It's like making a cartoon you can play with

This job would be quite different to any other job, in the sense that it's all about having fun! At meetings we discuss things like how effectively a head is exploding; the office is full of toys and posters of games, and it's a very creative environment.

There are 25 people here working on games. I'm part of a team working on the sequel to Speed Freaks. It should be out for Christmas 2000.

Even though lots of the development work has been done, there is a huge amount of work involved in putting together a video game, and it takes a long time. You have to create a virtual world. It involves programming, adding sound and music, the art work and devising what will happen in the game. It's like the amount of work involved in doing a cartoon: you design the characters, pick a scenario to put them into and realise it by computer.

The difference being these are characters you can interact with. Unlike the characters on television, you have a certain control over what happens to them. Of course it is a limited control, and some games accord the player more freedom than others.

Speed Freaks is a car-racing game, so quite a lot is prescribed. It's a game you play with four players, which is unusual for video games. Despite the assumption that people would become increasingly immersed in a one-to-one world of "me and my computer", lots of them have made it clear that they prefer to play with humans. It's more fun to shout at a friend who's beating you than at a screen.

I studied CAD (computer-aided design) in Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. At that stage, there was no course in Ireland where you learned how to design computer games. Then I went to work for An Post. I bought myself a book and taught myself how to do video games.

I've always liked art and computers, and I was really into computer games. I'd have started out in arcades in the 1980s, on Atari and Sega. Things have changed an awful lot since then. Internet games are really taking off - you can play a game with your grind in Australia now, anything from Snap to Quake. You could actually have 50 players playing the one game online.

There is also a huge range of games. You have games where people can shift and change the plot as you play, where people interact with the landscape - for example, blow up an important building - which has a serious effect on the other players. A fully interactive story line is the next big thing.

The work I do is equivalent to sculpting. We have a traditional artist here whose job is to draw sketches. He gives me a character, and I use software to build the 2D picture into a 3D model. It's sort of like getting a lump of clay and using tools to sculpt and mould. You can make entire worlds in this way. At this stage we are moving very close to a time when you wont be able to tell the difference between what's computer-generated and what's real.

Then, using another package, I animate the characters. I get them running, waving, exploding, whatever. I also have them making noise, shouting and that sort of thing. Once the character is done, I send it through another tool to PlayStation, and we drive it around in the game, seeing how it works.

Speak Freaks is a bit like Wacky Races. There is no blood and guts. You've other characters all around you and they each have various weapons. You go around blowing up your components tyres and stuff. It's funny, not gory. We made something quite colourful, not concentrating on realism, inspired by arcade games.

I love the idea that I'm making something which people will pick up and have a lot of fun with. It's a great job, but I hate the deadlines: we often have to work a lot of long hours.

Has it become the new rock 'n' roll? Well, if you're involved in a very successful game, you do develop a certain fame and, yes, I would be recognised in my home town these days!

In conversation with Jackie Bourke.