Introducing our VP of Tech – Art Zaratsyan! (Part 1)
Meet Art Zaratsyan, Myria’s new vice president of tech and a gaming trailblazer. But we’re not just talking about?playing?games. Art’s first foray into?coding?games began when he was eight years old.
Born in the Soviet Union, Art was subsequently brought up in Armenia where his father headed up a tech lab. The lab became a haven where Art got to wile away many happy hours learning Basic computer language and discovering how to program.
“My father’s workplace was where my fascination with games began,” he says. “Back then, he was in charge of monitoring and maintaining these giant mainframes. After a while, early PCs started showing up on site and I’d start playing around on them until one of the technicians who needed to do something work-related picked me up and moved me to another terminal.’
But getting under the feet of his father’s busy colleagues didn’t deter the budding young programmer, and within a short space of time he had advanced from ’10 print “Art”; 20 goto 10’, to building simple games
“Yeah, I learned to code early on. I think I was around ten years old when I learned C language and started coding up these little video games that I could entertain myself with.”
Fast forward a few decades, and with a PhD in applied mathematics under his belt, Art was ready to move bigger things. After gaining his qualification he worked as the central tech engineer at EA, building libraries of code for the games, and after a year or so of that, he moved into the game teams.
“I worked on casual sports games like Fifa Street,” he says. “I also worked on Need for Speed, which I still play. Then I got a job at Blue Castle games as systems lead until the company was bought out by the gaming giant, Capcom. After that, I went to Ubisoft and worked on Watch Dogs 2 and Far Cry 5. Then, I landed a job at Warner Brothers I really wanted.
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“They hired me as tech director to work on Gotham Knights, and I rebooted the project, rebuilding and restructuring it — personnel, workflows, everything. Shortly after that, I took another position as VP of technology at a SaaS company that did time tracking for?Jira?customers. That’s where I started to learn about building scalable backends on the cloud. Then Myria found me.
So what does it feel like coming back into the fold of the gaming industry as VP of Tech in Myria’s gaming division?
“Honestly, the only reason I learned to program is because I wanted to make a game. My first interactions with computers were always playing for fun. Back when I was a kid, I was a big fan of Sierra Adventure Studio’s offerings. So, Space Quest, King’s Quest, the Realm, Phantasmagoria, and others. So, when I started programming, I just wanted to emulate those. I started out generating these little asteroid games, just to see if I could do it, and then I started getting into graphics. I’d nerd out for hours doing things like messing with the palette on a static image creating these pseudo animations because the computer memory wasn’t fast enough to render the colors individually to get the same effect.”
“Then, at some point, I wanted to find out how the mouse worked. And I had to understand what an interrupt was and figure out what an assembly was, and so on. But the intent was always?how to make a game, and that’s never left me.”
Keep your eyes open for Part 2 of Art’s story published at the same time next week. To stay up-to-date with this and other reminders,?Follow Myria on Twitter
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