Roger's Blog

In 1999, I was deep into Banjo-Kazooie. Not just playing it—I was borderline obsessed. Little did I know that this colorful, quirky platformer would become a surprising (but pivotal) part of how I landed my first job in the games industry.

Back then, I was working as a Brand Manager at Kerry Foods, a large FMCG company. I loved the discipline of marketing, but I wasn't exactly passionate about the products. It took me a while to realise something that now feels obvious: to truly enjoy your job in marketing, you need to believe in and love what you’re selling.

Every Wednesday at my desk in Egham, I’d eagerly flip through Marketing Week magazine, skipping straight to the jobs section. And one week in the summer of ’99, I spotted it: an ad for a European Marketing Director at Activision. This was my moment—the opportunity to fuse my professional skills with my lifelong passion for games.

At my interviews, I didn’t hold back. I talked a lot about Banjo-Kazooie. Luckily for me, Activision’s global marketing team in the U.S. had been hiring talent from FMCG backgrounds, and they were looking to bring that same brand discipline to games in Europe. My timing couldn’t have been better. I had the packaged goods experience—and the games obsession to match.

And that’s how it happens, isn’t it? Passion and timing. That’s the formula for most big breaks.

I’ve always been a massive Nintendo fan—Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Kazooie. Every new title felt like a step forward in creativity and depth, especially the ones developed by Rare. I had already grown up on their earlier work as Ultimate Play The Game (which is a list for another day!).

By the time of the interview, I’d sunk countless hours into Banjo-Kazooie. I’d unlocked every secret, collected every Jiggy, Jinjo, musical note, blue egg and honeycomb across Gruntilda’s Lair. But maddeningly, my progress was stuck at 99%. I couldn’t figure out what was missing.

Then, one night, after firing up my N64 for the thousandth time, I somehow—through a perfect storm of careless button-mashing—deleted my save file. Just like that. Weeks of progress gone in an instant.

Still, I wasn’t deterred. I started all over again. And after reaching about 90% completion a second time, I headed off on holiday… only to return to find that my house had been burgled. My N64, memory card, and Banjo-Kazooie cartridge? Gone.

To this day, I’ve never 100%-ed that game. But Banjo-Kazooie still holds a special place in my heart—not just for the joy it brought me, but because it helped me get my first role in an industry I’ve now worked in for over two decades.

I’ve even had the incredible privilege of meeting some of the people behind Rare later during my time at Microsoft. And I’ll always be grateful to them for creating the game that unknowingly helped launch my career.

With thanks: Gregg Mayles, Lee Schuneman, Ian Howe, John Burns, Sarah Ewing, Chris Lewis, Craig Duncan, Ben Cull, Richard Cattell, Ben Connelly, Lisa Hector, Farina Jabari, Matthew Walker, Sara Grover, Kathy Vrabeck