Paul Cross has a resume that many high-school students today would probably salivate over. When he was the lead designer at Criterion Games, he developed a series of high-speed racing games called Burnout. He also served as a consultant for the powerhouse game company Electronic Arts, helping it develop its first-person shooter game Medal of Honor. Now he’s the director of game design at Ubisoft Entertainment, the multinational video-game developer responsible for titles such as Assassin’s Creed, Just Dance, and Rocksmith—the hugely popular game he created that teaches players real songs on the electric guitar. To date, 3 million copies have been sold.
One credential Paul Cross doesn’t have, though, is a high-school diploma.
Sitting on a sleek white sofa in a tucked-away room at last week’s E3 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, he described his backstory as the room’s walls throbbed with the crescendoing beats from a new Ubisoft shooter game on display outside. Cross was 16 when he dropped out of his performing-arts schoolin England. “Traditional methods didn’t work for me,” he said. The school, he continued, failed to accommodate a glitch in his high-school trajectory when he moved with his family to Scotland for a year and then returned to England the following term. “The school didn’t have my course work [from Scotland], so in some subjects I was pretty far ahead, and in other subjects I was miles behind because I missed an entire chunk,” he said. By Cross’s account, the school wasn’t equipped to help catch him up on the parts he missed, and when he suggested doing more advanced work in math, in which he excelled, he was shut down. “‘Nope. Stop being difficult,’ was the reaction I got,” he said. “At that point school was kind of broken for me.”
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
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