Nickname: Rodger which is short for Rodger mybuttocks but for other games I use Shok. On the TW forums I was briefly IGA Russ.

Irrational Title: Quality Assurance

Qualifications: I had done a traineeship doing tech work and then I saw an ad in the paper for Micro Forte. I kept hassling the crap out of the QA manager there until, they already had their team but one of the guys they didn't want so they got rid of him and because I kept hassling him they got me in.

Previous games worked on: Fallout Tactics, Freedom Force and Hot Wheels: Bash Arena at Micro Forte.

Hoth: Beautiful one day, perfect the next

Hardest moment in development of any game you have worked on: Putting up with the hours, when milestones come around here all weekend or until four in the morning. We just keep working with like 4hrs sleep everyday. It is not a very challenging job.

First Gaming system: Atari 2600.

Earliest gaming memories: Tennis game on the Atari 2600 and a weird zombie game that was really cool.

Favourite game of all time and why: Starcraft, not Broodwar but Starcraft. I put four years into that game, I played it ever since it came out, it is one of those games where I could leave it and comeback and still get better at the game. It is always challenging and you could just do what ever you wanted like 5 vs 3 and make your own fun.

Did you reach Korean level of mastery?
*laugh* No I didn't bother with that stuff, I did get to a stage where we were doing like 2 v 2s and it would be like "right it is your turn to trounce these two guys".

Games currently playing: I am too embarrassed to say, I am playing Counter Strike. I don't want to play it but there is nothing else to play I am waiting for World of Warcraft.

Home PC rig: Only a Duron 800, with 64MB of ram on the video card. I have some weird amount of RAM like 280MB or something like that, all assortments just chucked in there.

Console or PC: I go through phases, depending on what is available to play, I am also a big Nintendo fan boy as well. I have had all the Nintendo systems through out the years.

Single player or multi-player or co-op: Depends on what they are offering with each game. I am happy to play multiplayer if it is worth playing and I am happy to play single player if it's worth playing. I didn't touch multiplayer in Call of Duty but single player was awesome.

What is it like QA'ing a game that you don't like? You didn't seem to keen on the Hotwheels game, if you have to spend days and days playing it.
Luckily that [Hotwheels] was only a short project so it wasn't too bad; you do sort of play it because you have to. There is no keenness in it at all, there is no trying shit out just because you can. Luckily with most games I have been given I have either liked the genre or just liked the game. Even Freedom Force, like I have played that through so many times but I am so looking forward to the expansion, it is going to be cool.

Exactly what do you do day to day in QA? Are you play testing all the time?
We have testing plans and there is a process for everything. If we want to get a build out to designers because they need new features, they will give a testing build out and we have to test that. Then that will go through a testing plan of all different aspects of single player and multiplayer. Then if it passes that [QA] and there are no showstoppers or bugs then we will get that out and release it. Once we get around to milestones we will get a whole separate tree in Perforce [an application] so even when they're still making changes it doesn't affect this [the build] so we have a completely solid build to send over [to VUD] for milestones and stuff like that. And that is usually what happens around gold time as well, we will have a build there and we will only put in changes that are not going to stuff things up to bad, of course unless they are absolutely necessary and depending on what the publisher wants as well.

Is there anytime that you have found a bug that has been really strange? It probably happens all the time is there any one that stands out that is bizarre?
At the moment we get bugs with the renderer that will make whole sections of the map just disappear but only if you look at it from certain angles and stuff like that. With Fallout Tactics we had to work with Interplay and their QA. That was pretty interesting because that whole team worked on Baldurs Gate 2 and we just payed them out, because you couldn't even play Baldurs Gate 2 out of the box. We were giving them shit.

Just thinking about some of the bugs in Tribes2, like the concussion/MPB bug were really bizarre.
We had something like that not long where they changed the physics but not the weight of the people so that when you rag dolled [died] you would get flung half way across the map. It was pretty funny.

How much time do you average playing a game per day?
It depends on what I am doing. If I'm testing a build I will be playing through all the single player, which will take nearly 2 days. That is only because I know where I am going and with god mode on. Other times I will be verifying bugs, if the programmer marks a fix it gets sent back to me, I actually have to go in and make sure that it is fixed. If I am tracking down bugs then that could take from 10 minutes to 2 days to 2 weeks.

So relying on other people's documentation for debugging and trying to reproduce bugs?
Well I have to make sure I have to log it properly and make sure that other people can find what I'm talking about, like screen shots have only been a new thing for this project and that has helped out so much. We're meant to be implementing debug demo recording, not what's going into the game, in the next few weeks that's going to help even more as it will replay exactly what has happened right up to the crash and that will make things much easier.

Thanks for that Russel.