10 Years
I just realized that it has been almost exactly ten years that I started to work in the industry. Wow, thats about 35% of my whole life. So what have I been doing the past 10 years (like professionally…)?
1996-2000, To the Point: TTP was a pioneer in multimedia, and created some of the best CD-Rom multimedia presentations of that time. I used Director a lot and wrote our “script-system”, a framework on which every of TTP’s later productions was based. The framework enabled designers to create complex products without the need of scripting. At that time it was really cool and made it possible for the team to focus on user experience rather than actual programming. To the Point is still alive, although it changed its name to Morning Digital Design after a merger.
2000, Razorfish Helsinki: I joined Razorfish in the beginning of 2000. I reckoned that To the Point was going nowhere, and that they had missed the web bandwagon, so I decided to hook up with one of the best web-companies of that time. I concentrated solely on Rich Media using Flash. A year later, Razorfish Helsinki was bankrupted by the U.S. management, although it still was making good profit.
2000 – present, Valve: I quickly quit Razorfish when my old buddies from To the Point called and wanted to think about founding a company of our own. I had been working for RF only for half a year, so I found it a little disturbing to leave that quickly, but in the end I just couldn’t miss this opportunity. Almost six years later, I can say that it was a good choice to make. Valve has gown to be one of the most appreciated finnish digital media agencies.
For the last 5 years, I’ve been whoring a bit too much for advertising agencies, getting people to buy stuff they really don’t need, excluding some odd products that even I bought 
. While designing and developing ad campaigns is at best very creative, I still have liked most working on real product development. Be it UI design for phones or PC applications, or the latest in Web 2.0 services, I really enjoy on putting my head on a product that I personally believe in and that is ultimately used by millions of other people.
I’ve been lucky enough to have been able to work for some cool and/or big clients, including Nokia, Siemens, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, UPM, StoraEnso and Exxon. Having such great clients enables you from time to time to be very creative. I don’t know for sure how many awards the projects that I’ve been involved in have received, but it must be somewhat over 50. Most of these are finnish awards, but some international acknowledgment has also been given. New York Festivals gave us two times silver for ONE, a Nokia N-Gage campaign, LIAA and Cannes has shortlisted us a few times (for High Seize and Zeroforty, which is no longer online). And I remember that we received something from Clio as well, although I can’t recall what 
Over my lifetime I’ve had the possibility to work with several programming/markup/query/modeling-languages; Basic, Amos, Lingo, HTML, xHTML, CSS, JavaScript, SGML, XML, CFML, MXML, SQL, ActionScript 1/2/3, Java, C, C++, Objective-C, PHP, ASP, UML. And still – odd enough – there are enough brain-cells to fill with yet another syntax (or exterminate with some booze).
I’ve never really thought of doing something else, except Game Development… Oh yes. Game Studios build awful games these days. It seems that all the effort is being put into visuals and that games have become more like movies. Fair enough, some games do this really well and are fun to play, but whatever happened to all those absolutely fabulous game concepts of the 80′s and early 90′s? Pool of Radiance, Mule, Space Taxi, the early Ultima – god those we good games. And they all fit into 64 kb. And while the graphics were lousy, your imagination was hard at work to fill all the gaps.
Yeah, one day, I’ll build a killer RPG… Until then, bring on the next 10 years.
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Well, everyone has fond memories from most of the classics of the golden era of games, but if you try them nowadays, not many of them actually stand the test of time that well. Nothing wrong with that though. Personally, I don’t really feel that the games of the old era were in some way superior to what’s around today. There’s still loads of innovation around and even as the projects are getting bigger, there’s still plenty of opportunity to prototype wacky ideas and you don’t even need big team for that.
And even as a game developer, i’m happily surprised from time to time even though I’ve played since vic20 
I think game developers are only now beginning to get the possibilities to do stuff they only dreamed of back in 80′s. You wouldn’t have had Spore, LocoRoco, Ico, Guitar Hero, Sims etc. back then… Then again, gaming has also entered the mainstream with people investing in the companies and such so of course it has become business driven as well. The field is huge too compared to what it was ten years ago, you have your flash games where there’s some great examples (Hiidenportti always comes to mind ;D) and other net stuff (Samorost 2) along with a thriving indie-field which has produced really wonderful stuff (Oasis 2). Then you have your mobile games, all the ways you can connect to other players (DS’s Wifi, XBOX 360 Live) and on top of all that you still have the heavy duty games field of traditional PCs and consoles. It’s hard to sometimes stay alert on what’s up nowadays when there’s so much possibilities
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