It came together in Los Angeles around 2002. Tom was the in-house "talent person" at Vivendi Universal Games when an American Idol game required a large emphasis on dancing, which meant somebody had to build a library of dance movements. He knew he had the experience for the job, so he connected with friends in the dance department at UCLA and took a choreographer to House of Moves, which was his first time in a mocap volume. Standing in the volume, he realized this was a space he wanted to work in. Soon after, the team that would become MachineGames connected with Tom about a new game titled The Darkness. They wanted to record voice and body at the same time. Tom was excited for the challenge, and he agreed on the spot. This project required him to think in a whole new way as crews built the set around the actors rather than the other way around. The projects continued to scale from there, and his process continued to develop. During Battlefield 3, he started incorporating his iconic voice and movement warm-ups to get talent centered and comfortable in their suits before a shoot. Mirror's Edge taught him to invent "business" for the actors out of whatever resources a virtual environment offers. On Wolfenstein II, he expanded his casting net when he had to help find two eighty-year-old actors who spoke Polish and English. Battlefield 1 and Star Wars Battlefront II followed, then Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, where he learned how to ground existing franchises with honest performances, such as his suggestion of a dinner scene in Jedi: Fallen Order that became one of the game's most watched and shared moments. More recently, he directed Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, where he worked with Troy Baker to "get inside" an iconic character rather than imitate him. Across all of it, his love has grown, but his approach has stayed the same: that PCAP is real acting, as much like a play as a film and a voice session all wrapped together, and that the actor is a collaborator to be conducted, never a puppet to be worked.

Nowadays, Tom continues to direct award-winning games, but he has also decided to share his craft by writing a book titled "The Complete Guide to Videogame Performance Directing." His book is a unique perspective on storytelling for games through a focused lens of performance and theater. It's presented as a journey through the years when video games were still working out how to best capture performance, and he provides examples of how you can structure your own videogame shoots. His hope with this book is that it helps directors understand the concepts that he learned in drama school, especially if they've never attended. It's a resource so that anyone who directs actors knows how actors are trained, how to determine what characters want, how actors mean to affect the person across from them, and that the director is a kind of role master setting up the situation and translating it. As Tom says, "It's a great life. I'm so grateful. Really." Grateful that every time he walks onto the volume for a project, he gets the same feeling as when he was a child going to a school play day. A day really worth living.