KEY POINTS:
Chris Butcher started taking high school maths and science classes when he was just eight-years-old, began his first degree in maths and computer science when he was 10, and completed it when he was 15.
Now aged 29, Mr Butcher has reached the pinnacle in the video gaming
world after being hired as a lead engineer on one of the most popular video games of all time - Halo 3, the last in the Halo series.
Halo 3, a first-person shooter game, was released to the world by Microsoft last month to much fanfare and hype.
In its first week the Xbox game achieved US$300 million ($396.77 million) in global sales and became the fastest selling video game ever.
Mr Butcher told NZPA he felt like one of the luckiest guys in the world to be working for the company that created the game.
"There's really few people in the world that can say that they are really happy and they love what they do and they have a chance to affect the world in some small way."
Mr Butcher began life as a child prodigy who rose to the top ranks of computer engineering in record time.
He now lives in Seattle and works for Bungie - a company that until earlier this month was owned by computer company colossus Microsoft.
Despite his obvious status as genius computer-geek Mr Butcher was remarkably easy to speak with and during our phone chat from Seattle, he only drifted into cyber-talk on a couple of occasions.
He said his fast-paced life in the United States, which began seven years ago, was about as opposite as it got to his life growing up in the rural backblocks of the South Island.
He lived in Kakanui, 11km southwest of Oamaru, with his scientist parents and younger brother and sister.
He fast-tracked his primary school years when his headmaster realised what a gifted child he had on his hands, and only two weeks into the start of school, the five-year-old was moved up to standard one.
By the time he turned eight, he was spending a couple of days a week at an Oamaru high school studying maths with calculus and statistics as well as chemistry at a sixth form level.
"It was actually Waitaki Girls High School," he admitted laughing.
"My parents thought it would be a better choice if I was eight-years-old to be trundling around a high school that an all girls school might be a more appropriate environment with less bullying and stuff - and it was kind of funny and kind of weird as well."
Mr Butcher started tinkering with computer game programs when he was seven and was writing his own programs by the time he was nine.
About this time Mr Butcher's father was taking extramural computer science papers through Massey University. He would write down computer programs on punch cards and send them in to be marked.
"And that looked really interesting to me because I had been playing around with these computer programs on my own just on a little computer and the thought of writing real programs that did things on a big computer somewhere else was really exciting," he said.
Restrictions at Massey meant the 10-year-old was too young by six years to start a degree course, but his Dad persuaded them to give his son a shot at some computer science papers.
The following year he also took up some maths papers.
But Mr Butcher quickly realised that all the intelligence in the world could not replace old fashioned life experience.
"I was taking a paper which was a third year paper in managing information technology ... and it was about how to be a manager and project manage and people management.
"At 14 or 15-years-old I really had no idea about people management or anything like that, so I got an E in that class."
He left high school at 16 to attend Otago University and begin his second degree, which was in science.
He said at that point he still did not know what he wanted to do with his life, but thought it would be nice to make some contribution to science that involved genetics or maybe even help find a cure for cancer.
But computers had stolen his heart and he eventually turned his attention back to the virtual world where he immersed himself in "fuzzy stuff" such as computer graphics and artificial intelligence.
He also enjoyed using the powerful computers to play games during the evening with his classmates.
One game that attracted Mr Butcher was Marathon, a multi-player game, which was made by computer game company Bungie.
"It was really fun to have this group of people that would sit around and work on computer science assignments and then afterwards play a bunch of Marathon."
It was like a secret society, he said.
"You could argue it was a waste of resources, but a lot of the most interesting and fun stuff that comes out of computers comes out of people who are just playing around rather than doing what they are meant to be doing."
When Mr Butcher was 20 he was working on his PhD in 3-dimensional computer graphics when he noticed a job vacancy with Bungie.
He modified one of their own games, Myth, by adding his own program where the user could "zoom all over it all at once and fly around in real time".
That sort of thing was "pretty fancy" compared to what people were doing in games, he said.
The company was impressed and flew him to Chicago for an interview and straight away offered him a job.
Mr Butcher said he had no qualms about starting his career with a company that "wasn't exactly a top paying games studio in the industry".
"It was very much an independent company, trying to make things work on a shoe string budget and make the best games on as little money as they could. It's changed since then."
When Microsoft acquired Bungie, Mr Butcher was snapped up to work with an exclusive team of engineers on the Halo games.
The latest Halo was the most successful of the three and Mr Butcher said he was stunned at its global success.
"It's definitely surprised us that people have picked up on it so much.
"It's kind of a testament to the talented people who work here."
The popularity of Halo has stretched to the world outside of video gaming with New Zealand director Peter Jackson interested in transforming the story onto the silver screen.
The project has stalled for the moment due to lack of funding, but Mr Butcher said if it did go ahead it would be interesting to see.
In the meantime Mr Butcher said he was happy to stay with Bungie and continue to create games that expand the boundaries of gaming worldwide.
"I think I still have a number of games left in me.
"It's possible that in some point in the future I'll end up deciding that I want to do something else besides games and who knows what that will be, but I'm really enjoying coming to work every day and focusing on my craft and working with the people I get to work with here. I feel very privileged."
- NZPA
