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Hey folks —

This one's Heather Chandler, and thirty years deep into this industry, she said something in the first ten minutes that ended up being the whole episode: she got into games almost by accident, chasing a film career, and only stuck around because the people were better than anything she'd found in film. That accidental-entry story sets up everything that follows — Activision's gold-master courier runs, the two books she wrote because the material she needed didn't exist yet, Fortnite's live-service pivot from the inside, and a physical escape room she bet everything on right before the pandemic shut it down.

What stuck with me most, though, is something she said almost in passing about why the Fortnite tech team liked working with her: she knows what she doesn't know. That's not modesty — it's the whole operating philosophy behind three decades of production work, across some of the biggest and smallest teams in the industry. Settle in, this is a good one.

Alex (00:00)
Thanks Heather, thank you for making the time. I've never met you before, so I appreciate you offering to be on the show. You've got a great history, so many interesting projects you've worked on. But I always kick this off with my favorite first question: what first inspired you about video games?

Heather Chandler (00:18)
Honestly, I hadn't thought about a career in the video game industry when I was growing up. I was interested in film, living in Los Angeles, interning at New Line Cinema and trying to get my foot in the door elsewhere. Activision got my resume — this was a very long time ago, in the nineties. At the time they were looking for folks with film backgrounds because they were trying to figure out how to better organize their teams and get stuff done. Activision had a huge internal studio for that era, working on ten or twelve different projects. I told the woman I wasn't that interested in games, but she convinced me to come in and talk to them.

When I got there and saw what they were doing, I thought, this is way better than the film industry — a very welcoming, collaborative environment. The people were super passionate and very smart. In film, from my experience, there were a lot of negative things — the executives who act like jerks toward their assistants, and I have a few stories like that. But at Activision I thought, I could really see myself working here. They were creative in a different way, and I've always liked technology — I was interested in STEM when I was younger, so that appealed to me.

At the time I wasn't a huge computer gamer — I'd played more casual fare, a lot of board games. So really it was the people that inspired me. I was interviewing for basically a production coordinator role — slash executive assistant role — working with the head of the studio. When I told my friend group I was interviewing with Activision, they were all like, wow, that's so amazing. That was right when Dune had come out — Activision didn't publish it, but people were into video games, and they were like, Activision is one of the greats, they did all these Atari 2600 games, they did Pitfall. I thought, I've already gotten a much better reaction about this than any of the film stuff I tried to get my foot in the door with. Why not try it? And that's how I ended up at Activision, and thirty years later I've stayed in the video game business the entire time.

Alex (03:24)
I love that — such a different genesis to plenty of people I've had on the show. You weren't really giving games a second thought until you met the people, and then thought, actually, these are great people to work with. You went to USC and Vanderbilt and were very focused on film. But you joined Activision at a really interesting time, right? When the Apocalypse game with Bruce Willis was around — an interesting era to join.

Heather Chandler (04:00)
Yeah, at the time Activision was one of the few studios working on a very cool technology, full-motion video in games. They had a game called Spycraft: The Great Game — you played a spy in a point-and-click adventure, clicking on things, interpreting clues, and full-motion video would propel the story forward. That was a very big deal. Then there was the Apocalypse game, one of the first I'm aware of to have a major celebrity attached to play a main character — Bruce Willis. They were really trying to figure out how to marry the game space with the movie space, and I think bringing in people with film backgrounds was one way they thought they could do that.

Of course, we know how the story ends — that collaboration never really came to fruition the way people thought it would, because games are very different from movies and require different things to keep players excited. Games went off and had their own success, even surpassing the movies in many instances, I might add.

Alex (05:24)
It sounds like you were very versed in the language and process of making film. Did you find yourself on the back foot going into video games, or were there enough parallels that you could get a footing and learn on the job?

Heather Chandler (05:39)
Not on my back foot, per se — the role I had was low person on the totem pole, so the expectations weren't huge. That was actually an advantage — I came in with fresh eyes and an open mind, and learned a lot on the ground. I was always interested in a production role, even in film — I'm all about getting people together, helping them figure out how to do a thing, making a plan, unblocking things for them.

