Video Game Prodigy
One student’s virtual hobby led him into a $93 billion industry
Writers and film directors have long known that our phobias make good stories. Christopher McGlade (CGS’15, COM’17) knows they can also make an addictive video game. He’s created games based on fears of wandering in the woods at night and of battling giant lethal spiders.
McGlade must be on to something: he’s turned what started out as an after-school hobby into his own company, Lightning Man Media, and is now part of the $93 billion video game industry.
It’s a mostly one-man shop. McGlade creates all of his games’ elements, from the artwork to the soundtrack to the programming. His two most recent games, both first-person adventures, draw upon emotions and phobias, as McGlade believes the virtual realm is a place where players are more willing to try things they wouldn’t have the ability or courage to take on in the real world (“That’s one of the things I like about playing them,” he says). In Nyctophobia, which he based on a nightmare, players race through the woods searching for battery packs to keep their flashlight powered. If the darkness swallows you, the game ends—and you die.
“I like that you start with an idea and just keep building on it,” McGlade says. “It’s a lot of work to fill it in, but you can take an idea you have and bring it to life.” McGlade, who has played video games most of his life, became interested in graphic design and 3D modeling as a high school freshman, in 2010. He taught himself JavaScript by watching online tutorials and began programming his own games: a fantasy underwater adventure in which players hunt for pearls and treasure chests, and Arachnophobia, featuring those menacing spiders. During McGlade’s senior year, he was introduced to the head of the gaming company My Evil Twin, where he worked alongside the director of Grand Theft Auto to debug Maze Crusade, a game where a knight runs through a maze, fleeing evil gnomes and gargoyles.
In November 2013, armed with programming expertise and work experience, McGlade brought Arachnophobia to the Microsoft offices in New York City, where he sold it to another game developer for “somewhere in the five figures,” he says. Now a sophomore, McGlade juggles his passion with his life as a college student; he squeezes in his programming during breaks from class and homework and always carries his laptop with him.
To build a game, McGlade uses Autodesk Maya 3D animation software, the same program developers use to create graphics and animations for movies like Avatar and Frozen and the television series Game of Thrones. The software normally costs developers $10,000, but is free for students, McGlade says. Using Maya, McGlade creates each 3D component that appears in his games, and in Nyctophobia, that means everything from a hanging skeleton to a flashlight. He then transports each element into the game-creation engine Unity, where he codes the game as well as simulates the 3D objects.
Next, McGlade composes his own music and adds sound effects he records himself, like walking in his backyard to get the sound of crunching leaves. “My parents thought I was crazy,” he says. In the case of Nyctophobia, which took about a year to build, the challenge was deciding when the game was finally finished. A year can drag on, he says, and “eventually you just have to stop.”
McGlade asked his friends to be his beta testers and provide feedback before he made Nyctophobia available for download in March on the gaming website Desura. “I had a few friends majoring in computer science play the game with a technical mindset,” McGlade says. “Then I had a friend at the College of Fine Arts look at it through an artistic mindset. I asked someone at the College of Communication if the story made sense. But the most important thing I want them to tell me—was it fun?”
In the video above, watch a trailer for Christopher McGlade’s video game, Nyctophobia, which he based on a nightmare.