About Aaron

I've always been enamoured with games and interactive media.

In my class journal from 4th grade, I wrote about wanting to be a video game designer when I grew up. In middle school and high school, my friends and I would spend hours creating and playing our own board games. My parents told me that all my time pouring over pen and paper RPG rulebooks was a waste of time (they feel differently about it now!) but I couldn't help myself.

I got started in multimedia design through making web sites, shooting and editing video, and music recording in my friend's basement. My first game projects were in Macromedia Director where a friend and I created a 2D platformer engine that allowed us to draw out level collision in Photoshop and script game behavior in Lingo.

My first job in the games industry was at Electronic Arts as an embedded QA tester on Tiger Woods 2003 for PC. It was a short contract, but I loved it.

I spent two years as a QA analyst at Sony testing third party games for major issues before they were approved for final release. Because we only spent around a week with each game, it meant I was exposed to many, many games of all types during my time there. But my aspirations were always to be more directly involved in creating, so I eventually pivoted into freelance multimedia work.

I spent 5.5 years as a one-person multimedia studio, creating websites, shooting and editing video, and designing interactive multimedia training programs for clients such as Chevron, Hilton Hotels, and Roche Molecular. Eventually, the opportunity came up to return to the games industry; I was eager to work with a team that could create things at a much larger scale than I could alone.

I joined Maxis as a game designer where I worked collaboratively with engineers, UX, artists, production, and marketing partners to design and implement gameplay systems, game worlds, and a plethora of interactive objects and user flows, guiding the process from concept to completion across The Sims 4 base game, twelve different Sims 4 expansions, and two Sims 3 spin offs.

I'm currently pursuing my passion for VR at BigBox VR where I'm working as a producer to create online multiplayer VR games.