The game industry at the time was very wild west as to how they actually made stuff. They had ten or twelve internal teams, all working very differently. We had Interstate '76, a car combat game, on their proprietary engine. The MechWarrior 3D game, also very cutting edge, on a different engine. A sports game called Hyperblade. A Zork game. Every team approaching things differently — it seemed like there was a lot of effort going on, and maybe if they'd had better process and planning... but the people working on them really just wanted to prototype, write design documents, and see their efforts, versus overlaying process on it. So what I was on the back foot about was really just the terminology — alpha, beta, things that are second nature to me now. Engines, how they work, what the various people on the team do, what's the difference between this programmer and this designer.

Because I was low person on the totem pole but also worked for the head of the studio, I had a lot of freedom to go around and talk to whoever I wanted. I could sit down with designers when they had time — I wasn't a pain, I'd ask questions, and they were all very happy to share knowledge. There was a guy who was really interested in teaching me the basics of programming, and another person on the team who wasn't a programmer wanted to learn too, so he started a lunchtime thing for us — once a week we'd get together and he'd talk about the basics of programming and engines. It was an incredibly supportive team, very helpful people, many of whom I'm still in touch with today.

And they got the games done. It was a time when you'd say, hey, when can we play the game, and they'd say, we can't for six months — because you wrote everything down in a design document, and if you were lucky you'd get to prototype it, but only if you had an engine, because we didn't have Unreal or Unity, everybody had to build their own. If the engine wasn't ready, it was like building a bridge from two different ends and hoping they'd meet in the middle around the time you thought they would — and when they did, it was mismatched, with horrible bugs that would take another three months to sort out.

Even though I came from a very different background, I was able to jump into the chaos and provide some help and support. I playtested almost all the games — we'd organize company-wide playtests. We had a Muppet game we were doing. It was so much fun, the people were so awesome. Fun story — I used to work with Mark Lamia, who rose to be a senior VP at Activision in charge of the Call of Duty stuff. When I met him, he was the person who sat in what we called the burn room, burning all the CDs we'd use — we'd go through hundreds a week, because that was the only way to get games to QA, since we had no way to upload anything. That was his first job, and then of course he rose up, like I did, and became a pretty top dog over there.

Alex (11:08)
It sounds like a great opportunity, for just over four years, to be between different teams, see those differences, and get a very broad understanding of how games are put together, at a really important time when technology was advancing quickly. Great grounding to then take onto EA and then onto Ubisoft as a producer.

Heather Chandler (11:50)
Absolutely. Back then, just getting a game ready for Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft was very different — we didn't have cloud stuff or digital uploads. For Nintendo you'd have to submit the actual cartridges, physically mail eight or nine copies. One time my boss came by my desk at the end of the day and asked if I had a passport. I said yes. He said, we need someone to deliver the gold master to Europe, because the manufacturer is waiting, and it's faster to send somebody on a plane tonight — even FedEx couldn't do international overnight then, that would take at least three days. So I hopped on a plane, went to London, dropped off the disc the next day. It always seemed very exciting, learning how all these pieces go together.

I learned a lot about physical disc manufacturing — the process of making a disc, getting it into a box, all the pieces that go into cost of goods, the box, the manual. Back then every game came with these thick manuals. One of my jobs was converting that to HTML and putting it on the disc — we thought we were so cutting edge, having an electronic version of the manual.

Alex (13:48)
Such a fantastic transition point in the industry — as someone who's sat up till five in the morning burning a gold master to hand to a FedEx guy, I know what you mean. So you spent about four years at Activision and then moved to EA. What triggered that, and how did you feel about where you were in the industry when you left?

Heather Chandler (14:23)
By the time I left Activision I had a good basic handle, and knew I was on a production track. When you're building your career, you're always trying to find the next step forward — I really wanted to become a producer with my own project, and at Activision that probably could have happened, but I started putting feelers out because I honestly wanted to move back to the East Coast, where I was from. Partly personal reasons.

EA was trying to build up a presence on the East Coast, with a studio in Charlottesville they'd purchased. So I was brought in as a producer there — this fulfilled both my goals, a producer on my own projects, and closer to family. I'd moved to California by myself, no support system, and after being in LA for seven years, I realized I needed that support.

