Dev to Dev S03 E01 - Steven Dwyer

This one's a bit special for me — Steven and I go back, and it was great getting to sit down and finally hear the whole story, not just the bits I already knew.

What gets me about Steven's career is how little of it he actually planned. He failed his way out of a computer science degree at Glasgow, and it was his Mum who pushed him toward Abertay's games course — one of only two in the world at the time. He burned out hard on his first industry job in Japan and quit on the spot the day it shipped. He recovered by playing World of Warcraft, and it was, once again, his Mum who pointed out that people actually make that game for a living. Twenty years later, he's still there.

Every "failure" in his story turned out to be a redirect. I don't think you can plan for that — you can only trust it when it happens.

In This Conversation

"The designers are using hammers and nails. I'm the guy that makes the hammers."
— on what tools engineering actually is

"Within ten seconds, almost involuntarily, I stood up, wiped the drool off my face, walked over to my manager, and said: I quit."
— the moment burnout on Sonic Riders caught up with him, the instant the game got its final approval

"It wasn't important to him that I'd answer the question specifically — it was that he could lead me to an answer I'd arrive at myself."
— what he learned, years later, his Blizzard interview was actually testing

"There's a point where you stop thinking you need to go somewhere to be successful. You just start to feel like wherever you go, you'll be fine."
— on what repeated immigration actually left him with

— The Full Conversation —

Alex (00:00)
Good to see you — it's been a while. We're friends, but I don't know your full history, so I'm excited to dig into it — I always enjoy uncovering things about people I know but don't actually know. I'll start with my favourite first question. What first inspired you about video games?

Steven Dwyer (00:30)
Wow. It goes way back — I'm no spring chicken. My first interaction with anything resembling games was a proto-console called the Grandstand. Do you know it?

Alex (00:50)
I had one too. Yep.

Steven Dwyer (00:51)
There you go. The Grandstand had physical switches you'd flip to change games. The GOAT, as they say, was Pong — it used an old potentiometer-style dial, and that was it. I'd sit there for hours hitting the ball back and forth, watching it fly off the screen, because I didn't have anyone else to play with.

Eventually I tried playing it with both hands, like everybody experiments with. My mum saw this and thought it was interesting — back then nobody knew where games were going. So she got me one of those old Game & Watch-style handhelds — a yellow, flattish, squishy thing with a tiny LCD screen — that was Pac-Man. That's what started the fascination.

A lot of us have a similar history: I'd go outside if forced to, but left alone I'd just sit in front of a screen. Once pushed outside, I'd find my friends had other systems — Commodore 16s, Acorns — so I'd go round to their houses to avoid being nagged, and play their computers. From day one, this was the only thing I was really interested in.

Alex (03:17)
Right, so it hooked you immediately — what was it about it that captured your fascination?

Steven Dwyer (03:27)
It touches a little on your upbringing — how dark do you want me to go, Alex? If you had a hard time at school, you'd come home and look for an escape from reality. You don't process that as a kid, you're just doing it. But a lot of us have that: a system that's simple, that I could understand and get good at fast — a skill nobody else around me had. You can't frame it that way as a kid, but that's basically it: hard time at school, come home, escape into the video game universe. I don't know how much has changed — we all love games for that escape. I was just the pro version of it when I was younger.

Alex (04:37)
I can relate — video games validated me. They gave me confidence I could do something well, even when people told me I couldn't. Sounds similar for you — picking up the controller, getting good at it, feeling like: can I do this? Gave you self-confidence, belief almost.

Steven Dwyer (04:50)
Yeah. I wonder — if I'd been born a generation later, into a world with esports and competitive online play as an actual avenue, would that have changed my trajectory? Would that be what I'd be doing now? I think it's because that avenue didn't exist that I got into game development instead. If there'd been a path to play professionally, I might have gone that way. But because there wasn't, I wanted to know how this works, how do I make these — I had so many ideas. That's basically how I got into game development.

Alex (06:02)
Interesting, definitely a teaser. Where did you grow up?

Steven Dwyer (06:08)
Glasgow, Scotland.

Alex (06:10)
Any siblings or family members who played?

