Profile - Nick Verne

What are your strongest memories of NSBHS?
Early on, the year 7 lawn, that riverboat show we did, the guys (Brett Murphy, Danny Yee, more) who visited me weekly in hospital when my legs were broken, dividing the school day up into work periods and "bludge" periods, the Melbourne exchanges, the school orchestra, a shifting cast of friends. Getting serious in the senior years, music periods with Stephen James and me as the whole class, the formal, the muck-up day gathering at Balmoral.

Summarize briefly your life since school.
I went to straight to Sydney Uni for Electrical Engineering, starting with a few other NSBHSers including Michael Gadiel and Ted Hartnell.
Shifted over to science for third year because I was more interested in that. I started a PhD in pure mathematics but found myself more interested in life outside school and drifted into a small video business with all the usual problems of someone with no business education. In 1995 I was offered a job with a tech startup company in California and I decided to take the chance. The dot-com bubble was just beginning, and it turned out that the company was one of those that fooled venture capitalists into funding a lot of hot air. Hooray for the "new economy". Although it was at least four more years of madness before the crash, one year was enough for me.
I got a new job as a video game programmer at Visual Concepts Entertainment, based in San Rafael (about 30 minutes north of San Francisco).They had the advantage of a) actual products b) actual sales and c) a lot of intelligent people. The games I have worked on are mainly sports games, most recently leading the development of NBA 2K6 for the Xbox 360. I've had a lot of fun coaxing maximum performance out of video game hardware and actually applying a surprising amount of maths I didn't think I'd need again.
The last ten years in the USA have been a mixture of amazing (starting from scratch in a new country - new friends, new life) and depressing (Bush II and all the insanity). San Francisco has been a wonderful city to live in, a pocket of insanity of its own kind, set dead against the values of the America you see on the news. I live in a little house high up a hill in an area called Golden Gate Heights, with my partner Yuri and two cats. We're planning to come back to Sydney to live in the near future. Ten years here has been long enough, and I could never really leave Australia behind.

Who are the most important people in your life today?
That's easy. My dear partner Yuri, our families and and close friends.