EA had purchased a studio called Kesmai, semi-famous for being one of the first studios to do online gaming, over what was called the GEnie system. They had a game called Air Warrior, a flight sim based on World War Two aircraft, where you could fly planes and play online with friends — very novel at the time. They also had a really good partnership with AOL, a suite of casual games together — Slotto, a slots-lottery combination game that was super popular, card games, and so on.

I became a producer there, moved to Charlottesville, everything was going great. But the studio got shut down roughly a year after I'd been there — EA is EA, and business decisions get made — most of the folks were laid off. Some were offered a move to another EA studio, but I wasn't interested in going back to California. The benefit of working there is that I learned a ton about online games — at Activision we didn't have any. I learned about back-ends, servers, clients, how to do back-end releases.

Alex (18:35)
Interesting — another important time when the industry was shifting, giving you a good opportunity to pick up on the technology you'd need moving forward. That took you onto Ubisoft, also on the East Coast.

Heather Chandler (18:58)
I did. One fun story from Kesmai — we were super excited because there was a new engine on the scene, and we got a demo of it: the Unreal Engine. Tim Sweeney — just a genius programmer — and Mark Rein came to demo their engine. Everybody thought, maybe we could use this, this could save us so much time. Then EA shut us down before we got the chance.

I ended up at Red Storm, which had just been acquired by Ubisoft. Getting laid off totally sucks, but I opened up my job search — staying on the East Coast was the priority, and if I couldn't do that, I wasn't going to relocate back to California for a game job. I was very fortunate that Red Storm hired me as an associate producer. They had Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six, and at first they needed me to focus on marketing, because they'd just been acquired by Ubisoft, who wanted to provide marketing and other support. So I became the person who helped organize everything our publisher needed — a hybrid dev-slash-publishing producer.

I learned a lot from the marketing side and the publisher side — what it's like working with a person providing your funding, how you manage that relationship, how you prioritize their asks versus internal needs. I was also there to support the other producers on playtesting and localization — did a ton of both, plus marketing work. I learned a lot about downloadable content, because that's when console systems started doing more extensible content — before that you'd buy a disc, and there wasn't really a way to update it. When Xbox launched and Ghost Recon was one of the launch titles, we learned a ton about planning for post-launch life — what does downloadable content look like? At the time it was usually paid, not the live-service model we see today.

My role evolved into getting my own team — I believe it might have been The Sum of All Fears, one of the first titles over there — actually, I was the associate producer on that one, but the producer I worked with gave me a lot of responsibility. It was one of the Ghost Recon expansion packs that was my first time piloting the ship, officially on the leads team — setting meetings, responsible for making sure everything happens, that we're providing Ubisoft the information they need, that the game is good, playing well, on track.

Alex (23:01)
A fascinating remit — the more traditional production side, but also working with Ubi as the mother brain, plus the marketing side. How did you adapt to that?

Heather Chandler (23:24)
One of the things I was constantly doing was managing the marketing department's expectations versus what the team could actually deliver. Marketing is all about needing new content — screenshots, demos, a special build for E3. They'd say, we have this opportunity to work with a celebrity, what voiceovers could we do? From my side it was a lot of taking in these requests and personally knowing where the team was in development — thinking, well, they won't get that; this we might be able to do but not in the timeframe they need. So it was a lot of prioritizing.

We knew E3 was a priority, so we had to have something good to showcase — marketing's building a whole plan around it, journalists coming through the booth. They'd also do PR-specific events, flying devs out to a hotel, and we'd have to write up the demo script. It was all tangentially related to the actual game, but from my perspective, since I was responsible for it, it was equally important. I started being able to say, I think there's a better way we can do this — I built out a pipeline for marketing assets and married it into the development calendar. I worked closely with the producers to say, we know marketing's going to ask about this, so before they even ask, let's figure out what we can give them and go to them proactively. That helped a lot — it made marketing feel safer, and we could more easily prioritize. That worked out really well.

Alex (26:31)
Smart — getting in front of it and feeding the pipeline rather than waiting to be asked. And an interesting time too — E3 is still a thing, but general internet coverage is starting to grow outside the traditional magazines, a much bigger appetite for screenshots and interviews.

