A Career Built on Luck?
And a Bit of Work
I’ve always felt privileged to work in video games as a Producer. I’m still a few decades away from amassing a fortune (at least in euros or dollars), but in every way that matters, I consider myself incredibly fortunate.
I can honestly say I’ve achieved every career goal I set for myself.
But how much of that was really down to me—my effort, my skill, my willingness to roll up my sleeves and do the work? And how much was just luck?
Right Place, Right Time
By the time I finished my studies, World of Warcraft was in development. Blizzard was getting close to launching it and had started thinking about how to support a game of that scale—not just in the U.S., but in Europe too.
That part? Pure luck. Nothing to do with me.
Blizzard started recruiting Game Masters to provide in-game customer service at their new European office. Around the same time, I happened to read an article in EDGE magazine about World of Warcraft—one of those pre-release hype pieces with gorgeous screenshots that made you desperately want to play the game. And I was a massive Blizzard fan.
Like, the kind of fan who, after reading that article, immediately started planning his daily schedule around how much time he’d dedicate to playing the game.
At the time, I had just wrapped up five years of university toil, casually browsing for jobs. And then—by sheer coincidence—I saw that Blizzard was hiring Game Masters in France.
Let’s break this down:
A job at a company I desperately wanted to work for.
On a game I desperately wanted to play.
In a country I was already eager to move to.
The stars couldn’t have aligned more perfectly.
So I applied. And then I got the interview, which went down like this:
Interviewer: Have you ever played an MMO?
Ernie: No
Interviewer: Wait…wut? Not one? No EverQuest. No Ultima Online. No Asheron’s Call. Nothing?
Ernie: Nah, can’t say that I have.
Interviewer: Okay. Well, have you ever worked in customer service?
Ernie: Nope.
Interviewer: Wow, really? Never? Like, not even as a side gig, a waiter in a bar or something?
Ernie: Heck no!
Interviewer: How’s your English?
Ernie: I talk good.
Interviewer: Welcome on board! When can you start?
Looking back now, as someone who’s spent years scrutinizing resumes, I don’t think I would have hired me. But back then? They were growing so fast that they just needed warm bodies. Right place, right time. Again—pure luck.
Career Progression via Desperation
So I moved to France. This was late 2004, a few months before World of Warcraft officially launched. My wife—always incredibly supportive—was willing to uproot her own career and dreams to follow my ridiculous one.
Again: Lucky me!
When WoW finally launched in early 2005, the servers exploded. Way more people were trying to play than anyone had anticipated, which meant Blizzard needed more customer support. Fast.
And if you’re hiring hundreds of new Game Masters, you also need trainers to teach them how to do the job.
So they opened a position for Customer Support Trainer, which I applied for.
Interviewer: Do you have any experience teaching people? Can be anything, even tying shoelaces to kindergarteners?
Ernie: No
Interviewer: Do you have any experience talking to a large group or public speaking?
Ernie: Hell no! Public speaking scares the hell out of me. I avoid it like the plague.
Interviewer: ….right. Well, at least you know the job we are training people to do, right?
Ernie: Shit yeah! I’ve been doing it for almost eight weeks now! Worldwide, I am one of, if not THE person most skilled at answering questions about elves and mages to complete strangers in Azeroth.
Interviewer: How’s your English?
Ernie: I talk good.
Interviewer: Welcome on board! When can you start?
So I became a trainer. No real competition. No selection process. Just circumstance.
A few months later, they needed someone to manage the training team. Another step up.
Then the customer support needs expanded—server moderation, player behavior policies, account security. New problems kept popping up, and they needed people to handle them. So I got pulled into designing policies, managing teams, and overseeing entire sections of customer support. Then when we merged with the anti-gold farming and compromised accounts prevention team, I was managing over 100 people in Blizzard’s European office at 28 years old.
At this point, I started thinking: Okay, this is great, but I still want to be a Producer!
Getting on the Radar
After about five years in Customer Service, Blizzard decided they needed a closer connection between the European office and the U.S. development team. Each region—Europe, China, Korea—had unique needs, and they needed a direct liaison to bridge the gap.
So they opened a Project Manager role in Europe.
I applied.
This time, there was actual competition. But by this point, my experience was solid, and I got the job.
That role got me face time with the development team in Irvine. It also meant I was now on their radar. So when an Associate Producer position opened up in the U.S. a few years later, I had a huge leg up.
Did I work hard? Sure.
But so do a lot of people who never get that kind of opportunity.
Once again: luck.
Welcome to Live Ops Hell
So after seven years in Europe, I got the job as Associate Producer and moved to Blizzard’s headquarters in Irvine, California. A dream come true.
...Except the job was Live Ops.
For those who don’t know, being a Live Ops Producer for a massive MMO is a 24/7 slugfest. My entire job was making sure the servers stayed up and that the latest hotfixes and content updates were smoothly deployed to the millions of players.
If a server went down or an exploit was discovered anywhere—North America, Europe, China—I got the first call. No matter what time it was.
3 AM? Call me.
At the beach with my family? Call me.
“Naughty time” with the missus? Call me.
And after I got the call? I had to wake up everyone else. And they were not thrilled about it.
It was brutal.
And yet, even then, I knew it was an invaluable experience. The best war stories come from the trenches. And sure enough, after doing time in Live Ops, I eventually landed the job I really wanted: Producer on the Design Team.
Finally. The dream job.
At that point, I was 35 years old, and I had already reached the goal I set for myself in university: being a full Game Producer at Blizzard. Some might say I peaked too early, but I don’t see it that way.
After leaving Blizzard and moving back to Europe for personal reasons, my career continued evolving. And one thing became incredibly clear:
Having Blizzard on your resume is an absurdly powerful advantage.
Lucky me!
Success, Luck, and the World According to Ernie
At the beginning, I asked myself: How much of this achievement can I honestly attribute to myself?
Here’s how I think about it now, in my old age:
I’m not a Formula 1 driver. I was never going to be a Formula 1 driver.
It never crossed my mind as a kid. My parents weren’t into it—never watched it on TV, never talked about it, never cared about racing. I didn’t know anyone who did. No childhood friend who took me to a karting track. No mentor regaling me with stories of their racing exploits.
So, naturally, I never even tried. Never sat in a kart, never worked my way up the ranks. Which means I never had to go head-to-head with Max Verstappen to become the best in the world. Lucky for him, no doubt.
Now, let’s say I’m the Max Verstappen of Video Game Producers. How many people out there never even tried to compete with me for a job in this field?
Billions.
So is anyone really the “Max Verstappen” of their industry? Hell, is Max Verstappen even the "Max Verstappen" of Formula 1?
Impossible to say—but odds are, no. For any job, there’s probably someone, somewhere in the world, who’d be better at it than you or me.
Speaking for myself, the best I can say is: I took advantage of an opporttunity.
Or, as the late, great Johan Cruijff put it:
"If you don’t see opportunities, you can’t take advantage of them. It’s always better to take a chance than to do nothing."
Sidenote, Cruijff also said:
"Before I make a mistake, I don’t make that mistake."
Now those are words to live by.