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By Courtney Tait
Zhang
As a five-year-old boy in Haikou, China, Liuguo Zhang received a gift that would shape his future.
“My dad bought me the Nintendo entertainment system,” says the computer ace, now 22. “Working in the game industry has been my wish since I was very young.”
One of UVic’s top students in the computer science program, Zhang is living his dream as a software engineer at Need For Speed (NFS) in Vancouver, a developer of electronic sports games and franchise of Electronic Arts, the world’s largest computer game publisher.
Hired in his fourth year through the computer science/math work experience program, Zhang has since been promoted to Platform Lead, making him responsible for ensuring every aspect of the game developed functions properly.
“It’s the process of creating a piece of art work,” he says.
Zhang—whose English name is John—learned computer programming basics in elementary school. By Grade 11 he had passed all the tests to be a Microsoft Certified Engineer and won several national programming competitions. Wanting to see more of the world, Zhang left China at 17 to study at UVic. He discovered his talent for game programming in 2005, through playing “Lumines” on his Playstation Portable.
“My girlfriend and I liked the game so much we had to fight over who got to play next,” he says. “All of a sudden I thought, I could just write a PC version with network capability, so two of us can play against each other.” Without any prior game programming experience, Zhang taught himself to write a version almost visually identical to Playstation’s.
“I had hardly any sleep that week,” he says, “but I found something that really interests me.”
When he’s not debugging programs or managing memory at NFS’s Vancouver-based studio, Zhang enjoys weekend drives, checking out the coastline views.
His future? “I’m still at the learning phase,” he says. “I’ll try my best to learn as much as fast as I can.”
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