As most folks know by now, you come to 3D Realms from Ritual Entertainment where you've worked on Sin for most of the last year. Before I was offered the chance to work with Ritual I spent about 5 months in Indiana working with Sunstorm Interactive on several Build engine game addons. Before that I had spent a little under a year doing contract work for them. With Sunstorm I worked on Duke It Out In DC, Duke Caribbean, Cryptic Passage for Blood, and Wanton Destruction for Shadow Warrior. My time at Sunstorm was where I learned a lot about how the industry works from the inside and gave me the time to learn enough that I finally got the job offer from Ritual.
Most breaks come from taking a chance on an opportunity.
The first time I became involved in this industry though was when Tony from Sunstorm emailed me based on some freeware programs I had written and asked if I wanted to do some contract work for a Duke Nukem addon his company was working on. Up till that point I had been doing level design and programming completely as a hobby and so given the chance to work on an official addon for my favorite game, I had to give it a whirl. I was anxious to get back to Texas and thus started to look for jobs back down here. I was creating some Quake maps for applying at 3DR and wound up getting in contact with Ritual through Aaron Corcoran. I decided to take a chance with that and got the offer from Ritual which led to where I am now.