My 'Aughts
In the end, all you have are your stories. Every year that you don't have at least one story, be it good or bad, is a waste of a year. The following are my own abbreviated adventures that I experienced from 2000 to 2009. For each and every adventure, there's a story to go with it. May you enjoy my journey down memory lane just as much as I did.
'00: I finished at the top of my Building Virtual Worlds class and completed my five years of Architecture earning a Bachelors in Architecture with a Minor in Film and Digital Imaging. I found myself up crushing hard on a cute French programmer, but it was not meant to be. I applied to graduate school at the Entertainment Technology Center but was denied without reason. However, after playing a game of blindfold chess with a friend, one of the codirectors of the ETC challenged me to a game and I handily defeated him. Soon afterward my rejected application was promptly reconsidered and I accepted their invitation to attend. Before taking a road trip out west for the summer, I threw away versions one and two of my giant cardboard robot suit and began my search for summer employment. Instead of landing a job, I bought my first car and learned how to live off of $2 a day. As I started my time in graduate school, I discovered that my master's program was really rough around the edges and didn't have things that normal programs took for granted, like full time faculty. The first project I worked on was a game designed to teach network administrators how to maintain secure networks. Our team was given the instructions to make it "just interesting enough to not be boring".
'01: My frustration with the Entertainment Technology Center grew and I considered dropping out for my own good. I worked on a hodge podge of projects including one that changed weekly and resulted in nothing more than an impossibly ambitious game design document and bizarre CG video, as well as an interactive movie that allowed students to travel back in time to check out dinosaurs whose frame rate made it more of a slide show than a movie. That summer I had an internship at the Institute for Creative Technologies where I worked with hippies building military training tools. At the end of the summer, I returned back to take on my second year the ETC. On my own time, I fed my creativity by building version 3.0 of my cardboard suit. This version was clad in blank news print and I wore it to a friend's Halloween party. The goals was to look like a giant rock golem, but the crinkling of the paper just made me look like a giant paper ball. Throughout the course of the night, people were tearing off pieces of the paper as souvenirs leaving a wake of newsprint debris everywhere I went.
'02: In an effort to help improve the Entertainment Technology Center, I lead a minor revolution, pointing out weakness of the program and offered potential solutions in a formal document and the student body demanded that the codirectors read it. I suspect our input was still ignored in spite of our united front made of both the staff and the students. In addition to the revolt, I also worked on building a set for an animatronic robot that people can talk with and I also helped create a game for the Jam-O-Drum that was a rhythm based DJ scratching game. For my ETC, graduation I painted my cardboard suit all black and wore my cap and gown over it so I could get my diploma in style. After all was said and done, I had a fairly expensive yet worthless piece of paper and several invaluable friends such as Jazz, Nate, Bo, Rebecca, Mauro, Ian, and Wil to name a few. I met Lilli while dancing at the Upstage, and shortly there after we started dating. In a chance meeting with an old class mate, I was introduced to three guys starting up a video game company called Demiurge Studios. I began working with them as their (unpaid) level designer getting my first break into the industry. Lilli broke up with me, but then we got back together.
'03: Demiurge started making money and was able to start paying its employees, including me! With somewhat steady business, Demiurge incorporated and started growing, establishing themselves as the Unreal Engine experts in the industry (outside of Epic Games who make the unreal engine). Demiurge became known as the go to guys by other companies who needed help with their Unreal Technology based games. I became an expert on the Unreal Editor and was in charge of cleaning up and filling in the holes in the Unreal Developer's Network's on line documentation. Lilli broke up with me for good, but we managed to still remain good friends. I signed up for Puzzle Pirates and created my own crew of cartoony pirates that puzzled and pillaged on the high seas.
'04: I did the level design for a playable XBox demo of Demiurge's home brewed game. I also worked on optimizing the content for Advent Rising, helping to cut their memory footprint in half without any real loss in quality. Demiurge put together a Mod for Unreal Tournament 2004 which won the best vehicle category in the 'Make Something Unreal Contest' and acquired a small following of dedicated fans. I went to Burning Man for my first time with my friends Nate and Chris and my imagination exploded. I started building my ent suit. Demiurge picked up and moved the whole company to Boston, with the exception of both Chris's who both moved to California. One Chris continued as the founder operating our "West coast studio" and the other went to work for Crystal Dynamics. My Puzzle Pirates crew merged with the larger crew of the Emerald Raiders, and then later I left to join the Booty Lubbers continuing to feed my puzzle game addiction.
'05: With Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood, I shipped my first official (non-mod) content as a game developer. I discovered Love Night at the Common Ground made new friends (Rene, Tiffany, Erica to name a few). I also flew out to meet up with my far away friend Grit, in Germany where I learned that only the bums drink Jagermeister. While in Europe I went to a game expo in Leipzig, hung out with other travelers in a hostel in paris practicing my various languages, briefly losing my American accent in the process. Through out the rest of the year I made steady progress on the ent suit including ordering custom grapplers for the hands and used drywall stilts. I finished off the year volunteering as a carpenter on the set construction for a theatre performance of A Doll's House.
