FOLLOW DESIGNS

MICHAEL HÜLL on being a level designer, and how he got there

- Luke Kemp

Today, Michael Hüll is a senior level designer at MachineGames. He cut his level designing teeth elsewhere however, with multiplayer maps. When he was playing GoldenEye with his friends back in the days of the N64, he never suspected that he’d eventually be designing levels played by others with their friends.

The ability to play with others in the same virtual environment was always attractive to him. “I guess my first love in games was Duke Nukem 3D”, he says, “because [while] it was not fully 3D, it was still awesome that you can play with your friends and you know, in those kinds of environments, just go around killing each other.”

Some time helping out in an internet cafe sparked an interest in games like these, an interest that really took off when Hüll got his first computer with a modem. He dived into online play, and never looked back. He started creating maps as a hobby during his time off from the day job, driving a forklift.

Eventually, all those hours poured into his computer would start to pay off. Significantly. Hüll’s big break came with Strike, a