A friend of mine was kind enough to write this list for you kids. You can all thank Matt with fruit baskets and money! :)

PROGRAMMER

1. Programming in the games industry is hard. You'll have to manage yourself and work 60+ hours a week. Every week. Until you go into crunch mode. Then you'll start to work really long hours.

2. Learn C. Understand pointers, pointer math, memory allocation, and the difference between floats and doubles. Know every place that const can go and understand what each one does. Get a copy of Kernighan & Ritchie's book (ISBN: 0131103628), it's small, white, inexpensive, has no color pictures, and you will really learn C.

3. Learn C++. Learn objected oriented design. Learn exactly what happens when things are virtual or not virtual. Learn what templates are and when they're useful. Learn when templates are a pox upon your codebase. Learn about the new and delete operators. Know what the difference is between "delete" and "delete []".

4. Write a game. Not Q3A. Not the most amazing game anybody ever saw. Write something simple like tetris. When you've gotten that right start over taking everything you've learned and write another simple game, this time write something where you have to load & save levels.

5. Learn to profile your code. Learn to read assembly dumps. Learn to make things that are both well structured and run fast.

6. Play games. This isn't some weird bullshit zen thing where you can make better games by not having preconceptions about what a good game is. This is building a complex machine and you have to look at other examples to see what does and doesn't work.

7. Read books, websites, tutorials, etc. Remember that people who are online are often stupid and they way that they show to do things may not work as well as they say it does.

8. Really, really, really want to be in the industry. You can make more money elsewhere with less effort.

9. Good luck

Year of 2003