'06: While in California for the game developer's conference, I met my one of my fellow puzzle pirateers, Elizabeth. I started to drift away from puzzle pirates but managed to keep in touch with the majority of my crew, including Elizabeth with whom I ended up trading a fair number of postcards. Back at Demiurge, I worked at a break-neck pace to build the intro for Bioshock in time for an E3 demo under Ken Levine's direction. The intro wasn't quite ready by our deadline, but my work remained fairly intact in the final launch of the game. I got far enough on the ent suit that I decided to take it to my second Burning Man. I only wore it briefly, but it was a pretty big hit among those who saw it. Back in Boston, I was doored by a cab while racing my bike home to beat the rain and resulted in a "phantom fracture." My right arm was rendered useless for about a month, but healed just fine. It didn't end up raining that day. I killed four separate xboxes - two development kits and two commercial xboxes. I went on to work as co-lead game designer of the multiplayer portion of Model of Honor: Airborne. At a halloween party hosted by my new friend Guido, I met the smart and charming Kristin. We got to know each other while chatting over several games of on line chess. That lead to a couple dates before we each went our separate ways - her way leading her towards the Peace Corps in Vanuatu.
'07: After much thought and mixed feelings, I left Demiurge Studios to sign on with another start up company, Slipgate Ironworks, to work on what was known as "John Romero's MMO." Shortly after signing on, the entire game design rebooted and I helped redesign the game from the ground up. My fifth xbox had broken audio so I (permanently) loaned it to a friend and gave up on ever getting a functioning xbox. I finished my ent suit and brought it to my third Burning Man which was appropriate for the theme: Green Man. While wearing it out in the desert, I tripped on my own roots and ended up putting a 2' dent in my camp mate's truck. Oops. Upon returning from the desert, I decided to try out the crazy master cleanse diet with my friend Bo. We I ate no food for 7 days straight in an attempt to detoxify our bodies. I didn't really notice any change during or after the cleanse. Throughout the year, I periodically kept up my correspondence with Kristin while she was teaching about sustainability in Vanuatu.
'08: At Slipgate, the entire game design rebooted (again) and I helped redesign the game from the ground up. I attended the San Diego Comic Con on behalf of Slipgate's Design team and learned that it has very little to do with comic books now. I began putting my collection of pasta sauce jars to use and started building my LED jars during comotivated art nights with my new found friends Jen and Jean. Version 5.0 of the cardboard suit was created which folded down tight enough to be flown out to Colorado for another Halloween party at Guido's. I flew out to visit my friend René in Hawaii and realized that even a four day weekend is not enough time to visit either Hawaii or René. Kristin suddenly stopped writing me back. I only found out that she never wanted to talk to me anymore, after I got worried enough to email her telling her I was going to contact her family. I don't think I'll ever really understand what happened there.
'09: At Slipgate, the entire game design rebooted (yup, for a third time) and I helped redesign the game from the ground up. My car was stolen forcing me to upgrade my transportation with a slightly newer Honda Accord. With help form some friends, I built and brought four cardboard suits to Burning Man as well as a hexayurt. This burning man was my second best burn ever (the best being the first). In addition to showing up at Burning man, the fifth version of my cardboard suit also made appearances at the Gazillion/Slipgate offices in San Mateo, Decompression, and the DNA lounge where it won 1st place in a halloween costume contest. Shortly there after the internet found my pictures on line of the suit, and I became famous for a week. One last scope change for the project at work resulted in nearly everyone, including myself, being laid off. In experiencing my first video game industry lay-off I finally felt like a real game developer. On my annual trip back home to Indy, I got to meet my nephew Dylan for the first time.
'00: I finished at the top of my Building Virtual Worlds class and completed my five years of Architecture earning a Bachelors in Architecture with a Minor in Film and Digital Imaging. I found myself up crushing hard on a cute French programmer, but it was not meant to be. I applied to graduate school at the Entertainment Technology Center but was denied without reason. However, after playing a game of blindfold chess with a friend, one of the codirectors of the ETC challenged me to a game and I handily defeated him. Soon afterward my rejected application was promptly reconsidered and I accepted their invitation to attend. Before taking a road trip out west for the summer, I threw away versions one and two of my giant cardboard robot suit and began my search for summer employment. Instead of landing a job, I bought my first car and learned how to live off of $2 a day. As I started my time in graduate school, I discovered that my master's program was really rough around the edges and didn't have things that normal programs took for granted, like full time faculty. The first project I worked on was a game designed to teach network administrators how to maintain secure networks. Our team was given the instructions to make it "just interesting enough to not be boring".
