W
ith stints at EA and Microsoft Game Studios, Tara Mustapha has an impressive CV – as you might well expect of someone
who’s been in the gaming industry for more than 20 years. What marks hers out however isn’t so much the games she’s worked on, but the accolades she’s amassed, including two global Women in Games Awards and two from MCV/DEVELOP, including the big one earlier this year for Outstanding Contribution. The accolades have come about largely through her
early advocacy of underrepresented groups, subsequent to which was the founding of Code Coven (itself a persistent award winner), which for the past five years has worked to bring learning, finance and support to those who might not otherwise be able to access it.
How did you get started in the industry? I’ve always loved games. My dad was an early adopter when I was a kid – we had a Commodore Amiga – and he was always tinkering with games and programming, such as it was back in the 80s, and I was always really interested in how that all happened.
“If people aren’t staying they are not making it to the upper echelons of the industry, then there is no encouragement for anybody of marginalised backgrounds to stay around”
Later I was living in Montreal [studying art] and
flunked out of university because it just wasn’t my thing. Then I ended up doing two diplomas, one in Montreal and one in Vancouver for game design. Both courses were pilot programs for their colleges to do games. Then from graduating out of Vancouver Film School, I went into working at Backbone Entertainment as a game designer and scripter.
The first half of your career was very much in the trenches of game development, working at places like EA and Microsoft. Do you miss that aspect? My experience with Code Coven, while fantastic, has made it clear that I miss designing games. I think my passion will always be getting into the nitty gritty of building and making. It has just always been that as a designer you tend to wear the production hat as well - which is probably a recipe for disaster to be honest. But, yeah, my love has always been making things feel good in a design sense. When I started, my ambition was to make the next
Call of Duty or the next World of Warcraft, or have that kind of impact and influence. Those are the games that I was playing, the games I loved… Or Football Manager… If Sports Interactive had come along and said ‘Here’s a football manager title for you!’ I’d have been like, ‘Oh, yes. Heaven!’
Can you not indulge those ambitions any more? Only in a really annoying way. No, I joke. I mean, in a games sense, not as much as I would like to. The beauty of Code Coven is that we do get to see many different teams and so many different games. I hope that the programs that we create have a small part to play in their development and in their greater success. But the way I now have my design fun is taking how I designed video games in the past and that thinking, ‘How do we apply that to how we work and develop games as organisations.’
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