Heather Chandler (27:01)
Yeah, and the amount of attention that went into making a screenshot was also a learning curve. I remember marketing needed something, I thought, I'll go take some screenshots — brought them to the leads group, and the art director was like, who made these? They're horrible. I said, I did, and he said, we can't send these out — the camera angle, the lighting, all of it. I'm not an artist, so I said, okay, I get it, and he said, just tell me what you need, and we'll grab a QA tester, since they know the game so well, sit down with you, get the list, let them make some screenshots, and we can look at them together. Screenshots were so critical, and I guess they still are — at the time these were actual gameplay screenshots, not doctored in any way, so they had to look as good as they could.

Then key art — what's going to be on the box? With Ghost Recon, one of the hallmarks is the realism, down to the guns — this type of ammunition, these attachments — and looking at key art thinking, the barrel of that gun isn't quite right, let's fix that. Super interesting.

Alex (28:58)
Very high pressure, right, because everything shown publicly has to be right — even more so now, when anybody can take a screenshot, the official ones have to be the best of the best.

Heather Chandler (29:20)
Yes they do — and if you have rabid fans, they're going to dissect those screenshots. Ghost Recon was actually the first game where I got called out on the forums — "Heather Chandler, what does she know about military stuff?" — because obviously I don't have a military background. Amusing to me, the idea that an associate producer working on marketing assets has any influence on the game at all — but it was fun too, and I don't think the internet was as toxic then as it is today. It was fun to understand how important community is, and how they have these expectations — if you don't do it justice, they're going to be quite upset with you.

Alex (30:26)
Absolutely — and they'll very loudly vocalize that. You were at Ubisoft for about four years, and around that time you also became an author. What triggered that?

Heather Chandler (30:42)
I love school, I love learning, and I'd always buy a book for anything I didn't know about. As I got to understand more about the role of producer specifically, there was just no material about it at all — no information about localization, which was what my first book, the Game Localization Handbook, was about. Going back to Activision, we'd often ship in English only first because it would take six months to localize, and all these territories would have to wait. One of the big things people were trying to solve in the nineties was how to localize games more quickly. I ended up doing a ton of localization at Activision and Ubisoft, and became well versed in it. I thought, there's some basic localization knowledge that, if people had it, would be super helpful. So I wrote the book because I thought there was a need for it, and the publisher agreed. It was an easy book to write, honestly — there was so much to say and nobody was talking about it.

When it did pretty well, my publisher asked what other ideas I had. I said I'd love to write one about production, because when I started being a producer I had no idea what the role actually was — you couldn't find books, information, even blogs, this was before people really had blogs. So I basically wrote the book I wished I'd had — if you've read it, it's structured like: you have a project that's nothing, and here are all the things you're going to need to do. A project manager reading it would recognize, of course, you scope out your thing, you prioritize — but in the game industry a lot of that hadn't been verbalized in a formal way.

I'll still go to a conference and people come up and say, I read your book, it's so helpful. It's been about eight years since I updated either one, because the producer's role is still fundamentally much the same. In both cases I was finishing the book around the same time I was trying to get a game released — this was before I had a child, so I had a lot more time. Not something I'd want to do today, it's just so time-consuming.

Alex (34:08)
I love the idea that the book was easy to write, even though I'm sure books in general aren't — but when you've got the time and understand the subject matter so well, I guess it's a lot easier for it to come together.

Heather Chandler (34:20)
My editor did tell me my writing style was very dry — these books aren't a laugh riot, but they're packed with information. At the end of the day, I think they're easier to write because I'm just imparting information directly from my own experience — I did this, here's the outcome, here's the template I used. So it's not a bedtime read, it's not a beach read.

Alex (35:04)
The book you wish you'd had when you were coming into it. So at this point you've spent time at some big studios — Activision, EA, Ubisoft — and then you go freelance. What made you feel ready to move into a role that can be a lot more challenging?

Heather Chandler (35:32)
That was part of my long-term plan — when I wrote those books I was thinking, this is a good way to establish credibility. The transition happened sooner than I thought — a company in Los Angeles had read my localization book. They were a translation and subtitling company that worked mostly in film and were interested in opening up a games division. They read my book and specifically reached out — we'd love to talk to you, we're going to be at E3, if you're there we'd love to meet. It was a legit thing, a real company genuinely interested in understanding the games industry.

