Ms. Kimberly Unger is the Founder of Bushi-Go, Inc. and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. Ms. Unger spent nearly 8 years in the brokerage industry on the retail side, acquiring both her Series 7 and 63 Licences before jumping ship and going back to school to pursue a career in games and entertainment. She has worked as a full-time professional, hired-gun and artistic troubleshooter in the games industry until the founding of Bushi-go. She graduated cum laude from
Note: Originally posted November 4, 2013
Name: Kimberly Unger
Vocation: CEO
Years of experience: 18 (yikes!)
Twitter: @ing3nu
PC Games:
1. What are you currently reading and/or playing? (originally posted Nov. 4, 2013)
Playing: DeusEx: Human Revolution, Defiance, Minecraft, Cookie Clicker
Reading: Equuoid, How the Other Half Lives, The Art of Deception
2. First time you knew you wanted to work in games was…?
1984, when my friends and I figured out how to hack the title screen of Zaxxon on the Apple IIe.
3. What was your favorite mistake?
When I first started doing mods in my spare time (Unreal and DOOM II) I was doing a lot of character meshes and skins. I inadvertently “broke” one of the models when I exported it out of Max. I had to edit the ASCII file manually (because I’m really stubborn). While it was a pain in the *ss, and I ended up starting over anyways, it opened up a whole different way to work with the assets that I hadn’t previously considered.
4. What was your favorite success?
Finding backing for Agiliste. It was a random hallway encounter with a mobile producer at GDC that turned into a real business deal.
5. What’s the best advice you ever got?
Needs more cowbell. Yeah. But they were right. Add as much cool as you can in the concept and design because it’s much easier to trim out stuff you can’t use than it is to come up with filler material at the last minute.
6. Share one thing few know about you.
I run old TV shows in the background the way that some people run the radio or music. (Simon & Simon FTW!)
7. What’s one thing or trend you’re most excited about in the industry?
More stuff. For the longest time, games were just the box, just a single product that sank or swam and then onto the next. More and more games are moving into things like Fallout’s DLC, or MMO hybrids like Defiance, or the Forward Unto Dawn miniseries that ties in to the HALO universe. The plays are getting larger and longer, not just 3 months and a single console, but people are looking to build worlds and stories that will last longer, that will expand and develop across different media and ultimately even across generations.
Bonus: 8. Anything else you want to add?
Ask questions. There are people out there who probably know the answer, and asking someone who knows is faster than reinventing the wheel yourself. The turnover rate in the games industry is staggering, which means that we lose information all the time: tricks, secrets, thought processes. It’s mind-boggling the number of times I have seen something “new and nifty” that is actually something old and tried and true that has been brought back into the light and given a fresh coat of paint. And if someone asks *you* a question, don’t look at them like they’ve just sprouted a third eye (even if the answer is blindingly obvious to you). There is so much information that gets lost as the industry evolves and as people come and go that we can’t really afford to not pass it on.
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Feel free to reblog with a link back to this post. If you are a lady dev who’d like to be profiled or would like to nominate one, please contact Anne [at] igda [dot] org
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