Roger Collum has always been good at breaking things. But when you grow up in poverty – as he did in Goose Creek, S.C. – you can’t just go out and buy a replacement, so you’d better know how to fix what you break.
As a teenager in the early 1990s, Collum mowed lawns, scrounged quarters and saved up to buy parts for his first personal computer. He wanted it so badly he even sold his prized comic book collection.
“I pieced it together with duct tape and bailing twine,” Collum says of the 8088 XT computer. “And from there, I was learning how to program on my own.”
He spent hours trying to make the computer’s software do things it wasn’t designed to do, forcing it to crash so he could learn how to improve the code.
It was an exciting time to be a teenager, with early video gaming consoles like Nintendo and PlayStation One hitting the market, and games like Super Mario Bros. and Double Dragon sucking in an entire generation of youth with mind-blowing graphics and animation.
One game, Final Fantasy 7, was the clarion call that would shape Collum’s future: “It’s the first PS One game that had real animated cinematics that made the game feel extremely immersive. If you look at it now, it looks really bad. But at the time, I thought, This is the future. This is crazy. How did they do this?”
While the graphic interface realm of the digital world remained a mystery to him, Collum began writing his own text-based games and then decided to pursue a computer science degree. Collum, the first in his family to attend college, was at the College of Charleston for two years before he was forced to cut his education short in order help a family member through a life crisis.
But he made the most of his time while at the College.
“The college experience and moving away from home: That is everything,” he says. “That is the basis of my success, learning how to think and taking away the safety catch and having to figure out how to make it.”
And Collum certainly figured out how to make it: In 2006, he landed a job as a quality assurance specialist at Epic Games, a video game company based in Cary, N.C. He was a perfect match for the job, which was largely about breaking things.
“You have to have people whose job it is to try to break your product over and over again, so that when it goes out to a customer, it is as good as it can be,” says Collum, who has since worked his way up to producer at Epic, which is best known for the popular Unreal series of games and the billion-dollar blockbuster Gears of War franchise.
The kid of meager upbringing, who skimped and saved to buy his first computer, now travels the world to spread the gospel of gaming.
His latest project is a game called Fortnite. It’s the company’s first foray into free-to-play, and Collum says they are determined to get it right. That’s the strength of a company that has been around for nearly 25 years, he points out: It has enough financial stability to take its time building products that will last.
It’s better to ensure the game is crash-proof because, as Collum knows, there’s always going to be some kid out there trying to break it.
– Ron Menchaca ’98
