I ran into John Gnuechtel, Interface Designer for Tiburon, in downtown Orlando about a month ago and he said he was looking into getting a house and a tattoo. I remember rolling my eyes and making some comment about the early onset of his mid-life crisis. He is twenty-five. Last time we had talked he had just bought a Porsche. What could he possibly want to get permanently stained under his flesh? An Atari logo. Pass the Air Raiders and slap bracelets, please.

Gnuechtel, pronounced Nooshtel, and known affectionately as “Noosh,” decided he wanted to be a full-on computer nerd after attending Full Sail’s Behind the Scenes Tour. He graduated from the Digital Media program and says that he wouldn’t be where he is today without the training he received at Full Sail. According to John, “Full Sail has classes geared toward exactly what you need to know to get a job in your field.”

After graduation, he was designing interfaces for the web pages of pop stars and playing trombone in a band called Bughead. Said band was asked to record tracks that were used in Madden 2002. One pre-release party and several introductions later, Gnuechtel lands the interview with Tiburon, and of course, the job. Cut to now, and he’s got quite the brag list. “I first worked on Madden 2001, that was cool because it was the launch title for the PlayStation 2, which was huge. The next year I worked on NASCAR Thunder 2002, a launch title for the Xbox. That was really exciting because Tiburon had only worked on football titles up to that point. And last year I worked on the second edition, NASCAR Thunder 2003.”

John likes working on massive, long-term projects like games. “It’s a huge contrast to web design where everything is supposed to be done as fast as possible and it doesn’t take very long to create the full product. The stuff I work on now takes a really long time to get finished and one of the great parts of doing projects like that is you get to see it incrementally grow from nothing into a really cool game.”