Dream jobs: Lawyers who love what they do

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Deborah K. Fulton, Midway Games Inc.

When she wasn’t hard at work as a senior associate in fall 1994 at the law firm then known as Gardner Carton & Douglas, Deborah K. Fulton was deep into her role as a lone space marine armed with pistols and shotguns, fighting to stay alive during an invasion of horrifying creatures from hell.

A rabid video game player, and a fan of science fiction and fantasy, Fulton was spending her free time in the game of Doom.

”They brought in this gigantic monitor for a litigation case. After hours, I would go and I would play this crazy game on this enormous monitor,” Fulton said. ”I would occasionally disturb my colleagues who were working late, because I was screaming and squealing as all these crazy things are happening on the screen.”

In a twist of fate, that was also around the time when she took a cold call from a recruiter, asking whether she would be interested in an in-house job — as senior counsel to a leading developer and publisher of video games. Two weeks later, Fulton started work at Chicago-based Midway Games.

”I was a true believer within about 10 seconds of starting my job,” said Fulton, who today serves as Midway’s general counsel, senior vice president and secretary.

The company, headquartered on the Northwest Side with roots in pinball and other coin-operated amusement games, develops and publishes video games for home entertainment consoles, personal computers, and handheld game systems.

Landing a position at a place where her interests away from work happen to intersect with her job as a lawyer is uncanny, but that’s not where the coincidence ended for Fulton, a 1988 graduate of Harvard Law School who majored in math, computer studies, and politics at Lake Forest College.

She pointed to her first project after joining Midway. It was to work on a deal that would allow the company to distribute the Nintendo 64 version of the very game, ”Doom,” which was originally released on a personal computer platform.

”It was hysterical. It was amazing. I was so thrilled,” Fulton said. ”The very first piece of correspondence that I have in my files from starting in November 1994 is a letter to counsel for the makers of Doom about this deal. It was just perfect.”

More recently, Fulton led an unusual transaction involving the 2007 release of The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO, and her favorite computer game of late. Fulton, who negotiated the agreement under which Midway could publish the game in North America, admits to playing it every day in her free time.

Fulton has been playing computer games in one form or another since she was a girl, when her father, who worked in the information technology department at Zenith, brought home a computer terminal that enabled him to keep tabs on the department’s mainframe.

”We had to play games on it,” Fulton said. ”We couldn’t possibly leave this thing alone that’s sitting in our kitchen.

”It was one of those ancient things where you take the telephone receiver and you stick it into some rubber things on the back and there’s this thermal paper that comes out,” Fulton said. ”It was a text adventure game, where it would say, ‘You’re in a gigantic hall with pillars of mist arising from the side of it. You see a dragon in front of you. What do you do?’ And you would type in your answer, ‘Kill dragon with sword.’ My brother and I played that for hours on end until we got stuck, which was my first exposure to hacking a computer.”

In the ever-evolving video game industry, where elements of entertainment and increasingly complex technology come together, change is a constant for Fulton, who heads a law department that handles legal matters associated with the corporate aspects of the publicly traded company — such as compliance issues related to securities laws — as well as the operational side of the business, where the legal work deals largely with issues involving intellectual property.

”The business forces you to learn new things,” Fulton said. ”It’s a great challenge and something that keeps you constantly interested.

”With the capabilities of the game systems the games have all these different elements — from an artistic standpoint, from a creative standpoint — that they didn’t used to have. And you’ve got to get used to practicing that type of law,” Fulton said. ”[Video games] are much more like interactive movies than they were just a bunch of pixels on the screen years ago.”

Take the old arcade games, like Tetris or Gauntlet, or even reaching back to Pong, Fulton said, ”you didn’t license music to put into those games, necessarily. You didn’t license personalities, actors to be in your games.”

Fulton keeps much of the legal work involving celebrities to herself, like the work associated with the company’s release last fall of the third-person shooter game, Stranglehold, starring Chinese actor Chow Yun Fat. The game, which was developed in Midway’s Chicago studio in collaboration with Chinese film director John Woo, is the sequel to the director’s 1992 film, ”Hard Boiled.”

While playing games may not be a routine part of her role as general counsel, Fulton did point to one of the more ”interesting” perks of the job.

”We do have a sound studio here, and my voice has been in a few of the games,” she said. ”I think my screaming and yelling is in Mortal Kombat: Armageddon. They had me scream for seven seconds — that’s hard.”

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