Steven Dwyer (06:19)
This was back when it was all nascent — so few systems, arcades yet to come. From my mum's perspective this was just a curiosity her son had. I've got a sister, but she came along nine years later. The kids in my neighbourhood were in the same boat — each bought some proto-system, all weird, all bespoke. A friend would mention some odd game they'd got, and you'd go round to see it. Maybe two or three of my friends had a different system each.

Alex (07:22)
I've spoken to a few people about this — Luke, for instance, grew up in a remote part of Ireland where video games or development just weren't really a thing. Was Glasgow different — was the concept of video games and game shops part of the culture, or still very underground?

Steven Dwyer (07:56)
Especially with games, the collective consciousness was starting to understand computers were coming into homes. A friend had one of the original IBM PCs — I'd go round and play one of the original 3D games, made of primitives, no real definition to anything. He'd mostly used the PC for word processing and spreadsheets. So people were getting used to the idea, but games specifically were still a way off. When I was playing the Grandstand, a video game arcade was so far in the future nobody had even thought about it.

Scotland is remote, though not by today's standards. I was born in '79, coming of age in the mid-80s, right as all that started kicking off. Major cities had more options; the further out you went, the longer it took to arrive — probably the same in Ireland.

Alex (09:34)
Makes sense. So video games were an obsession all through school, and at some point you go to university for computer science. What took you in that direction?

Steven Dwyer (09:56)
You're giving me the "done his research" feeling. As a kid playing games in the nascent age of computers, your parents get a little worried — is there a career in this, is my son going to make money? Games weren't sold as "games" the way they are now, so there was a worry. In high school I was good at art — graphic design specifically — and there wasn't really a computing class, just curiosities. But there was a computer science class in one of my last years, using some of the original Apple machines. I've never been a fan of Apple's products, but I found it fascinating how alien that system seemed compared to everything else.

So, finishing high school — where do you go from here? A choice between graphic design and computing science. By then the world was catching up, and my mum asked the obvious parent question: if you don't know which to choose, which makes the most money?

Alex
A logical decision.

Steven Dwyer
I answered computing was going to be the next big thing. But Glasgow being further from the centre of things came in again — only a few computing science courses existed. Luckily Glasgow has the well-established University of Glasgow, and they had a computing science course — the only one available to me. I signed up. I'll pause for questions, because the spoiler is: I did not do well in that class.

Alex (13:30)
That was my next question — you spent a couple of years there, then moved to Abertay University. How did that happen?

Steven Dwyer (13:38)
Everything was so nascent that the language Glasgow taught was Ada. I found out years later the military had an early interest in it — representative of these nascent fields, where early adopters ended up influencing what got taught.

I don't know what it was, but I was completely uninterested. I'd sit in the computer labs, not yet having made the connection that this wasn't games, wasn't what I actually wanted. It was the only course available, so the class was 300 strong — a massive lecture hall, everyone learning simultaneously. I started getting a sinking feeling: if I needed help, I wasn't going to get it, since there'd be a queue of twenty-five people after each lecture. That started a chain reaction of disengaging. I passed the first year somehow, went into the second — but it was almost like burnout. I know that now, having experienced it later in my career, but at the time I couldn't put a name to it. I just didn't want to engage, couldn't get help, so I'd wander around campus — a bit like the stories of Japanese businessmen who get fired and just go eat a sandwich in the park. There's a lot of pressure on you as a kid — parents expecting a lot, you did great in high school.

By the end of second year I'd failed almost everything — strangely passed geography — but everything else, especially my major, I failed. The failure letters arrive, my mum got them too, anger first, then questions. All credit to her, she got right to it: "does this just not interest you? I see you in front of the computer every night, so why are you failing?" She figured out it was the wrong fit and suggested looking for something else related to computers, but not this. That's how we ended up at Abertay University.

Quick history: at the time I transferred, Abertay was the only university in the world — except one, in Japan — offering a game-specific computer science course. They'd been running it a year already, so I joined at the second-year mark of a brand-new field, still rough — they hadn't fully figured out what or how to teach. But it was luck and fortuitousness: rather than struggling through four years at Glasgow, I switched. The course was Computer Games Technology. My mum and I drove the hour and a half to Dundee, sat in front of a lecturer, and he looked at my record and said, "you've been to the University of Glasgow, you're in" — completely glossing over that I'd failed almost everything. Just having attended Glasgow got me in. That's the start of the Abertay era.

