Dennison’s career is one that he wanted since he was a child. It’s been a brilliant choice, offering him work that’s constantly bringing new challenges as new hardware comes on the market. Gaming is also an industry that survived the recent economic downturn very well. In fact, it’s larger now that it was just a few years ago.

“There was always a computer in our house,” Dennison said. “We started with a Commodore 64 and my dad was very into computing. It was a very natural thing. I’ve never really had a barrier to using a computer and so I studied it in high school. I did an A level in computing. I moved to degree level and I studied it for my honors degree. That was actually directly related to video games. It wasn’t a traditional software engineering course.”

Dennison studied at Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland. Abertay was the first university in the world to offer a computer games degree. Known as the UK’s premier university for computer games technology, computer arts and related degrees, Abertay’s Institute of Arts, Media and Computer Games has links with companies which help structure the contents of its courses. These courses range from games programming at the science and technology end, to narrative-based animation at the arts end.

Dennison was highly committed to a future in the video game industry. However, he explained that it wasn’t as radical a choice as some might imagine.

“Particularly for the programming discipline, because so much of it is rooted in traditional software engineering skills, there was an obvious fallback if video games didn’t work out,” he remarked. “I’d have quite a lot of skills that could be transferred to traditional software engineering. With video games, it’s not a dead end thing to study.  If you change your mind and want to go down a more traditional route, you’ve still got 90 percent of the skills to do that.”

Obviously, Dennison has been a success in his field. He entered video gaming as a career from the programming aspect, which is suitable for someone who is technically inclined, capable mathematically and very good with logic and problem solving. A programmer also should be someone who finds satisfaction in organization and planning. But Dennison pointed out that programmers make up just part of a computer game development team.

“More than fifty percent of a development team are artists,” he said. “Professionals on the art side of a development team are people who are creative, inventive and visual thinkers. Many have traditional art backgrounds. Skills such as hand drawing, modeling and sculpting are important. Computer game development is a fascinating industry in that it caters for two very different types of people who have to work together successfully to produce these fantastic products.”

Dennison was fortunate to have chosen a career direction at a young age and to have the educational resources available to combine with his talents in order to achieve success. Not everyone is as empowered. Dennison advised that if students don’t have access to specialist courses in computer gaming, there’s no need to despair. Any degree that has a strong backbone of mathematics and software engineering is a fine start.

“You can augment your studies with the additional games-related knowledge just by looking online and getting involved in one of the many online development sites that teaches specifically about games,” he said. “There are a huge number of sites available. For instance Microsoft makes a lot of the information about Xbox game development available freely online for exactly this reason. It’s possible as a lone developer to make an Xbox game because Microsoft provides all those tools for free at the XNA Creators Club — more recently called the App Hub.”

And if you are interested in creating a computer game, then according to Dennison it’s essential to stay up-to-date on the latest developments in the field.

“For instance, one of the big features in our new game DiRT 3 is our social integration,” he explained. “For the first time, we have YouTube functionality which lets people upload their own videos directly from the game to YouTube. We’ve had over 100,000 videos uploaded from players. That’s really exciting for us because now we have a direct connection with the gamers and we can see exactly what they’ve been doing and how they’ve been playing. This is bringing a sense of community even further into games and encouraging people to play more. One of the attractions of the industry is that I know that for the rest of my career there’s always going to be new technology coming. That’s something that I embrace and that excites me.”