That was my first freelance gig, a year-long contract. Even though I loved working at Ubisoft, I thought this was worth taking a chance on — the life of a freelancer is feast or famine, but a one-year contract meant I knew for the next year things would be great. They were based in Los Angeles, but I still worked from the East Coast — a great learning experience, learning a lot about subtitling and dubbing in film and how to translate those processes to games, with competitive rates, quality controls, all of that.

I worked with them for a year and got their whole process set up, and then, as planned, they hired a full-time on-site person — fine, because as a freelancer you're always networking, and I'd already started lining up my next things. A very strong start to freelancing. With my background, and people I knew from Activision now at Ubisoft and Red Storm, people would say, Heather's worked on stuff like this before, we should talk to her. So lots of little gigs add up — three to six months, sometimes a year — and I was lucky in finding jobs that kept feeding that freelance career. My goal was to follow it through, and if the work dried up, I had other options — you can always take the skills you've learned and apply them to a different industry. The trick is getting the person from the other industry to understand you can do the job, it's just skinned a different way.

Alex (39:45)
Fascinating that your first freelance gig smashed the two things you love together, films and games. Freelancing isn't for everyone — it takes a certain type of mentality. Did you feel like you were that person from the start, or did you learn that along the way? How did you have the confidence to step out as a freelancer?

Heather Chandler (40:18)
I'm at heart a very entrepreneurial person, and being a freelancer is pretty much being an entrepreneur. I always felt confident in my abilities, and confident that if I had to take up a regular job — retail, whatever — I wasn't opposed to that. I'll do whatever I need to do to pay my bills. I think that confidence helped me keep getting work, because — here's advice I give people who ask me about this — when you quote your rates, quote what you think you're worth. Even if you're thinking, they might balk at this price, so maybe I'll go a little lower because I really want the gig — I'd say nine times out of ten, I just quote what I think the worth is, and nine times out of ten people don't even bat an eye. At the end of the day, if they've sought you out and think you can bring value, and you're asking a fair price, not a low one, you just have to be confident and be okay with them saying no. You're the one who has to deal with a client asking for things that weren't in your contract, or more time than you agreed to. If you've set your rates having thought through all that, you're going to be a much happier about it.

Alex (42:17)
Quote your worth, like you say — great advice. And after a long period of freelancing, with some overlap, you join Elephant Mouse.

Heather Chandler (42:32)
Yeah, I didn't actually form Elephant Mouse — that was a studio started by friends I'd worked with at Red Storm, and they brought me in as studio director. It became my main gig for quite some time, working full-time as studio director. A fun team — a mobile studio, which I hadn't done before, I'd only worked on proper console and PC games. A four-person team that needed a producer type. They'd already released one called Little Birds, a casual game where you collect birds and hatch eggs, typical mobile fare, but ours was really cute, beautiful art, nice mechanics. This was before mobile games had gone free-to-play, so you just paid for the game and played it, none of these weird mechanics where you're running out of time.

I stayed about a year or two — the same core four people: an artist, a designer, an engineer, an audio guy, and me. We handled all aspects of it, some local QA testers, a very small team. The owner had other things going too, he was an entrepreneur, and the studio was one of the things he did because he loved video games — but I ran all the day-to-day stuff. I learned about mobile games, free-to-play, buying ads — mobile games got marketed very differently at the time. I also learned how to run a business — I was the HR department, the finance department, did everybody's paychecks, picked the health insurance plan, talked to the landlord when there were issues. If something required money I'd message the owner, tell him the deal and what it would cost, and he'd say okay, no problem. At one point we were looking for new office space, so I learned about leasing offices and square footage.

Alex (45:40)
I'm guessing that served you well going forward, giving you a whole-brain view of the business. I do want to spend a little time on Fortnite — you jump over to Epic, staying in your neighborhood on the East Coast, and join at a fascinating time. How did that role come up, and what was that like?

Heather Chandler (46:01)
I knew a lot of people at Epic, and was very happy freelancing and working for Elephant Mouse, but I got that itch — mobile games are okay, but not really where I saw myself long-term, and a team of four versus sixty or a hundred is very different. This was well before the pandemic, so everyone worked on site. They were in my neighborhood, I liked the people there, so I thought, I'll apply and see what happens. This was pre-Fortnite — Fortnite was in development, and I'd be on the team. It was around sixty people, only two producers before they added me. We were trying to figure out when we could get this game launched. They'd done a lot of work already — Fortnite Save the World had the building system in place, all the design systems in place, the art style set. So the question was, what more content do we need, what progression mechanics? That's where I learned about UX and progression, because Epic had a full UX testing department headed up by Celia Hodent — if you're not familiar with her, she's the queen of UX.