Alex (19:20)
I love that. And I imagine at that point you thought: I want to do computer games specifically, not generic computer science — the dots connected.

Steven Dwyer (19:33)
Yeah, and honestly I flew through the four years. The key had turned, the lock unlocked, no problem at all.

Alex (19:46)
Great — your mum put you on the right path. You go through those four years, and at some point do a year in Japan. How did that come about?

Steven Dwyer (20:10)
Coming to the end of Abertay, fourth year, working on dissertations, I was one of five or six people whose work was identified as near the top. I did facial animation — this was around the era of games like Max Payne, where the face was one flat texture, a constant grimace. I used that as an example: with a bit of facial animation, an emotionally driven story would land better. That got highlighted.

An opportunity came up — the university partnered with companies abroad — would I be interested in an internship? I'd never heard the word before. They explained: take your skills, go to whichever company, do what they ask, related to what you're already doing. At Abertay, of ten modules a year, eight were your major and two were electives. Mine was Japanese, because I found it interesting — early anime and manga, not a huge fan, but interested enough. I found out Japan was the "second place in the world" running a games course like ours, and obviously has a games industry, so maybe I wanted to leave that door open. Not how I was processing it at the time, but part of it. So Japan was on the list — what would I actually be doing there?

A year-long internship at Japan's biggest phone company — something like AT&T, fingers in a lot of pies. Their company, NTT, did telecom work but also had a research division working on natural language processing and speech recognition — long before Siri, a nascent field where even tokenization of phonetics was separate from language processing. NTT had two research divisions; I ended up in tokenization. I accepted — who wouldn't want to go to Japan on someone else's dime for a year? The work wasn't games-adjacent, but it let me clock in, clock out, and enjoy Japan for a whole year. About twenty other interns were there at the same time — a great, crazy, party-attitude experience, all of us young and fascinated by Japan.

Alex (24:36)
Amazing. Did you get good exposure to the gaming culture over there?

Steven Dwyer (24:49)
Very much so. By the time I got out there — maybe six to eight years on from the Grandstand era, early nineties or thereabouts — we'd got arcades, early consoles. Definitely gaming stores, and you could play the arcades. One thing I'll never forget: a 24-hour, multi-floor arcade in Osaka, after missing the last train — your options are sit at the station till morning, or go to the arcade. We played physical games like Fist of the North Star punching machines, even bowling. The culture was great, though not what I was working on day to day — mostly socialising with the other interns, so I didn't get much chance to indulge that first year. That's part of why I stayed: I felt like there was more to experience in Japan, so I applied to as many video game companies as I could.

Alex (26:43)
And that took you into production work on an actual game.

Steven Dwyer (26:48)
The classic desperate-foreigner thing. My Japanese wasn't great. At the company I'd interned for, everybody spoke English — even the Japanese staff saw it as a chance to practise theirs. But I worried: at an actual Japanese games company, where everyone only spoke Japanese, would I thrive? In the end, how much I wanted to stay outweighed the fear — I'd let them decide. I applied to about fifty companies, from Hokkaido down to Hiroshima. Five responses out of fifty — about ten percent — three were "why did you apply, we don't get it," two were "please come in so we can talk about it."

Alex (28:41)
Wow.

Steven Dwyer (28:42)
Strange, right? One in Osaka, one in Tokyo. I was living in Osaka — that's where Now Production is based. NTT's research division was in Kyoto, close by, so a good choice either way. Tokyo interested me because it's this massive city. I went to both interviews. Tokyo — I got lost, obviously, but made it eventually. A curious experience — my language skills weren't great, so at a certain complexity you only pick up vibes, and the vibe I got, maybe paranoia, was that I'd end up as their "pet foreigner." They looked at my demo game and engine and said, essentially, if you want to work for us we'll find something for you to do.

Then Now Production, and it was night and day. The president interviewed me personally, very curious. Now Production had made cool games in the early console era, then moved into contract work — Nintendo or Sega would commission a project, they'd build it, ship under, say, the Sega banner. He showed me their prospectus, genuinely trying to sell me on working there — like they wanted a different mentality, more creative. So I went back, thought about it, but already knew — let's do this. I had to go home, get a new visa, come back — a lot of admin — but it worked out, and I started at Now Production.

