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![TMCNet: Brian Glines answers his own [Standard-Examiner, Ogden, Utah]](http://images.tmcnet.com/siteart/invisible.gif)
Brian Glines answers his own [Standard-Examiner, Ogden, Utah]
(Standard-Examiner (Ogden, UT) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Feb. 06--Jean Glines knew her son had talent when she saw her kitchen table decked out in dead corpses.
The corpses, the kitchen table, the entire South Weber home, all of it appeared in a homemade computer version of the "Doom" video game that Brian Glines, then 12, had taught himself to create on his computer.
"It had the green counters and you could turn this way and see the cabinets, the refrigerator and the stove," said Jean Glines, who now lives in Pleasant View. "The decapitated bodies over the dining room table were not something I approved of."
Like many children, Brian grew up with video games as a part of his life. It was a hobby that he and his father enjoyed together, although the younger Glines took a different approach.
"I was always a computer gamer, so he picked it up from me," said Brent Glines, Brian's father, who lives in North Ogden. "Except I was more interested in blowing stuff up -- where he was very interested in the mechanics of it."
Brian was raised in South Weber and attended Northridge High School in Layton before moving to Arizona after his sophomore year. He knew the video game industry was his future, and enrolled in a software engineering program at Arizona State University. College was a short endeavor, however, when he found a job opening with Ion Storms, the company that created the popular "Deus Ex" game.
Glines was a fan of the firstperson shooter and role-playing game and even developed his own levels at home based on the game's software.
"I just thought it was worth a shot," he said. "So I just gathered together some screen shots of stuff I had been working on and a really bad resume that wasn't in any proper format."
A few phone interviews later, he was flown to Texas for a faceto-face meeting -- and he had to tell his parents the life-changing news.
"We came home from out of town and he said, 'I found a job,'" Jean Glines remembers. "We said, 'No, you are a full-time student and you bag groceries. What more of a job could you handle ?'
"He said, 'No this is my dream job.' I said, 'Well, you will be able to finish college, won't you?' He said he won't be able to finish college. 'I have to go now.' "
The 18-year-old left college after a semester and a half to start his gaming career. He spent the next five years with Ion Storms, as a developer on "Deus Ex: Invisible War" and "Thief: Deadly Shadows."
Heeding the call
Ion Storms went out of business in 2005 and Glines found work with video game developers at Treyarch in Los Angeles. Activision is the parent company and the distributor.
That opened the door for him to work on "Call of Duty," one of the most popular franchises today, starting with "Call of Duty 2: Big Red One."
Glines worked the last two years or so to develop "Call of Duty: Black Ops," which focuses on the Cold War. The game became mega-popular, beating the record for single-day video game sales on Nov. 9, 2010, when it was released and reeled in more than a billion dollars in its first five weeks, according to a Dec 10, 2010, Activision press release.
The success came as little surprise to Glines.
"I think it makes sense. Because 'Call of Duty' is the basic shooter game. (You) basically run around and shoot guys. We try to make that run as smoothly and feel as good as possible," he said.
"I think we have kind of honed the formula over the years. It is kind of interesting how it keeps getting more and more popular year by year. That's something you don't normally expect to happen."
Glines' job was to make the world, the wars, into a 3-D masterpiece.
"Basically, I come up with what happens in a given mission in a game. I am mostly responsible for building the actual environments that you run around through," he said.
"So (if) you run through a destroyed building, that is something that I have had to piece together from some sort of 3-D modeling program."
"Black Ops" takes the gamer around the world, through Cuba, Russia, Vietnam and even through the Pentagon to meet with John F. Kennedy. As a level developer, Glines needed to develop the virtual world to resemble the real world as much as possible.
A large amount of research was involved, using reference photos to piece together the environments into a 3-D landscape. Kevin Worrel, lead level builder at Treyarch, said that while the story in Black Ops was fictional, months of attention was spent on the landscape.
"Our primary input was for what kind of props, what kind of foliage, what type of trees, the shape and styles of the structures to show," said Worrel.
The research went beyond looking at photos from the locales.
"We actually had some guys who fought in Vietnam that we consulted with, who told us about how it was from a soldier's perspective," said Glines. Glines said he felt the pressure while working on the popular series. "I always try to make whatever I work on something I would be proud to show the world," he said. "But you do think about it once in a while -- 19 million people are going to walk through this hallway I just made. I better put a little more work into it, make sure it's the best that I could have made it."
It has been 10 years since he made the decision to start a career instead of finishing college.
Brent Glines said he talks about his son's work every chance he gets. That's fitting, since it all began with a father and son enjoying time together playing video games.
Brian Glines said he loved that time as kid, when he could just play a video game and enjoy a game for what it was.
"It's different than when I was younger," he said. "Now I still enjoy it. But I can't help but take a more analytical approach now."
To see more of the Standard-Examiner, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.standard.net.
Copyright (c) 2011, Standard-Examiner, Ogden, Utah
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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