Al Reed's career in video games got off to a rather unusual start, back in 2000. While an undergraduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Reed also interned at Cognitoy, a small independent game developer in Massachusetts [for more on Cognitoy, click here]. Cognitoy was about to release its PC game MindRover on retail shelves for the holiday season, when its co-founder Kent Quirk received some bad news: The company's distributor was going out of business the next morning, and boxes full of MindRover games would be lost if someone didn't pick them up that night.

Luckily, the distributor's warehouse was located in Pittsburgh, so Quirk called his intern at CMU and asked Reed for a big favour. "Kent called me up that night and asked me to go rescue the games," says Reed. He was able to talk his way into the distributor's warehouse and rescue the games before they were scrapped - and before he got caught. "It was all a blur, and it was a little scary."

Fast forward a few years, and Reed is now director of development and co-founder of his own successful game development company in Cambridge, Mass., called Demiurge Studios. The name comes from an ancient deity envisioned by Plato, who believed that the god Demiurge was an exceedingly benevolent entity that fashioned and shaped the material world as we know it from chaos.

It's not a bad way to describe the history of Demiurge, the company. Since Reed and a few friends at CMU launched the company in late 2000, it has risen out of the bedlam and disorder that often plagues independent game developers, and achieved success. Key to this has been work on top titles such as Brothers In Arms, and its newest sequel, Earned In Blood. Demiurge's good fortunes may indeed be the exception rather than the rule when it comes to most independents, but Reed's company is also proof that battling your way to victory in this industry is more than just a lofty pipe dream.