Alex (31:46 – 32:28)
Wow. Having emigrated myself, once you've made a move like that, it's hard not to want to keep going. So a year at Now Production, then Blizzard — how did that jump happen?

Steven Dwyer (32:31)
Brutal honesty: I like to think I have a good work ethic. Now Production was a company where very few people spoke English, so my Japanese had to get good fast, and there was a lot of discomfort in that. Try describing God rays, in Japanese, to someone who doesn't know the term well either. Credit to the Japanese team, very patient. But it was a difficult project.

Sonic Team gave Now Production the contract for the original Sonic Riders — my first professional games-industry job. Being part of Sonic Team, working on a Sonic game, was huge right out of the gate. A year and a half, tight schedule, releasing simultaneously on Xbox, PlayStation, and GameCube. Lots of issues, two Sonic Team liaisons telling us their expectations. Because of my work ethic and language struggles, the last six to nine months were exhausting in the Japanese-work-ethic sense — it just feels natural to stay with the team late into the night. Real peer-pressure dynamic. I literally fell asleep on my keyboard more than once.

Major burnout. Toward the end, waiting on the last approval — Nintendo's — you'd send the gold master and they'd accept or reject. We already had PlayStation and Microsoft's sign-off. Our manager came over — I was asleep at my desk — tapped my shoulder: "Steve-san, Nintendo's accepted our game, go home and rest, great job." Still half asleep, I went, "okay, okay." And as he walked away, almost involuntarily, I stood up, wiped the drool off my face, walked over to him, and said: "I quit." Part of me already knew this wasn't sustainable.

Alex (36:35)
Wow.

Steven Dwyer (36:44)
That's how I ended up leaving for what became Blizzard in France. This was my first programming job — no framework for comparison — I just knew if this was what it'd be like, I wasn't sure I could survive it. Existential-crisis moments — foreign country, exhausted, everything seeming much larger than it was. So I thought, maybe I'll go home for a while. I quit and was out of Japan within two weeks — stuff gone, bank accounts closed.

One eye-opening moment: I got off the plane, and my mum started crying as soon as she saw me — I must have looked gaunt and pale. To her credit, she didn't bother me for a month. Looking back, I was recovering that whole time. During it I found World of Warcraft — vanilla WoW had just launched, becoming a massive global phenomenon through to Burning Crusade. I credit WoW for my recovery — I'd played D&D in high school, so a fantasy world game was right up my alley. It felt good to make progress, to get what I hadn't been getting in Japan. After a month, my mum — God bless her — said, "maybe you should start looking for a job, Steven." I think she'd started enjoying having the house to herself.

So I reached a crisis point — didn't want to go back to programming after what I'd been through. With her wisdom, she said something like, "is there not something else in games you could do, that wouldn't throw away what you've learned?" She turned around — I was sitting there like the typical WoW player — and said, "why don't you see if they're looking for people?" I hadn't even made the connection: I'd just made a game professionally, and hadn't connected that people had made this one too.

Alex (40:29)
Almost like you'd refused to make that connection, because you'd had such a bad experience making games you just wanted to consume, not think about making.

Steven Dwyer (40:44)
My brain was very much: imagine these things materialise out of nowhere and you'll be happier. So I looked at their website, and because of WoW's success, Blizzard was hoovering up people for customer support as they went global. Vivendi, an American company, later merged with Activision — around 2007 or 2008 — and that, plus WoW's success, meant they needed support offices covering Europe, Asia, and so on. I joined in customer support, since that's who they were hiring — fifty to a hundred people overnight. Not a difficult process, especially for me. I joined alongside about twenty new hires, another twenty who'd started two weeks earlier. We were all put up at a nearby hotel — the Etap — for two weeks of training. If my Japan internship had crazy parties, the first two weeks at the Etap in Vélizy, south of Paris, were nuts.

Good environment, and I was older than everyone else — a recurring theme in my life, since losing two years at Glasgow meant I arrived at Abertay two years older than everyone starting out. Bit like how the best hockey players are sometimes the ones held back a year — more experience, more comfortable with myself. That was the start of Blizzard customer support. If you'd asked whether I saw myself moving back into engineering — not a single chance.

