The earliest video games can be traced back to the original pin ball game – the Montegue Redgrave Bagatelle – but the video games that most of us know and love came into play in 1972 with the official release of Ralph Baer's Magnavox Odyssey home video game console. Decades later – even in a slumping economy – people cannot seem to get enough of video games. The game development industry, in fact, officially began surpassing the film industry in annual profits just a couple years ago. That is quite an accomplishment for an industry born of hobbyists’ indulgences and toy maker determination.

Kids – for the longest time – used to dream of becoming firemen, police officers, astronauts, sports stars, or even the President of the United States. Parents – dedicated to putting food on the table for those kids – used to dream of finding a job they could enjoy. Many kids – to be fair – still dream of traditional occupations, and many parents still dream of jobs they can actually enjoy, but they would collectively drop almost everything for a shot at making the video games that are celebrated by so many people and making the associated income enjoyed by so few who succeed.

How on Earth did that happen? When did the game development community become players on the international scene? How could there be so many video games in development?

While North America continues to be the biggest hub of video game development, Japan and the UK have been at it for quite a while as well. Pockets of French, German, Spanish, and Swiss developers have also joined the fray over the past 10-15 years.

The past 10 years have resulted in a virtual invasion of Indian development efforts in a spectrum of technologies that reaches well beyond games. China – to no one's surprise – has been literally bursting with an import / export combination of game development opportunities.

While components of video game projects are being outsourced anywhere and everywhere, there are certainly not 100,000+ mass market, instantly commercially-viable, fully-funded video games being developed worldwide.

"Video game developers" to some people represent entire companies, while for others – like me – the term refers to the talented individuals who comprise a greater whole. A labor pool of 100,000 is, in fact, small for most industries, but game development has – until recently – always been a more exclusive and specialized trade than most.

Such specialization, however, has generated an attraction like few other industries enjoy. Game development represents an incredible and accessible vehicle of opportunity – to deliver a cross-section of creativity, technology, communication, and new business – for anyone on the worldwide stage with the hunger to learn and the drive to succeed.

While games industry outsourcing was late blooming, it has converted the steady natural competition of a boutique industry into an aggressive survival of the fittest, with lower overseas production costs and the worldwide economy starving for new business.

The culture of outsourcing, of course, began eons ago when individuals and companies required a task to be completed for less money, at a faster pace, and for similar quality to what they could deliver themselves. As more game development tasks are outsourced to still-developing countries – that are aggressively seeking to adopt and drive modern day technologies – even more fledgling game developers will join what has become a global game development crusade.

Bleeding edge game development tools have always been rather expensive to acquire, whether you are purchasing for just one person or aiming for a company site license.

It is hard enough for an independent game developer to get a project funded. While there has been an exception or two, it has become just as hard for a wholly-owned subsidiary to ask a parent company for more project funding, in support of necessary software development tools or unforeseen production problems.

A growing number of game developers – small and large, here and abroad – however, have refused to let the issue of money prevent them from procuring the tools they need to succeed.

There was a 1970's candy bar called "Mounds," and it had a catchy slogan: "Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't."

If you polled the greater game development community on their collective ability and desire to legally purchase their own commercially licensed software tools – for any game development discipline – you might hear another catchy slogan: "Sometimes you feel like paying, sometimes you don't."

When it comes to stock commercial 3D modeling and animation applications, Autodesk 3D Studio MAX is the most widely used package in the world. Stock is the appropriate word, as so many companies now make wholesale alterations – within source code and through custom plug-ins – to those commercial packages in order to more accurately fit their specific CG film, broadcast television, or game development requirements.

Before Autodesk Maya was purchased from SGI, it was the younger sibling of a real film industry power house called Alias | Wavefront, and Alias Power Animator before that. Maya was created to continue SGI’s excellence with CG and character animation-based products, and Autodesk appears to be honoring that pathway.

Autodesk Softimage, for such an excellent character creation and animation package, continues to have a smaller but loyal following of game developers. Autodesk gobbled it up for safe measure, all but cornering the commercial market for big ticket 3D animation, modeling, and rendering solutions.

Autodesk MotionBuilder has just come into its own over the past few years as, quite simply, a very powerful animation and file-sharing gateway between MAX and Maya. It has become very popular among artists who are encouraged by their employers to utilize whichever tools they need, even though MotionBuilder can be a costly luxury.

Newtek LightWave 3D has been known for some time as the predominant leader in broadcast 3D graphics and animation, and to a much lesser extent in film, and to an even lesser extent in games. While it may not dominate the digital television waves anymore, LightWave, with its almost toy-like ease of use, is still very popular.

After incubating in the film industry for some time, Pixologic's ZBrush was finally shared with the games industry around 2004, and certainly earlier for beta testing by some higher profile developers. ZBrush is an incredible 3D sculpting tool. An artist can import a low detail 3D model into ZBrush from several but not all 3D applications, and, then, use an unending number of digital sculpting tools to enhance the details of that model in almost any way imaginable.

The resultant higher fidelity sculpted details generated within ZBrush are, then, typically exported for use as depth-adding texture-maps for 3D models that would otherwise require a prohibitive amount of physical detail in a typically constrained real-time 3D environment. The catch with ZBrush is the equally incredible interface. It takes an engineering-centric approach, and even some of the most intelligent folks in games today did not – and will not – learn its magic immediately.

Autodesk Mudbox is another former stand-alone product adopted by Autodesk. It was generated partially as an innocent alternative to ZBrush, but an alternative that delivered a much simpler interface without sacrificing any real depth of features or power. It remains to be seen if the more user friendly product will be able to make a dent in the market share currently enjoyed by ZBrush.

Google SketchUp Pro has become the games industry favorite among concept artists and designers, as it provides the perfect middle ground of communication between the game designers – who currently grow and shepherd ideas from conception – and the concept artists who are currently charged with creating beautiful interpretations of those ideas. As Google expands SketchUp Pro’s feature set, you can expect it to become a real player in the full-capacity 3D application market.

What else can be said about Adobe Photoshop that has not been said? It is not perfect, but with such a refined-over-time interface, it is darn near perfect for everything that must be accomplished in 2D in and out of the games industry. While there are competitors in the form of GIMP and Painter, those applications tend to tease you with open-ended interfaces that lull you into experimentation rather than completion of your tasks and meeting of your deadlines.

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