 |  | After four years, Steve began to think that he really should finish his degree. It’d been on hold for a long time, but he knew he would never get a better job without it. “So I went back to school,” he adds, “and figured I'd supplement my quickly withering bank account with some freelance work. I sent off some samples of my 2D work to Alderac Entertainment Group, and started painting samurais and monsters. Since then, it just sort of snowballed. I really haven't solicited much work, clients just find me. Thank goodness, too, because I'm no good at finding them.”
So now, he’s full time freelance. Still chipping away at that degree, but having such a good time working on all these supercool projects, that it’s just impossible to turn them down. |
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his own reckoning, Steve Argyle was the nightmarish dread of every
parent. He took to disfiguring the walls and the furniture with abandon. “I
drew on everything that permanent markers would mark,’ says Argyle. “I'd doodle in class instead of take notes. Sometimes drawing awful caricatures of the teacher. This was popular with the students, but not so much with the teachers.” That was the deal when he was growing up. He read a lot of comics, played a lot of video games, filled to his adolescent brim with Mountain Dew. In fact, in the course of the interview he tells me that all through high school, Steve Argyle managed to get a lot of extra credit by bribing his teachers with paintings!
Steve Argyle also confesses a lack of discipline, "I should be making minimum wage now at some grease-pit who's only still in business because of blackmail photos of the health inspector". But he “got very lucky,” as he says.
He went to college at the University of Utah, and planned to go into medicine. “I figured that doctors get way more girls than aspiring artists,” explains a more than honest Argyle. “I really enjoyed it, but didn't finish. In the end, I'm glad that people’s lives aren't in my hands. And all of you should be too.” As money got tighter, Steve started taking art jobs to pay the bills. There was an opening at a local CG shop called Argonaut Films, and when he was offered the job, his academic career went on semi-permanent hiatus.
“I was hired on the premise that I knew 3ds Max,” says Argyle. When they asked about 3D experience, I told them about my internship at Viewpoint Datalabs, and the tiny section of the balloon-ship in Waterworld that I'd helped digitize.”
In prep for the job he’d already begun, Steve took out as much credit he could, buying an educational version of Max and a computer. “I'd started this sweet gig,” he explained, “and didn't know the first thing about what I was doing.” Argyle locked himself in a room for the week before starting, with a stack of food and caffeine, and went through the tutorial manual three times and the users manual twice.
This helped him, sure, but not enough to stumble through his tasks. There was the pestering from his superiors. “They told me years later that they wanted to fire me every single day since I started. But by the end of each day, my boss just didn't have the heart or energy; bless him. I got better. Really.”
Steve Argyle worked at Argonaut for five years, and in the end, the whole crew was getting frazzled. They disbanded, taking various new gigs. Argyle’s was PlayStation game development at Incognito Sony. While there, he worked with the most talented people he would ever meet. He worked on ‘Twisted Metal: Black’, ‘War of the Monsters’, ‘Downhill Domination’, and the upcoming ‘Warhawk for PS3’.
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