Alex (44:00)
Doesn't sound like it — a hard pivot away from what you'd done, but still back into video games. In France, pivoted into customer service — how was that, being a huge WoW fan working with fellow players and wrangling all that support?

Steven Dwyer (44:26)
In a lot of ways it felt like feeding my WoW addiction by also doing it during the day. This was in Vélizy, about 30 minutes south of central Paris. I lived in Versailles, the old capital — down the road from the Palace, a lovely place to live.

Coming from two and a half years in Japan — one of the most efficient, well-ordered societies you could live in — to Paris was absolute cultural whiplash. Simple example: wanting the internet hooked up, ancient copper pipework, and getting someone out is like, they're sitting there with a cigarette going, "maybe I'll think about coming round." Such a slow, languid pace compared to Japan. Equally, things I loved — the attitude to holidays, that relaxed view of work; not work-shy exactly, but people there really have work-life balance figured out. That was my second culture shock, after Japan itself — the whiplash between the two, and how differently an entire society can approach things.

That period was recovery too — low pressure from both job and culture, just starting to live and enjoy life again. World of Warcraft, when it arrived, opened a lot of eyes to what a living, breathing online world could be — it deserves its success. Each day at work — a bit surreal, honestly — we had a tool called GM Tool, GM standing for Game Master, Blizzard's term for support reps. You weren't in the game client talking to players directly — vanishingly rare — there was a separate ticketing interface: "I'm stuck in a fireplace" or whatever — Tauren players especially, always getting stuck in fireplaces. We'd pull tickets from a queue and answer them. I felt involved in WoW, but it didn't feel like interacting with it as a player would — different day to day — and then I'd go home and play anyway, so most of my day was WoW in some form, but it stayed fresh because they were genuinely two different sides of the same coin. Two weeks training, then straight onto the floor.

Alex (50:02)
Sounds like that helped you avoid burnout — two sides to it rather than steeped in WoW twenty-four-seven. I'm struck by the parallel between losing yourself in a Pong clone on the Grandstand as a kid, and getting this rich fantasy world to throw yourself into right as you're coming off a real blow to your confidence. Nice symmetry in the timing. I think that's one of the things video games can do — pull you out of dark places.

Steven Dwyer (50:37)
Dramatic, to say the least. I don't know if I'd call it beautiful.

Alex (50:55)
Around four years in customer support, then you move into managing people. How did that feel?

Steven Dwyer (51:06)
There are avenues for promotion in any job. From Game Master, with an aptitude for in-depth investigations — this was the early days of people getting "hacked," in air quotes, since it was rare to be genuinely hacked, more often details shared somewhere. The result: a bad actor logging in, selling everything for gold, mailing it to another account — that's how the third-party gold-selling market came about, the seedy underbelly of WoW's heyday. Internally there was a group called Specialists, drawn from the GM pool, going through logs to find patterns and help players get their stuff back. Specialists tended to be genuinely invested, being players ourselves — some of the worst experiences you could have in a game, really the start of real-world criminal organisations getting into gaming. We wanted to stem that tide.

I became a Specialist after about a year as a GM, great team — still friends now, I was at one of their weddings last year, twenty-odd years on, straight back into old patterns. Opportunities came up as teams expanded — I became what they called a Senior, a mentoring role elsewhere, but in the GM department meant manager: the team reported to you. Around the two-and-a-half-year mark, my first real experience of proper management — a great team, mostly already my friends, which shifted the dynamic a little, but overall good.

Steven Dwyer (continued)
The important part: I started getting an itch that it wasn't enough. Not too easy — the game kept evolving — but for my interests, not challenged enough. Around that two-and-a-half-year mark I started browsing job boards, looking at engineering again — maybe enough time had passed, maybe I'd made a mistake, there were parts of that first job I really liked. With more maturity and management experience, I thought: what if, rather than abandoning everything, I looked at what I liked and didn't, and found somewhere that suited me better. Almost as I finished that thought, an internal posting came up: Irvine, California, Blizzard Entertainment, Tools Engineering.

