got into the games industry in 1994 while she was studying film in college. She got a summer job as a "role-playing consultant" on a Monty Python game being made at the now-defunct Dallas game development studio 7th Level. She worked in film after school and then got a job as a game tester at Interplay, did the same at Microprose and became a lead tester at Ubisoft.

As the century turned, she got a call from a recruiter looking to fill a spot at Insomniac Games, a studio then known for its "Spyro" purple dragon platforming games on the original PlayStation. Insomniac had been churning through candidates for a level designer. They sent her a "Spyro" design test.

"They basically give you sort of criteria for a level anddifficult things later. Or I might comment that their enemy combat doesn't really ramp out. They'll just have a whole bunch of rooms with five guys in each instead of having — every bit of gameplay should build up to a climax. It should start simple and get more and more exciting and intense as you go through."

"Size Matters" is High Impact's first game, the product of about a year and a half of work. Mathieson is proud that the studio has figured out a way to run a "Ratchet" game on Sony's handheld, tweaking the series' control scheme to accommodate the PSP's single analog stick and peppering the title with gameplay homages to the four previous games in the series. They've even added new ideas, including a