analog internet, that world they build around the main character.
- What advice would you give to a young person today
about, let's say, a career? How to have a career they can
be proud of? How they can have a life to be proud of? You've had a non-standard life.
- I've had a lucky life in which I have
fought to mess things up, and fate has always thrown me a bone.
- You've traveled in South America and had hobos chase you with machetes.
- Yeah. Once.
- Yeah, yeah. So that happened.
- That was a series of poor life decisions.
And I ran, I ran away. You know, I ran away to South America.
That was a poor decision. I ran away from the guy with a knife.
That was a good decision. I came to America. That was a good decision.
I came to LA, that's, I think, been a good decision.
It's been fun to see a different side of America and be in a different
creative environment. LA is still amazing for creativity
and entertainment, the wider entertainment industry stuff. I think that's
been fun. What would I say? I would say,
when you get a chance, take it. That was one thing I did do well.
When I got chances, I was good at taking them.
I would say, do not worry too young about your career.
I would say, worry about having a rounded intellectual inner life,
'cause you're gonna spend your whole life in your own head. So the more
interesting you find your own head, the more interesting you find the world,
the less you're gonna annoy yourself. So I would say, I would,
I would say, do not do a vocational degree as an undergraduate.
That's been my... I would say, do something else. Do something,
you know, random and then focus afterwards. That would be, I think I was
advocating against the obsession that people had about four years ago with
STEM subjects. And now AI is gonna make them all irrelevant anyway, perhaps.
So, you know, it's interesting to see everything changes.
Jobs are not that hard. You know, turn up, be enthusiastic.
Be, but turn up in person, be enthusiastic. Help people.
Say, "You'll be fine in any job." People is, you know.
- Did you always know when the chance to take showed up? Like this is, okay, this is
interesting, this is new, this is different?
- Not always, no. But the big times were the chance to move to America.
For me, that was a big moment. My life was a mess in...
- That was weird timing. So I read that Sam wrote you an email. What, what...
in South America?
- I literally, I was in South America...
...in Colombia where there was a war raging there.
I was making a series of very poor life choices and a lack of life skills, age 25.
My latest poor choice was to get up too early, because the police didn't start
work till 9:00, but the muggers started at 8:00. And so I was out walking along
the beach at 8:00 and these...
guys, this Rasta who turned up, who I'd been talking to the day before,
started trying to talk to me. And then two guys came up to talk to him,
and I couldn't tell...
if they were trying to mug him 'cause he owed them money or he brought me to them.
But I did notice one of them had a machete and the other had a kind of broken gun.
So I thought, "This is not good." And I ran off, sprinted down the beach in my silly shoes.
And got the chance, for
once in my life, to run over to a road, jump into a taxi and
scream, "Take me anywhere!" I felt like I'm in an action movie, and a
guy's chasing after with a machete. The taxi driver looks back, sees the dude with the machete,
and goes, "?" And I'm, "No, no, no, they're not my friends."
"Get me out of here." He drove me up the street into a bit where
the town was. It's kind of between the old town and the new town in Cartagena. And
I got out of the car and then cut my foot on a rock. That was the sum total
of my injuries. Then I went to an internet café, cause this was probably
late '98, and got the chance to come and work
on a game for six weeks in New York. And I was like, "Well, if I stay in South
America much longer, I'm going to get myself killed," 'cause this was when I was getting into
silly stuff.
And so I went to New York, and they were just starting Rockstar. I got to sort
of write the mission statements and whatnot there, and help set the tone for
that and just ended up staying. I had to come and go
a bit while all visas got sorted out. And then I just ended up
staying, "I'll stay for a year 'cause New York's pretty fun." It actually was
not that-- this was the height of Giuliani before he was a maniac. So
you couldn't-- when you went to bars, you were told you couldn't dance.
'Cause they were trying to clamp down on New York being fun.
So it was actually less fun than London, but there's still a great energy in New York.
And I got exposed to the kind of madness of New York capitalism.
- By the way, as we hear sirens in the background, that always makes me think of New York.
- Yeah, of course.
- Whenever I'm in New York...
- Yeah
- ...there's always sirens.
- Steam coming out the floor, people screaming at you. I mean, you get people screaming at
you in LA, at least.
- Yeah, but it's more distributed, it's more, uh...
- Yeah, it's more spread out.
- ...spread out, yeah.
- You can get a bit more quiet here.
I love the energy. It was great to work hard and then be able to
go out for dinner late. And New York was really, really a fun experience for me.