Stargate Worlds :: Bios and Pics :: Phil Speer, World Builder

As you can tell from the picture, I'm a huge fan of classic literature.

What can I say about myself that the great scribes have not already put to prose? Okay, so that would be pretty much everything, I guess. My name’s Phil Speer, and I came to Stargate Worlds as a World Builder. Before that, I worked as a designer on Dungeons and Dragons Online. And before that in descending order, I was a production assistant, a student and a little kid, so let me begin there and I’ll work my way forward again. Be prepared for a life story. Don't say I didn't warn you!

As a young child, I had several passions in life: dinosaurs, robots, robots that could transform into dinosaurs, building things with Lincoln logs and Construx which said robots/dinosaurs could wreck, and video games. My father is responsible for my gaming fascination. At an early age, he hooked me up with an Atari 2600 and the greatest gaming PC ever created, a Commodore 64. We played everything, from Combat to M.U.L.E., together. I was always a big fan of multiplayer gaming like that, which is what eventually drove me towards MMOs. I've followed the world of gaming ever since.

Fast forward to Massachusetts, circa early 1999. When it came time to decide where I wanted to go to college and what I wanted to do with my life, I figured out that I wanted to make video games. I used to dabble with designing text based games and with a classic Epic game called ZZT which came with its own editor, among other editors. So, I picked the most logical choice: Computer Science, because science makes everything better! Well, as most people can tell you today, you don't need to be a programmer to work in video games. I learned that the hard way, and after a year decided that programming was not my passion. At the time, there were only a couple of known schools, like Digipen, which actually had game degrees. I took some time off and got a job working at a local video game retailer while I tried to figure out what I wanted to do again.

During that time, I came to the realization that I'm an entertainer at heart. I get no greater joy than when someone experiences and enjoys something I've created. I always had a knack for creative writing, and knew that there must be another avenue into the video game industry. During my time off, I watched a lot of movies, and figured that games were starting to become more film-like in style. This lead me to go to Film school, and I figured, at worst, I would be happy working on movies. I wrote a few screenplays and directed several student shorts.

Great! I graduated magna cum laude and believed I was ready for Hollywood. Everyone's a success in Hollywood right out of film school, right? Okay, I wasn't that naïve, I knew I had a lot of hard work in for me. But, at the same time, I must have been doing something right, because I landed an internship job at RSA, Ridley Scott’s Music Video and Commercial production company.

To this day, Mr. Scott is one of my favorite filmmakers, so this was a dream come true. Turns out, however, interning at a production company means a lot of fetching coffee, dropping off dry cleaning, and Fedexing Hawaiian cakes to New York City (don't ask). I did work on two videos for Green Day, and a commercial for Nintendo, but that sort of work was not as consistent as I hoped.

I found out through the grape vine, or Craigslist, that a company by the name of Turbine was hiring for temp QA positions. I remembered that a frequent customer at the game store, Allan Maki, was Senior Designer at Turbine, and had given me his business card before I left for Hollywood. He told me that if I was ever looking for a job, that I should call him up. I did, and two to three weeks later, I was driving cross country back to Massachusetts with a good buddy of mine in comedic mad-cap road trip romp I like to refer to as "Mass Exodus" (working title).

Shortly after landing my first QA gig on Dungeons & Dragons Online, I was offered a position in Design based on the merit of my work. I was a pretty big fan of D&D at the time, so this was a great opportunity! During my time there, I built over twenty levels, many of which are fan favorites. I specialized in interior dungeons with all sorts of nasty traps and funs stuff like that. I committed myself to making my work as close to the D&D license as possible, and that's something I hope to support while on Stargate Worlds as well. Here, I'm currently working on landscapes, and will be working on some action filled interior spaces which will hopefully keep you begging for more.

So just in case you’re wondering, that's the short version. The long version comes with a PowerPoint presentation and features an intermission somewhere around the middle.

Phil Speer