I didn't fully know what "tools engineering" meant, but it didn't sound like the game development I'd struggled with — maybe adjacent engineering that still involved games. I found out about a tool called WoWEdit. The way I describe my job: designers are using hammers and nails, and I'm the guy who makes the hammers and nails. A really powerful world editor — nowadays there's Unreal, Unity, Godot — WoWEdit is purpose-built specifically for making World of Warcraft. The Unreal of World of Warcraft, and that's what I work on day to day.

There was also life admin around the visa process for America. I always laugh at people posting "moved to America" videos that skip how difficult that actually is. I got an H-1B — is that what you had?

Alex (58:56)
I had an L-1B, but yeah, I know the H-1B too.

Steven Dwyer (59:00)
Touch and go for about a year — this was the Obama era, and at one point his administration reworked a lot of the immigration process, part of that cancelling active and pending visa applications. I was about six months into the process, already moved on mentally, accepted for Tools Engineering, Blizzard handling the sponsorship — did a fantastic job, I had little to do with the mechanics. Then everything got cancelled — a letter saying reapply if you want, everyone else in the same boat reapplying simultaneously. I ended up in an awful queue, half-expecting an email saying they'd gone with someone else. But they didn't — credit to them. HR in Irvine, when my future manager asked, said, no, we'll get him. Another six months to get the visa approved. Total wait, while still in France, almost exactly a year — mentally checked out the whole time, already accepted, interviewed, done a code review, just sitting in limbo. They stuck with me, and I made it to Irvine — 2009, around September. By then I'd already been about three and a half years at the company.

Alex (1:01:46)
Amazing they stuck with you. Having been through the visa process myself — I was at Blizzard too, my L-1 ran out and I switched to an H-1 for a while — HR was great in a similar way, at one point half-joking about whether I had a girlfriend I might want to marry, worried that might end up the only way out. We're lucky this industry lets us take careers to other countries, but it's not free or easy — you'd already made one move, so maybe that part felt familiar, but navigating visas and uncertainty is still a real challenge.

Steven Dwyer (1:02:43)
Good point. People have a hard time understanding how you actually leave everything behind and end up somewhere else. I'd done it twice already, so by France I was travelling light — lost a lot of the materialism, the collecting-things instinct. A natural result of repeatedly uprooting. There's a downside too — a whole philosophical rabbit hole — you start to feel like you don't belong anywhere.

Alex (1:03:40)
Thank you for saying that — so true.

Steven Dwyer (1:03:45)
Even going back home after travelling — Scotland looks the same but slightly different, almost surreal, and you don't quite feel like you belong. I think the antidote is friends, family, the people you build bonds with — you'll always have those. Going to that wedding last year, we just dropped straight back into it. Home is the people and interests around you, rather than the physical place.

Alex (1:04:23)
Agreed. Quickly — moving into tools engineering meant a programming test to qualify. Cold sweats going back to it, or did you drift back without trouble?

Steven Dwyer (1:04:45)
Definitely friction. I think it's an odd person who walks into an interview 100% confident — having interviewed a lot myself since becoming a lead, often when a candidate seems completely confident, something's slightly off. Depends on seniority, but interviews are generally awful for everyone, including the interviewer, which you don't appreciate earlier in your career when you're the nervous one across the table. Once you realise that, an interview becomes more of a conversation — how I run them now, and how I approached my own interview for the lead role: here's my philosophy, if you want me, you want me.

Going back to my actual Blizzard interview: France, long before Zoom, so a jury-rigged, awful video call in 2009. They gave me a coding test printed on paper — no computer, pen and paper, write your answers. Never done a test like that, so I handwrote fairly complex algorithm questions off the top of my head — chicken-scratch, hadn't handwritten in years. I handed it over, and the plan was straight into a video call. He must have scanned or faxed it, because by the time the call connected, on an awful 280p feed, there was a long table with three people down each side and two at the back — apparently the entire WoW tools team. Interviewed by the whole team, not just the manager — now that I know him, I understand why: introducing one person into an established team, you want everyone invested.

Already sweating before the call started. First thing they said: "we've got this, and it looks handwritten — why didn't you type it?" I wasn't given a computer. Everyone seemed confused — in fairness to the France office, HR there isn't an engineering team, so they hadn't made the connection.