Alex (47:57)
Yep.

Heather Chandler (47:58)
She was bringing in how you properly do UX at a game studio, with a department under her, and they spent a lot of time UX-testing Fortnite. For example, you have to use your pickaxe to destroy things, and in UX tests players weren't doing that — they discovered the visual cue for "you can hit this thing" just wasn't registering. We tried out fixes like that — how doors open, how the building system works. I think one of the reasons Fortnite's building system was always so highly praised is that we had the luxury of doing a ton of UX testing on it, a ton of tweaking and polishing, so it was very smooth. We had the most talented artists, programmers, and designers, and the Unreal Engine right next door — if we needed grass that waves in the wind, we'd put it on the list for the engine team.

My big responsibility was getting the game ready to be self-published — this was when Epic was building their own launcher. I worked with the technology department, the dev team, publishing, marketing, localization, pulling all those pieces together. I was there keeping the trains running, making sure we had a schedule, the technology in place, the bugs getting dealt with — all the pure producer-ly stuff. We launched Save the World — I want to say in July, I don't remember the exact date now, maybe 2016.

At the same time, another team had been working on Unreal Tournament and had an idea for a game mode using the Fortnite assets — that became battle royale. They took the building system, the art, the characters, and put them into that mode. I want to say we released it in September, just to see what players would think. One of the big things I learned was the importance of real-time player feedback, and testing with a trusted group of beta players before they go out to the world — we had a program where we'd launch to a couple hundred people called the Fortnite Storm Chasers, and they'd give us feedback before it went live. We did that, launched battle royale, and the rest is history. It caught on super fast, and Epic thought, what can we do to make this better for players, keep people excited? So our focus pivoted toward content — how do we keep feeding the content machine? We pivoted from the traditional make-a-thing-test-it-release-it model. I believe we were one of the first live-service games to go to that weekly content cadence, which was insane at the time — but also insanely fun, because everybody was very passionate about making it happen. We figured out how to do those weekly updates, which really helped set it on a strong foundation to keep growing into what it became.

Alex (53:28)
What an incredible moment, to be there as that pivot happens — and you're very humble about your impact on it. That must have been a very challenging ship to wrangle, not just the game, but this pivot into a substantially harder approach.

Heather Chandler (53:58)
Yeah, incredibly challenging, but I love a challenge. When you're in it with a whole bunch of other people with the same mindset, it's still challenging but somehow enjoyable and bearable. Were there times I was stressed out? Yes. Times I came in on a weekend? Of course. But you want to do these things, because working on a game that shatters expectations like that is very exciting, it fuels you. There's a cautionary tale, though — you can't go a hundred and ten or a hundred and twenty percent all the time. You have to draw a line and take that break to recharge. You can't go all out all the time, or you won't have anything left later on.

Alex (55:09)
So true. You spent almost four years there, then made the pivot from what was probably the biggest game in the world at that time over to indies. What drove that change?

Heather Chandler (55:26)
When you work on a game like Fortnite and give it your all, you learn a lot over a long career. I want to say for people listening — working in games is incredibly valuable and super fun, but you're not necessarily going to retire off it. I left before Fortnite became what it is now, so I still have to go out there and work, no way around that. But I said, I feel confident in my abilities, I'm going to see what I can do. My pivot was starting a physical escape room with my husband — I'd learned all this from the games industry, how to run a business, how to make games, how to think about it from a publisher and a player standpoint, and I thought, I'm going to bet on myself. My husband, a game designer, and I asked, what can we do together? Someone suggested, you guys should open an escape room, and we thought, let's do it.

We opened it in 2019 — my husband built out the rooms, I did operations and business, lease negotiation, marketing, website. Everything was going really well, I had grand plans for multiple locations. Then 2020 happened — the pandemic — and an escape room is not an essential business. We had to close it down completely for eight months. That was pretty disheartening, honestly very, very tough.

