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Working in the gaming industry may not be the most common career path for a Greenlee School graduate, but Adam Bormann has been able to carve out a unique niche since his time at Iowa State.

After receiving an advertising degree from the Greenlee School in 1996, Bormann has been able to mesh his talents with a love for gaming.

Growing up during the rise of the World Wide Web and video game consoles, Bormann was forced to take a different route to achieve his dreams of being at the forefront of gaming technology.

“I’m a video game designer and that was always what I wanted to do, but there weren’t any colleges for it at that time,” Bormann said.

By attending the Greenlee School and actively participating in Advertising Club, Bormann was able to hone his writing while also gaining valuable experience in web design.

“I worked with Professor Joel Geske to try to teach a lot of the other journalism professors some basics of web design,” Bormann said. “Through figuring out how to do that early on, I was able to get myself a job in video games [out of college].”

Early on in his career, Bormann landed at Sierra Online in a position that utilized both of his skillsets.

“I had to do a lot of writing for web sites and I wrote letters for different games and things like that,” Bormann said. “It was kind of my perfect transitional job between doing web stuff and doing gaming.”

Since then, Bormann has worked for several well-known companies including Lucas Arts and now 2K Games. He has contributed to titles like “Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II” and “Tomb Raider.”

Now a lead gameplay designer at 2K, he is instrumental in making action and third-person shooter games, constructing a game’s rules, how players move and all facets of a game’s playability.

Bormann, who has seen firsthand the advancements the gaming industry has made throughout his career, reflected on what may be on the horizon.

“It is a little bit scary thinking about the future because things have changed so much, even since I was in college in terms of what computers were and what different game systems were,” Bormann said. “I can’t imagine what’s going to happen in the next 20 years. It might be even crazier.”