Episode 477- Interview with Greg Foertsch

Waypoint Radio

VICE

Leisure, Video Game Development, Television, Rewatch, Replay, Tv & Film, Video Games, Games, Movies, Video Game Culture

4.6 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2022

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rob chats with Greg Foertsch, ex-Firaxis art director and founder of Bit Reactor, about his time on Gettysburg!, XCOM, and other seminal strategy games after getting an internship at Microprose right out of art school. Greg reminisces on his time at Firaxis, learning to turn a computer on, and how making games has changed drastically since Gettysburg! was developed.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What's good internet? I'm your host Rob Zachini and you're listening to a special
0:21.2	Waypoint Radio interview. This week is part of our ongoing 101 series on 1997 Sid
0:26.6	Myers Gettysburg. I'm talking to bit reactors Greg Forich and artist on the game and subsequently
0:31.6	a long time art director at for access Greg. Welcome to the show. Hey, how you doing?
0:36.8	Glad to be here. So before we get into Sid's Gettysburg specifically, I was hoping you
0:43.1	tell us a bit about your career. How did you end up getting into games art and what led you to being
0:49.4	on the ground floor at for access? So I went to art school, Marylandist to Down the Street,
0:56.4	and spent four years there learning to paint, learned to draw, didn't turn a computer on,
1:02.0	had no idea what I was getting into. And I stumbled into an internship opportunity at MicroPros
1:08.9	software. And so they were up the street and I had done some freelance illustration, kind of
1:15.7	like doing that, but it was a little repetitive and I wasn't really sure I wanted to keep doing
1:21.7	that. So I thought I'd check out something else. And I stumbled into MicroPros one day.
1:28.2	And they happened to be hiring interns. And so I came on and I spent my second semester,
1:33.5	my senior year just making art, figuring out how to turn the computer on literally.
1:38.7	Back then it was like a 386 with like a stack of floppy disks, right? And so I remember my first
1:44.6	day actually had to get somebody like, how do I actually turn this computer on? Because you
1:49.3	know they had like you know, turned everything on the back and it was like the hard drives turn
1:52.4	once separately, or our disk drives I should say. And so, so yeah, so I spent about two years there,
1:59.8	kind of starting to figure out what I was going to do with my life. And you know, it was supposed
2:04.6	to be a pit stop. I was going to like, you know, work in games, make some money, then go out on my
2:08.8	terrific freelance career, right? As an editorial illustrator. And the more I did it, the more I liked
2:16.4	it, and the more I was like, this is kind of like a real job, right? Like it's it's it's like
	...

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