What are the tastes, backgrounds and experience of some of the biggest decision-makers at major console companies? Developer and senior contributor Brandon Sheffield talks to ID@Xbox's Chris Charla. Read the interview with PlayStation's Adam Boyes here. I've known Chris Charla for many years. I met him initially as head of business development for the now defunct game studio Digital Eclipse. We met when Meggan Scavio, director of the Game Developers Conference, invited us to lunch because she thought we'd get along. She was right. Turns out we both lived in and loved Oakland, liked old games, and had a penchant for dad jokes. When discussing fashion once, Charla told me "the way I figure it, bald and fat never goes out of style." For years I've known him for his awesome zines, which often get me through boring conferences with their weird humor and lo-fi production values, and his love of East Bay, CA diner food and punk rock bands. Nowadays, he's got his talons firmly embedded in ID@Xbox, an initiative he largely spearheads, and certainly champions. He has big hopes for the platform, and my fingers are crossed as well, though I may not yet be an approved developer (ahem). And no matter how corporate Microsoft may often be, Charla is still Charla. He did a zine about his favorite indie games at PAX East, for example, crowing about the new ID@Xbox games he was looking forward to. It wasn't Microsoft sponsored, and he only made a few. He did it for the love of the craft, and because he's legitimately excited about what he's doing. Who is this punk rock loving man, and where does he like to drink his diner coffee? Let's dig deeper.

Okay, the usual background check. Where did you grow up?

I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit Michigan, but my family were transplants from the hills of Tennessee and the boroughs of New York, so I had a really pleasantly disjointed childhood bouncing around between suburbia, Appalachia, and Rockaway Beach. But, it’s worth noting that my first baseball card was Rollie Fingers from the Oakland A’s, which I made a frame for and gave to my dad when I was like six, so that may have been prophetic…

Tell me about all the companies you've worked for!

I started at Next Generation, which was a very cool magazine. The easy way to think of it is as the U.S. version of Edge, which is because it was the U.S. version of Edge. It was a great education, and I was the features editor there for a while before heading across the hall to be the launch editor of IGN.com. Then I came back to be the editor-in-chief of Next Gen for a while, as well as some other mags, before I joined a tiny developer called Digital Eclipse as production manager.

My first game there was a Game Boy Color port of Klax, which was a really fun experience. Not only did we pack the cart full of secrets (including Mike Mika hiding his proposal to his wife inside) but I got to do things like debug assembly on a white board – stepping through the code and updating the “registers” step by step to try and solve a bug in Klax. I think we wrote the story up for a “greatest bugs” article in Game Developer magazine once, so I won’t repeat it, but it turns out there’s a bug in the way Klax scores in the arcade that’s is incredibly interesting and weird. Digital Eclipse, which went on to become Backbone and then Foundation 9, was an awesome education in really making games, especially because we did a lot of games on short time frames – my second game there that I was producer on was three months from pitch to final, so it was like an accelerated education. I was there for 10 years doing everything from level design to production to IP development to business stuff, and helping the company grow from 20 to 1,000 before I ended up as VP of business development. After that, I joined Microsoft three years ago, where I was the portfolio director for XBLA at Microsoft Studios, which was really a dream job, getting to work with XBLA games and developers. Then last summer, I made the jump to be the director of ID@Xbox, which is Microsoft’s digital self-publishing program for Xbox One, which is what I’m doing right now!

What games did you most enjoy as a youngster?

The first game I ever played was actually an old Pong, or a Pong clone, at the Eastern Market in Detroit when I was too little to even really know how it worked. But the first time I ever successfully played a game was Zork at a family friend’s house. All the older kids were playing, and they were stuck in the Loud Room and I was like “say ‘echo!’” and pretty much after that it was all over – my life direction was set. As a kid I played everything – I loved DataSoft’s Conan on the Apple II – but I was super into Infocom games. The feeling of exploration and the satisfaction in problem solving in those games is almost unmatched. That’s all I ever wanted for Christmas or my birthday, and I just assumed I’d grow up and work there some day. I was the irritating kid who would call Infocom and try and get Dave Lebling or another Implementer on the phone, or made my parents take a detour to Cambridge on a trip to Maine so I could visit the Infocom office.

The Infocom guys are actually the only people in the game industry I can’t really talk to or be friends with; I’ve never gotten over my fanboy relationship. I still make crappy text adventure games all the time in my spare time too, and if I see Steve Meretzky at GDC, I basically have to be liquored up to not immediately start talking about really obscure parts of Planetfall or A Mind Forever Voyaging. By the way, AMFV and Lurking Horror (by Dave Lebling) are still two of the best games ever. I was super excited to see the Zork post-mortem at GDC this year! The only time I ever used my editorial fiat to jam things in Top 100 lists while I was at Next Generation magazine was when I made sure ALL the good Infocom games made it on the list, not just Zork. In the arcades I loved Gauntlet and Xevious, and on NES I was somehow a huge fan of Wrecking Crew, which my friend had. Then later I was pretty much a Genesis fanboy, with games like Sonic, Burning Force, Crackdown (the Sages Creation one, not the Microsoft one) and Shadowrun. Phantasy Star II… Anyway my roommates had a SNES too, but other than Super Metroid and the other Shadowrun, I really was more of a Genesis guy for whatever reason.

What games have you most enjoyed in the last year, and why?

When did Fez come out? Fez for me is one of the best games of its generation. To me it perfectly recaptured this feeling of exploration and secrets that I used to get from Infocom games. That game had real secrets in it, and my experience of playing it day one, with no hints available and not even a real nomenclature for how you’d even ask for hints, was just really special. I can get frustrated really easily with games – if a game irritates me, I just stop playing, even if I just dropped $60 on it. But Fez, I once spent like 45 minutes in one room just trying to figure something out that was INCREDIBLY frustrating and obscure because… I don’t know. I just loved it. I know Phil Fish is a controversial guy, but that game, on its own merits, to me is just a masterwork. I’m currently trying to outdo Meggan Scavio at hours ground into Animal Crossing, pretty much to the point where I may have a problem. I’ve been working a lot lately which is cool, and sometimes I will seriously start ACNL at my desk, then in the game buy a coffee from Brewster and sit on the bench and drink it to relax. Which is really pathetic I know, but there you go! I also really enjoyed FTL because I love the desperate situations you get in, and I’ve played a ton of Below because I really love that game, and I know that’s not out yet and so that’s sort of a cheating answer, but holy cow, if you want to talk about secrets and a feeling of exploration, and desperation, it delivers. I remember getting to this thing I’d never seen before, which was across a bridge, but I’m bleeding out and just yelling at the screen “PLEASE!!!” hoping I just could get to this door before I died. But I died...It was such a great gaming moment though! PR is probably going to make me take that part out, I guess. [Note: They didn't! Good job.] I’m sure there are a ton of games I’m forgetting like Forza Horizon.

What's your favorite city in the world? Loaded question.

Oakland, Calfornia. And generally the whole East Bay area. For whatever reason, it’s just an amazing percolator for culture, for games, for music. There are just so many scenes bubbling up there all the time. It’s also really sunny, and has lots of hidden weird parks and history. Like, the rainbow trout that are stocked all over the world, they came from a stream in Oakland. One time my car broke down in Oakland and while I was wandering around waiting for AAA and I found the ruins of the old Police Athletic League trout ponds, which was super cool, and that turned into a hike into a ravine filled with old-growth redwoods where I found crazy stuff like an old pickup truck half way down the ravine with a tree growing through it, and one of the best hidden graffiti walls I’ve ever seen.