Josh Ratsavong didn’t plan on quitting school and breaking into the industry in the middle of a pandemic. But plans change, and he wound up getting a contract gig as a hardware tester for Microsoft. The products he’d been hired to test turned out to be the Xbox Series X and Series S consoles. After that job ended, Josh applied to Nintendo of America’s software-testing team in Redmond, Washington, where he earned his first video-game credit—for an eleven-month stint doing QA on The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Music by Christy Carew. Art by Audrey Estok.

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