So then I thought, we need to make a living here. I put the shingle out again and started freelancing. I knew Jay Powell — I think you've spoken to him, he and I go way back — and I also had contacts from Los Angeles, and I cobbled together enough freelance work with indie studios to keep me busy while the escape room was closed. That's how I ended up on a game called Beyond Blue, about underwater exploration — I'd worked with E-Line before, when I was a freelancer, on a game called Never Alone. I always liked working with them because they were interested in impact games, something more than just fun — this underwater ocean game was about exploring, finding sea creatures, learning about them, a beautiful game. Jay also had little gigs for me through indie game business, and I thought, this is really fun — when you leave something as high-stress as Fortnite, you need decompression time.

Even after we reopened the escape room, I thought, I'm going to keep my foot in the door, because I didn't have a contingency plan if it had to close again. So I kept working — Trover Saves the Universe, Beyond Blue, lots of things. Then Jay said, I'm going to start a publisher, and I said, let's do it. That's where I am now — we formed this publisher, focusing on indie games. I found that while I loved the large-budget titles, there are different stressors that come with that. With indie games, you feel like you're having a huge impact on the team, helping them, and that's where I get a lot of satisfaction.

Alex (1:00:36)
An interesting shift, from trying to make big teams successful to helping small teams get on their feet. You left out, in the middle there — that period on Helldivers 2, also pretty successful.

Heather Chandler (1:01:03)
Oh my god — I'm missing a title! That was interesting — I got contacted, the chief operations officer at Arrowhead, her name was Maria, was looking for a producer to help her assess the game, where it was, when they could launch it. I thought this would just be, I go in and work with her for a week or so and assess it — as a freelancer you get a lot of little audit gigs like that. That's what I thought it would be. What was fascinating is that the Helldivers team was in a very similar spot to the Fortnite team back when I started.

As I started working with her and the team, we decided there was room for me to come on board in a more ongoing way — I actually ended up on Helldivers for three years. I'd forgotten about that. I helped get the game prepped for launch, launching it, pulling together content updates. That was nice because instead of me learning, I was also able to teach, which felt really good. A fun team to work with. Then it comes to its natural conclusion — either they hire somebody full-time, or they've learned what they needed from you. I would have loved to move to Sweden, that was something we discussed, but I had personal obligations here. Honestly, back in my Activision days, if they'd asked me to move to Sweden, I'd have said yes in a heartbeat.

Alex (1:03:24)
I love Sweden. And what a great opportunity to teach instead of continuing to learn — I'm conscious of time, so a couple more questions. You mentioned technology has been a draw for you throughout your career. Why, Heather — what is it about you that's drawn to technology?

Heather Chandler (1:03:58)
I like how quickly it moves, and how quickly you get improvements that help you gain improvements later in the process — that sounds super boring, but it's at the heart of who I am, I'm a very process-oriented person, and I view technology as a tool you can use to set people and their pipelines up so they can do their best work. It's exciting when new engines come out, and people find cool new ways to use them. I'm not an engineer, I can't have a deeply technical conversation with anybody — but what I understand and appreciate is that it can provide different ways to get better at helping people realize the things in their head and bring them out into something other players can experience.

Alex (1:05:02)
That's a great answer. From talking to you over this hour, it sounds like you're also someone who's very curious, very excited by what you don't know. I've found that curiosity can be a bridge between yourself and an expert — you're never going to be as smart, I'm never going to be an engineer, but if you're curious and interested in how people go about it, you can bridge the gap between "I don't understand what you're doing" and actually getting inside what your process is and helping, rather than being disinterested.

Heather Chandler (1:05:46)
Yes — one of the things I was doing on Helldivers was being their technical producer for a while, and it was interesting, because I'm not an engineer, but I get it — when I'm talking to technical people, I understand enough of what they're saying they need to translate it to something other folks can understand. I like to think the tech teams enjoy working with me because I know what I don't know. I'm not going to go in and say, you shouldn't be doing it this way — what I do say is, tell me what the deal is and what you need. Okay, this is what we need. Well, why do you need that? Well, because this and this has happened. Okay, well, have we talked to art and design about other ways we could mitigate this versus having you code this new thing? That's the piece I get excited by — you can use technology to solve problems, but if you can explain the issue to the other departments, you can sometimes find cheaper solutions elsewhere.

