Rod Fergusson

Career

Rod Fergusson was raised in Ontario, Canada, and always liked video games, but he figured the industry was too hard to break into. Still, he had already built his own multi-user dungeon, or MUD. He got his start in 1996 at Microsoft, first doing consulting work that involved giving technical support to big companies using the Microsoft Solutions Framework, and later moved to the Redmond campus. A job opening at Microsoft Game Studios, run by Shannon Loftis, let him join the company's internal simulations group, which later became Aces Game Studio.

One of his early projects there was Microsoft Train Simulator, made with Kuju Entertainment. When the first Xbox came out in 2002, he teamed up with Stormfront Studios to finish Blood Wake in time for the console's launch. After spending a few months looking into starting a new internal studio at Microsoft, he went back to a producer role to help bring Valve's Counter-Strike to the Xbox, since the work at Ritual Entertainment was running late. He helped get the multiplayer version onto the Xbox by 2003 and also helped set a schedule for the single-player Counter-Strike: Condition Zero to be done that same year, though Valve ended up scrapping most of Ritual's work and had Turtle Rock Studios redo the single-player portion.

From 2003 to 2005, Fergusson worked on two projects at Microsoft that never got announced. In early 2005, he was shown an early version of Gears of War from Epic Games, which was meant for Microsoft's upcoming Xbox 360. He said the game was "on fire" and way behind schedule, partly because Epic only had one producer at the time, who was splitting time between Gears and Unreal Tournament 3. After talking it over with Microsoft, they decided the best move was for him to leave Microsoft and join Epic full-time to get Gears back on track.

By July 2005, he was at Epic as an executive producer, spending the next 18 months pushing the game toward release. He later became director of production and worked on the whole Gears of War series. While at Epic, he also helped with other projects, including Bulletstorm, which was in a similarly rough spot close to its launch.