Namco Bandai Interview Questions & Reviews

Interviewed Feb 2011 in Santa Clara, CA (took a day)

Applied to a local staffing agency (Volt) just down the street from them. Took a reasonably simple spelling test at Volt's office. If you just Google commonly misspelled words the night before the test is a breeze. I actually lucked out and got a call back from Volt the same day informing me that Namco would like to interview me two days later.

Arrived 10 minutes early, and found they came out to greet me 10 minutes late. Bring something to entertain yourself, the magazines they have in there are more than 2 years old (though there is a game console set up).

I was interviewed by two young guys who introduced themselves as the QA leads. They had a checklist of questions and details they went through, and seemed to not have the slightest bit of interest in the interview.

One question in particular offended me. I was asked "Can we test your attention to detail?" after talking about graphical errors and bugs that I addressed when I made my own game (things like the character model sometimes going through the environment, wrong animations at the wrong times, etc) and then given a page ripped out of a magazine that contained an ad for Tekken. I was given roughly 15 seconds to look it over before they took it away from me. They then began to ask questions about the ad, like what color the floor was, how many fighters were on the page, etc. They did not care that one of the characters was missing a leg and even they had not noticed it before. Nice to know the QA leads care less about catching things that are wrong then being able to memorize every correct detail.

They also gave me a spelling test to take. The last third of the page was a short answer portion where they asked me to describe one object in the room to the best of my abilities without giving it away (don't use its name). They want to be able to read your answer and figure out what it is a few hours later when you're not there. Or that's the gist of what they meant.