They'd photocopied the faxes, the whole team going through it: why did you answer this. One question was 3D positional audio — a player and a point in space where a sound plays, how do you calculate the angle? I imploded on sight, because math. Didn't answer it well, rushing to get through as many questions as possible. But to their credit, on the call they gave me time and leading questions — okay, you've got left and right, how do you get front and back? Lots of rambling before I found my way to an answer, but I got there. I thought it was an awful interview, that I'd flubbed it — wasn't too worried, since I still had my job at Now Production as a safety net. But they got back to me: done great, would love to have me — that's what led into the year-long visa wait.

The point: I learned, that day and over the years working with that manager, what he actually wanted to know was whether he could work with me — whether, not knowing an answer, he could lead me toward one I'd arrive at myself. Not important I answer correctly outright, only that he could guide me there. Apparently I'd proven that. Funny how differently the same moment reads depending which side of the table you're on — to me a disaster, to him exactly what he wanted.

Alex (1:13:11)
You felt dragged toward the answer, and that was precisely what they wanted to see — that you could be directed. Fascinating. So, visa sorted, California, working on the foundation of what makes WoW, WoW — the Unreal of WoW. You've stayed in that domain ever since. Was that expected, and what's kept you interested?

Steven Dwyer (1:13:55)
Great question. I thought I'd end up a gameplay engineer, like on the Sonic Team project. But this hooked me unexpectedly, because tools engineering is the art of integrating all the disparate elements in a game. Over seventeen years on the WoW team, I've touched gameplay code, server code — contributed to pretty much every part, not just the tool, because a tool shapes the workflow other people use to interact with the game abstractly rather than at the raw data layer. I got to learn, touch, and modify all of it, while building a great experience for someone sitting two doors down, making the actual content.

In the early years, when the team was smaller, a designer would wander in: "I don't quite get how this works, could it do this instead," or, "I've done this a hundred times, no way to automate it?" Every day a new challenge on top of your own planned tasks. That's what's kept me here — WoW constantly evolving, wild feature shifts, a widening demographic — how do I help designers and engineers make the best possible game, faster? A bit of abstraction, but if I do my job well, they make a better game, faster.

If I'd been in a narrower role, like Japan, I'd probably have resented it or got bored. Here, I've touched so many things it's kept me interested — never felt the wanderlust of "maybe I should look elsewhere." Everyone at Blizzard is genuinely excellent, one of the best teams you could be part of, partly the sheer depth of experience — twenty years at Blizzard means twenty years of institutional knowledge about how WoW gets made. So part of my focus now is passing that on — more of a mentoring role the last few years, training interns, which I've volunteered for happily. Part of what led to becoming a lead — you build the experience, it makes sense to start leading a team.

Alex (1:18:29)
Great answer — working in tools is almost altruistic, so focused on supporting others. Developers generally try to make the best game for the player, but you sit a layer closer — enabling the people who enable the thing for the player. Is that mentality outside work too, Steve? You mentioned a tough stretch as a kid, maybe introverted or insular — but you've grown into a role about helping others. Does that show up in everyday life, or is it the job that brings it out?

Steven Dwyer (1:19:28)
Really good question — yes, I try to help people outside work wherever I can. Wouldn't necessarily call it empathy, though maybe — there's an understanding that if you've had your own difficulties, you learn someone might be carrying a lot of invisible difficulty, and you try not to add to that. Not running soup kitchens, but if I sense someone struggling I'll reach out, invite them over. Doesn't feel draining. Maybe doing that outreach constantly at work has trained me to ask professionally "is something not working, how can I make this better," and that's bled into personal life too — understanding what it's like to carry emotional difficulty, trying to lighten that load. Goes both ways.

Alex (1:21:21)
One's taught the other — if you've needed an escape, easier to recognise it in someone else, and know even just a chat can be enough. So — twenty years in one company, connected by a video game, which is rare. I did seventeen at Sony, though across different sites — what do you think staying in one place that long has taught you?