Alex (1:06:52)
And production seems to be the backbone of what you've done — what is it about production that you love, and what is it about you that suits it?

Heather Chandler (1:07:11)
Production is about organization and efficiency, and what suits me is that I can come into a situation and pretty quickly assess — if they just changed this one thing, they'd free up all this time, and that person burdened with grunt work could do something else. I love finding those little gains. This is going to sound silly, but when I go to a fast food restaurant, or any busy retail environment, I'm always thinking, how do they have things organized to get people through the line quickly? I see bad examples and good examples, and think, if they took that person and put them over here instead, that would free things up. That's how my brain works, and the satisfaction I get is making order out of chaos.

I think one of my superpowers in the game industry is that even though my ultimate desire is to have everything organized, when I work with game teams I can tell you a hundred percent of the time we never reach that state, and I don't try to force people to. I meet them where they are and say, I know we'll never do it this way, but let's try this one change and see what happens. I think people enjoy working with me on that, because a lot of times they'll say, we've worked with producers before and it was horrible, because they kept telling us we couldn't do it this way. I'm not here to tell you that — I'm here to say, how can we improve things with what you've got. That's part of it, that problem solving — how can we get some gains, how can we satisfy most people. People are super happy when you solve a problem for them and make their life easier. They may be skeptical of the solution, because it's coming from a producer, so you have to go in and prove yourself.

Oftentimes there are little things I can point to that lay the groundwork — okay, Heather's coming in, she's not being too outlandish, and hey, we did that thing and it was good, she was right about that, so let's trust her and let her make a bigger change. Sometimes they'll be talking about things they've debated over and over, and I'll say, I really think you should do it that way — I know you don't want to, but it's going to be way better than what you're doing now. If I've established that trust, they're willing to try it. Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm not a hundred percent right — but I'm also never a hundred percent wrong either.

Alex (1:10:18)
Last question — has this career that you've built and continue to push forward changed you as a person?

Heather Chandler (1:10:30)
I don't think it's fundamentally changed me — I think I've always been a very curious, open person. It's changed how I view games and entertainment as a whole — it makes me think differently than I had before. Now I'm thinking, what's this experience going to be like for somebody? Even coming to our escape room — how's that going to make the players feel? The main thing that's changed is that I'm a person who makes entertainment now, versus coming into the industry thinking, this is going to be an entertaining job for me — now I'm thinking, how can I make this entertainment better for other people. Less self-centered, I suppose.

Alex (1:11:33)
Thinking in the shoes of the player, rather than just how you experience it. I'd say that's similar to me, how it's shifted my perspective — especially with kids, it helps you think through their experience more.

Heather Chandler (1:11:55)
We didn't even talk about the kids — I have a child, and he's super excited that mom works in the video game industry. It's fascinating listening to him talk through the games he plays, what his friends play, what he likes and doesn't. That's been a nice way to have a relationship with your child that not most people get to have — because a lot of times, especially when I was on Fortnite, parents would come up to me and say, you're the reason my child's getting bad grades at school, and I'm thinking, well, no, I'm not. But it is interesting, that when you work in the industry your view on video games and how your child interacts with them is much more refined and mature — you can say, it's fine for this, but I'm drawing the line at that, and you understand why.

Alex (1:12:52)
That's the question I used to ask at the end, how does your family relate to your career. You mentioned your kid, and your husband's also in the industry, so I'm sure that's an interesting dynamic.

Heather Chandler (1:13:07)
My son is a huge gamer, my husband's a designer and writer, so it's felt like a natural fit. When I left Fortnite, I told my son I was wrapping up my time there — he wasn't a huge Fortnite player himself, though all his friends were, and whenever I'd go to school the friends would say, can you give me V-Bucks? When I told him I wasn't at Epic anymore, he said, good, now you can go work for Mojang, because Minecraft was his game — he didn't understand you don't just walk in and get a job like that. Same with Subnautica. We all get along, we play games together, it's super fun to play and then talk about it in the language of a game developer.

Alex (1:14:13)
Fascinating how your career started out without video games being that part of your life, and now they've become a massive part of your life across the board. Great story, great journey. Thank you, Heather, thank you for your time — great conversation, some great insight, I really appreciate you taking the time.

Heather Chandler (1:14:34)
Thank you so much for having me, really appreciate it.