel shaders and the
correct syntax for HLSL...
Q: What education did you
have?
I left school with 3 good ‘A levels
and went to Imperial College in London to study for a degree in
Chemistry. After two years I was surprised to find that I didn’t
really much like chemistry, so I ventured out into the world of
employment instead.
Q: What was your first
job?
I authored quite a few games as a
freelance games writer back in the 80’s and early 90’s. These were
mostly released on the Z80 based home computers which were popular
at that time. After a few years of that I moved to coding for the
exciting new IBM PC with its hugely impressive 4.77MHz 8086
processor!
Realistically it was a kind of a
half-job. When it worked well it was a really terrific experience,
there were intensely productive times and projects typically only
lasted 4 to 20 weeks. That makes for a rich variety, and I enjoyed
that a great deal.
The down-side was that doing the work
didn’t always guarantee payment, and in the early days it was a
genuine struggle to make much money from writing what are
essentially cheap and simple games.
Q: How tough did you find it
and did you embark on a new career direction once starting real
work?
The experience of working for myself
was a mixed blessing. It’s great to get up in the morning and know
that you’ve chosen the day that’s in front of you. But it’s also a
little scary knowing that you won’t get paid unless you deliver.
And in fact, one of the turning points in my decision to get a
proper job was the experience of working with games publishers who
went bust just after I had worked hard to write games for
them.
The thrill of taking your destiny on
your own hands is somewhat tempered by the observation that
actually you are too often at the mercy of customers and suppliers
and their failures are sometimes capable of doing you great
damage.
Q: What was your second
job?
After working as a freelance coder for
a few years I settled down to a “proper job” with a small company
called Magnetic Scrolls that produced illustrated text adventures
on machines like the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, and the early PCs.
I spent five years with Magnetic Scrolls, and one good thing for me
about that was that I started as a contractor for them - so I was
able to get a good feel for what the company was like.
Magnetic Scrolls were a good employer
and I stayed with them for around five years, but eventually they
gradually wound down due to delayed deliveries of their own
projects and worst still because they failed to anticipate the
change in the market. If you continue to produce illustrated text
adventures when the market has moved on then sooner or later you’ll
hear the sound of the bailiffs at the door!
Q: How did your career develop
to your current status?
When I started to work as a developer
relations evangelist I did that only because I created the role for
myself. I had taken a job with 3DLabs (now part of Creative Labs)
working in their driver team, and it quickly became apparent that
most of the games designed for hardware at that time were running
on DirectX 3 and ran slowly. There were several common problems
that surfaced time and time again, so I quickly developed a knack
for figuring out what the most likely problem was. Taking that
message out into the game developer community seemed to me like a
useful thing to do, so I started working with the lead DirectX guys
at Microsoft to arrange conferences and technical meetings where
they could explain their decisions and the sometimes very subtle
consequences to developers.
Once I had done that for 3DLabs
for a couple of years I was head-hunted by NVIDIA. I moved there
and worked for 4 years originally setting up their European
Developer Relations group. Then I moved to ATI just over three
years ago and I’ve done similar things here at ATI, though I have a
somewhat broader role now too.
These days I’ve taken advantage of the
fact that my technical knowledge combined with my communication
skills makes me a fairly rare breed. So I do a good deal of
technical marketing work including quite a few web interviews and
general technical PR for ATI in Europe.
Q: Did you embark on a career
plan or did you just progress naturally into the new
role?
I don’t think I really embarked on a
career plan initially, though I would say that from an early age I
knew that I wanted to work with computers.
Since that early foray into
programming I realised that a career plan would be a good idea, and
recently it has become a routine part of the way I
think.
Nowadays my plan extends roughly one
year ahead in detail, and about five years ahead in its more
general aspects.
Q: What have been the highs
and lows of your career?
I’m pleased to say I have more highs
than lows!
My quick-fix highs tend to come from
being on stage and talking to a well informed and very bright
technical audience such as those that we find in games
programming. Presenting new technical content to such an audience
is both challenging and rewarding. Being rated highly at these
events has done wonders for my professional confidence and
ambition.
One of my favourite long-term highs
would be the 6 month period when we put a plan for product launch
into position and followed it to its natural conclusion. We did
that so well around 5 years ago that my small group of just four
people (including myself) delivered around 85% of the content which
was used at a world-wide product launch. When that happens (and we
were heavily out-numbered about four to one by the members of the
US team) then you just can’t help feeling great.
Probably my deepest low would be when
I felt that I had to leave 3DLabs and go and work for their new and
aggressive competitor. Doing so was a good career move for me
personally, but I don’t think you can do something like that and
not feel like a traitor when you leave all your friends
behind.
Q: What advice could you give
to anyone starting out who wants to do what you are doing
now?
I don’t generally like to give careers
advice, but if I did it would be to find work that makes you happy
instead of just accepting work that will pay well enough. I’ve
seen too many people in humdrum jobs that put up with it for year
after year because “it’s a job” and because the world out there is
too frightening to them.
So, look within yourself, decide what
you want to do and commit to making that happen. And if you want
to evangelise PC gaming hardware or to work as a part of the games
industry then you really have two routes in. If you don’t have a
solid background in 3D graphics then get in touch with your local
games publisher and see if they have any openings for testers,
games designers and programmers - working through games companies
is a favoured path for people in my kind of position. If you
already have the experience in 3D graphics then go to our web site
and start looking around for openings. We’re always on the look
out for bright and creative people, and that’s generally true of
our competitors too because we work in such a dynamic
environment.