Steven Dwyer (1:21:52)
Crazy when you look at the industry. Good question I haven't framed an answer to before, but a deeper appreciation for people who've done something a long time — they know the ins and outs, the pitfalls, and a certain kind of that person wants to help shortcut everyone else past the mistakes they made. Blizzard, at its best, is full of people like that. I look at the ten-year board, thirty-odd people celebrating twenty years, one person at thirty — the depth of their experience is amazing, almost like a professional older sibling, true mentors. That's what staying somewhere a long time develops: deep mentorship, a deep knowledge base. WoW's client-server infrastructure is, from an engineering perspective, about as polished as people dream of building — not perfect, the odd Winchester Mystery House moment, but I've come to really value people with that depth of experience, whose opinions I trust because they haven't given me reason to doubt them. A game that's run continuously for twenty-plus years — more like thirty counting development — creates a specific, valuable environment for learning how to ship games successfully; a lot of runway, failed and successful experiments, an overall level of experience that's just very high. If I moved to another company, I'd be bringing thirty years of absorbed WoW-making experience with me — hopefully spreading some of that proficiency around the industry.

Alex (1:26:45)
The two things that stick: established institutional knowledge everyone benefits from, but also your glass-half-full take on the pitfalls and shortcuts — using them to help others move faster rather than complaining about how things have always been done. That altruistic thread again — a lovely way of framing it.

Steven Dwyer (1:27:29)
I sometimes wonder, though — I've had one short-lived game development project, and one twenty-year one, so in no way do I see myself an industry-wide expert. I wonder what it would've been like if those twenty years were split into a series of one-and-a-half to three-year stints back to back. I'd obviously be different, but how? Exploring one space thoroughly is a different experience from gaining experience the other way — maybe you become a better firefighter, fire to fire, versus being able to sit down and work on the same thing for months, really dig into big projects. Now that you've posed the question, I'll wonder whether that was a developed skill or an innate one — would I have built that muscle in shorter-lived projects? I don't know.

Alex (1:28:31 – 1:28:54)
Hard to know — the perennial question, jump around or stay put, no universal right answer, depends on the person. I did seventeen years in one place, learned and grew a lot; forced to move through layoffs, I learned a lot very quickly too. Good or bad, more of a jack-of-all-trades — I honestly don't know, horses for courses, down to mentality. Yours sounds like "here's the problem, I'll sit with it as long as it takes," and staying in one place suited that. One more thing: do you think staying twenty years came from your time in Japan, where the traditional model — certainly in that era — was more "this is your job for life"? Did any of that rub off, or coincidence?

Steven Dwyer (1:29:53)
Genuinely coincidence, I think. The Japanese salaryman mentality isn't really the same thing as twenty years at Blizzard. Speaking as someone steeped in Japanese culture for two and a half years — salaryman culture isn't something workers would necessarily choose given a real alternative, more a necessity built into how things are structured; probably changing now, though it's been twenty-odd years so I can't say for certain. Working on WoW has been a very different feeling — I don't feel like a salaryman at all. The real difference: doing a job because you have to, versus a career by choice.

Alex (1:30:54)
Indentured servitude, almost, versus career by choice. Dark way of putting it, maybe.

Steven Dwyer (1:31:02)
There's a part of it. Something else, relating to you too, having lived and travelled the way you have — layoffs are awful, a whole other topic — but pushing yourself out and moving somewhere new, I can't honestly say I consciously decided to; it was more a series of events I allowed to happen, and I ended up where I ended up. But at some point, maybe in France, maybe after America, you stop thinking you need to go somewhere to be successful, and just start to feel like wherever you go, you'll be fine. Mentally, an "I can do anything" feeling — what the travelling ultimately gave me. There's still the worry of the next paycheck if laid off, but also: I've moved, lived and worked somewhere new, survived this, survived that, it was all fine, I trust myself to do well — real comfort in that.

Alex (1:32:01 – 1:32:34)
There's a freedom to it — an unshackling of constraints that might otherwise shape how you think; once you've made that break, they don't hold you the same way. When I went through a layoff, my wife and I looked at each other and thought, where do we actually want to go? This industry's global, we could go almost anywhere — we ended up back in the UK. Once you've done it and know you're free to try again, why not do it again.

Alex (continued)
Good place to end it — great story, really appreciate you digging into it. Pieces of your history I had no idea about, and I appreciate you sharing them. Awesome conversation, thank you.

Steven Dwyer (1:33:32)
Thank you for setting this up. I'm going to walk away thinking about all sorts of new philosophical things — ponder my orb, have you seen that meme? That's what I'll be doing after this.

Alex (1:33:44)
Yes! Perfect. Success.