My route is probably hard to duplicate, and was more by chance than anything. I made a game for Microsoft's Dream-Build-Play game dev competition (Proximity HD, now called Proximity 2), on their new upcoming Xbox 360 Indie Games Service. It was a finalist in the competition (you can see me on the list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Build_Play#2007_Challeng...), and was on display at their XNA Gamefest conference in Seattle along with my name and my city.

A guy who worked for the (small) publisher attended the Gamefest, saw that I was local to their office, and called me up to stop by and discuss a possible deal to publish it on Xbox Live.

Halfway through the discussion I mentioned I was looking to break into the game industry, and the discussion morphed into a job interview.

I was brought in for a second interview with their parent company in Japan via teleconference, and was asked questions in Japanese and had my answers translated back, and apparently my answer to "What's my favorite game right now?" being "Tetris Attack" was a great one, since I found out later I was being interviewed by ex-Bulletproof Software guys who developed Tetris for Game Boy.

I got the job, and immediately had to become a competent producer, video editor (for ESRB ratings and game trailers), localization and certification checker, evaluating games for possible publishing, advertising asset designer, the local expert on managing the console dev machines for evaluating builds, and overseer of entire QA teams, had to come up with new game features and prioritize which bugs got fixed, despite having pretty much zero experience in any of that before I got the job. It was intense, but rewarding. I learned a ton while I worked there, and wore many hats.

If you have any questions about it, I'd be happy to answer them.