Tony Garcia has achieved more than a modicum of success over the past 25 years…

So let’s see. Tony Garcia is a videogame producer. He worked on Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis. He founded Microsoft’s games division in 1991 and worked there for six years. He became general manager of Electronic Arts Seattle and oversaw Need For Speed and the FIFA licence. In short, he has spent the past quarter of a century making his mark on gaming.

But the most important thing to have happened to him in all that time? “It’s hard to pinpoint,” he tells us. “But getting to meet George Lucas when I was very young and working at LucasArts was a real highlight. Actually I also met Steven Spielberg while I was at Microsoft. I’m a huge movie fan so these sorts of side benefits have always been a great part of this exciting industry.”

Garcia’s work is not yet done. If there is one thing which strikes home it’s his age. He may have spent 26 years in the gaming industry but he’s still only 45 years old and while he may have settled into some sort of domestic bliss – living, as he does, in Seattle, Washington, with his wife and four dogs which he enters into shows – he has just joined engine developer Unity Technologies as director of business development. His job now is to help promote the Unity engine in the production of PC, Mac, Wii and iPhone games.

Over the years, dozens of commercial games have been produced using Unity and although the engine has been used to develop casual web-based MMOs, it has also proved popular with students and indie developers. Games such as Global Conflicts: Palestine and WolfQuest have been created with the engine and Garcia says he is now working for a company which is helping fledgling videogame developers gain entry into the industry. As for himself, he owes his whole career to his father and a Commodore computer.

“My dad bought me my first computer, a Commodore VIC-20, when I was still in high school,” he recalls. “It was definitely the catalyst for me to take my budding interest in arcade games and turn it into a career.”

Garcia looks back with great fondness, thinking back to the days when small teams of people or just one solitary guy in a bedroom worked on small, fun and challenging little games and how the rise of the industry with larger budgets and increasingly vast projects have altered the landscape. Yet he is as interested in how gamers have changed as he is the methods of production.

“I think gamers have gone through their own progression and with some interesting results,” he says. “For a while, it seemed as though gamers were always looking for the next big game, something that would top the last one that they played. The demand for ever-increasing realism and immersion seemed to be insatiable.

“But then something interesting happened. With the advent of MMOs and with new hardware platforms being introduced we saw a new, more social trend emerge. Gamers began to actively choose a less realistic but more engaging experience in the form of these new products.”

… continued