Jamie Parent has what many people would call a dream job.
The Sudbury resident is a senior software engineer with Raven Software, a video game studio owned by Activision, which publishes blockbuster titles like the Call of Duty series and Destiny.
The last game Parent worked on was Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, the latest in the billion-dollar franchise that allows the player to take control of a soldier in the 2050s as he is taken on an adventure that rivals any major Hollywood blockbuster.
The game even stars Academy Award-winning actor Kevin Spacey as the CEO of a private military contractor.
Parent said he owes his job with Activision to his strong work ethic and luck.
In 2006, Parent worked as a programer for Bestech Engineering, where he helped develop an environmental monitoring system the company built to help mining companies like Vale and Glencore track their emissions in Sudbury.
Around that time, his best friend and former business partner, Scott Bean, called and asked if he wanted a job at Activision. Bean had just sold a piece of software to the company, and was granted permission to hire a programer.
As a longtime gamer, who got his start on the Atari 2600, and later moved on to the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Super Nintendo, and later PC gaming, Parent could not pass up the opportunity.
“The moment he called I was like, 'Yeah, I want to work for this company for sure'” Parent said.
He started with the company's research and development arm, and later moved on to Treyarch, a development studio that has worked on a number of Call of Duty titles including World at War and both Black Ops games.
In 2012, Parent moved internally to Madison, Wisconsin-based Raven Software.
Throughout his career with Activision, the father of seven has been able to work out a deal to work from home in Sudbury.
“I haven't worked in an office since Bestech Engineering,” Parent said.
At first, he worked in his home, but it was difficult to avoid distractions from his children.
Parent now has a workstation in his family's garage, which has been converted into a photography studio his wife Rosie uses.
With Raven Software, Parent works as a tools developer.
“If you had to compare it to a Volkswagen assembly plant, I don't build the car, I build the plant,” he said.
For Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, his main job was to help develop the level editor, which the game's artists use to build entire worlds out of polygons.
The game's settings range from the hectic streets of Baghdad, Iraq, to an icy cavern in Antarctica.
Even though the game was almost guaranteed to be a hit when it hit most store shelves at midnight Nov. 3, Parent said he was still nervous about the critical reception it would receive.
“With the critical reception – in the more negative sense I guess – of Call of Duty: Ghosts, I woke up at like 4:30 in the morning and I went straight to Metacritic and refreshed that page as fast as I could to see the reviews flow in,” he said.
After refreshing the popular review aggregation website, he found Advanced Warfare had garnered an average score of 84 per cent on the Xbox One, which was an improvement over the previous title in the series.
For the many young people who envy his job, Parent had straighforward advice.
“Get ready to work long hours,” he said. “But it's very gratifying.”
