It's brutal out there: Deus Ex and Unreal composer says he's submitted 50 resumes and gotten one interview in the last year
PC Gamer

If you don't pay close attention to game credits you may not know the name Alexander Brandon, but you've almost certainly heard his work. The composer of Deus Ex's soundtrack has some 30 years of games to his name as a musician (Unreal, Stormgate), audio director (Wasteland 3, Neverwinter Nights 2), and even voice actor—who could forget his performances as "Flayed Goat" in Pagan Online or "Additional Mudokon Voices" in Oddworld: Soulstorm?

Okay, those last two aren't his most prestigious credits—but the point is, Brandon's list of contributions to game audio run the gamut from legendary to humble, from in-studio director gigs to the sorts of small behind-the-scenes contributions every game needs to get out the door. It's the kind of resume that seems like it'd guarantee you a job. Unless the state of layoffs and hiring in the games industry was, like, terrible, or something.

"My take on things is: Full-time is far less likely, high-paying full-time is probably more competitive than it's ever been," Brandon said in a recent interview with PC Gamer. "I've submitted 50 resumes and gotten one interview in the last year."

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He's hardly alone on the job search: Brandon mentioned that other "unbelievably senior and legendary-status people," like Bungie's former head of audio, have had to make due with contract work as few full-time roles exist for them in triple-A games.

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"There are CEOs saying nobody's going to have a job in, like, two seconds, and we're all going to be in a utopia," Brandon said. "Money's just going to flow into our mailboxes and we're going to turn into Wall-E or whatever. I'm just like, stop the techbro crap—I think people are sick of that.

"People drink all of this Kool-Aid and are like 'if we don't use this language, we are behind.' We need to be behind. We need to acknowledge our limitations, and we need to be able to say, as humans, 'we can't keep pushing ourselves through this shitty economy and shitty situation.' Not to soapbox too much."