![]() ![]() In the end, it was fluke timing that kickstarted Goldfarb’s games career. “People would laugh at you if you told them ‘I want to go to school for games’”, he says. ![]() Not least because, in the early nineties, there was no obvious pathway into the industry. Goldfarb knew that he liked games, but at that time he never seriously considered game development as a viable career. “The biggest formative games were definitely things like Wizardry and the Gold Box SSI Dungeons and Dragons games.” Wing Commander I played on my friend’s Amiga.” But Goldfarb’s fondest memories of games during this period are primarily of RPGs. “I couldn’t afford a PC either, so in both cases I had to go to my friend’s house. “I didn’t really have a console,” he says. It didn’t feel like it had any analogue in my experience.”Īs video games began to enter the home, Goldfarb’s experiences of them mostly remained outside of it. “I hadn’t ever seen anything like that, even though we’d been playing Pong or whatever garbage there was,” he says. “The vector graphics were different,” he says, citing the game’s clean lines and dazzlingly bright visual display that marked it out from other arcade games. Amid all the games Goldfarb played at that time, one stood out – Atari’s Asteroids. Goldfarb first encountered video games during the heyday of arcades, when to play games was to be surrounded by a cacophonous, discordant and endlessly changing soundtrack, from the iconic ‘wakka wakka’ of Pac-Man, to the ominous buzz of Space Invaders. “I knew what I didn’t want to do and what I did want to do, and generally, I didn’t do the stuff I didn’t want to do, even when it made people angry.” “My parents said I would go over my friends’ houses and read their books and never interact with them many times, so I guess that probably says something,” This independent, perhaps headstrong nature has remained part of Goldfarb throughout his life, and he freely admits that it has sometimes gotten him into trouble. “I have no heroes in games, if there’s anyone who I admire and who I love unconditionally, it’s musicians.” ![]() “My takeaway from their careers was I didn’t have any interest in doing it myself, ” He doesn’t recall many specifics from his childhood, apart from that he “loved to read books and loved baseball and baseball cards.” But he has a strong sense of being independently minded, stating he was “always happy to be alone” and although would enjoy the company of other children, never felt like he needed it. “They gave me a lot of rope to do what I wanted when I was younger, ” he says. Growing up on Long Island, Goldfarb was raised by his parents, who were both teachers. Yet the most crucial moments in his life have often revolved around sound. Goldfarb’s career has been wide-ranging, occasionally confrontational, and highly itinerant, taking him from his home country of the United States, to Italy, the Netherlands and finally to Sweden. It’s a statement that could be seen as convenient, considering Goldfarb’s current project is Metal: Hellsinger – a first-person shooter made in Unity, where players blast their way out of hell to the rhythm of a bespoke metal soundtrack performed by some of the genre’s biggest names, from Trivium’s Matt Heafy to System of a Down’s Serj Tankian. “It’s easier for me to admire musicians because they are closer to how I feel as a person than anything else, except I don’t have their ability, just the appreciation.” “If there’s anyone who I admire and who I love unconditionally, it’s musicians,” he says. What he says next, however, is like a ray of light breaking through clouds. “And games are made by teams in most cases, so lionizing one person feels kinda weird.” “I don’t feel like a game developer most of the time, more like a stranger someone let into the building who knows a few things about games,” he elaborates. It seems like an odd comment from someone who has spent almost thirty years working on them, from testing games at Acclaim Entertainment – the publisher of titles like the dinosaur-shooter series Turok and Shadow Man, a voodoo-themed action-adventure based on the Valiant Comics series – to leading huge, multimillion dollar projects like Battlefield: Bad Company 2 at DICE, one of the biggest developers of multiplayer FPS games. “I have no heroes in games,” David Goldfarb announces toward the end of our chat about his career. ![]()
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