'01: My frustration with the Entertainment Technology Center grew and I considered dropping out for my own good. I worked on a hodge podge of projects including one that changed weekly and resulted in nothing more than an impossibly ambitious game design document and bizarre CG video, as well as an interactive movie that allowed students to travel back in time to check out dinosaurs whose frame rate made it more of a slide show than a movie. That summer I had an internship at the Institute for Creative Technologies where I worked with hippies building military training tools. At the end of the summer, I returned back to take on my second year the ETC. On my own time, I fed my creativity by building version 3.0 of my cardboard suit. This version was clad in blank news print and I wore it to a friend's Halloween party. The goals was to look like a giant rock golem, but the crinkling of the paper just made me look like a giant paper ball. Throughout the course of the night, people were tearing off pieces of the paper as souvenirs leaving a wake of newsprint debris everywhere I went.
'02: In an effort to help improve the Entertainment Technology Center, I lead a minor revolution, pointing out weakness of the program and offered potential solutions in a formal document and the student body demanded that the codirectors read it. I suspect our input was still ignored in spite of our united front made of both the staff and the students. In addition to the revolt, I also worked on building a set for an animatronic robot that people can talk with and I also helped create a game for the Jam-O-Drum that was a rhythm based DJ scratching game. For my ETC, graduation I painted my cardboard suit all black and wore my cap and gown over it so I could get my diploma in style. After all was said and done, I had a fairly expensive yet worthless piece of paper and several invaluable friends such as Jazz, Nate, Bo, Rebecca, Mauro, Ian, and Wil to name a few. I met Lilli while dancing at the Upstage, and shortly there after we started dating. In a chance meeting with an old class mate, I was introduced to three guys starting up a video game company called Demiurge Studios. I began working with them as their (unpaid) level designer getting my first break into the industry. Lilli broke up with me, but then we got back together.
'03: Demiurge started making money and was able to start paying its employees, including me! With somewhat steady business, Demiurge incorporated and started growing, establishing themselves as the Unreal Engine experts in the industry (outside of Epic Games who make the unreal engine). Demiurge became known as the go to guys by other companies who needed help with their Unreal Technology based games. I became an expert on the Unreal Editor and was in charge of cleaning up and filling in the holes in the Unreal Developer's Network's on line documentation. Lilli broke up with me for good, but we managed to still remain good friends. I signed up for Puzzle Pirates and created my own crew of cartoony pirates that puzzled and pillaged on the high seas.
'04: I did the level design for a playable XBox demo of Demiurge's home brewed game. I also worked on optimizing the content for Advent Rising, helping to cut their memory footprint in half without any real loss in quality. Demiurge put together a Mod for Unreal Tournament 2004 which won the best vehicle category in the 'Make Something Unreal Contest' and acquired a small following of dedicated fans. I went to Burning Man for my first time with my friends Nate and Chris and my imagination exploded. I started building my ent suit. Demiurge picked up and moved the whole company to Boston, with the exception of both Chris's who both moved to California. One Chris continued as the founder operating our "West coast studio" and the other went to work for Crystal Dynamics. My Puzzle Pirates crew merged with the larger crew of the Emerald Raiders, and then later I left to join the Booty Lubbers continuing to feed my puzzle game addiction.
'05: With Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood, I shipped my first official (non-mod) content as a game developer. I discovered Love Night at the Common Ground made new friends (Rene, Tiffany, Erica to name a few). I also flew out to meet up with my far away friend Grit, in Germany where I learned that only the bums drink Jagermeister. While in Europe I went to a game expo in Leipzig, hung out with other travelers in a hostel in paris practicing my various languages, briefly losing my American accent in the process. Through out the rest of the year I made steady progress on the ent suit including ordering custom grapplers for the hands and used drywall stilts. I finished off the year volunteering as a carpenter on the set construction for a theatre performance of A Doll's House.
'06: While in California for the game developer's conference, I met my one of my fellow puzzle pirateers, Elizabeth. I started to drift away from puzzle pirates but managed to keep in touch with the majority of my crew, including Elizabeth with whom I ended up trading a fair number of postcards. Back at Demiurge, I worked at a break-neck pace to build the intro for Bioshock in time for an E3 demo under Ken Levine's direction. The intro wasn't quite ready by our deadline, but my work remained fairly intact in the final launch of the game. I got far enough on the ent suit that I decided to take it to my second Burning Man. I only wore it briefly, but it was a pretty big hit among those who saw it. Back in Boston, I was doored by a cab while racing my bike home to beat the rain and resulted in a "phantom fracture." My right arm was rendered useless for about a month, but healed just fine. It didn't end up raining that day. I killed four separate xboxes - two development kits and two commercial xboxes. I went on to work as co-lead game designer of the multiplayer portion of Model of Honor: Airborne. At a halloween party hosted by my new friend Guido, I met the smart and charming Kristin. We got to know each other while chatting over several games of on line chess. That lead to a couple dates before we each went our separate ways - her way leading her towards the Peace Corps in Vanuatu.
'07: After much thought and mixed feelings, I left Demiurge Studios to sign on with another start up company, Slipgate Ironworks, to work on what was known as "John Romero's MMO." Shortly after signing on, the entire game design rebooted and I helped redesign the game from the ground up. My fifth xbox had broken audio so I (permanently) loaned it to a friend and gave up on ever getting a functioning xbox. I finished my ent suit and brought it to my third Burning Man which was appropriate for the theme: Green Man. While wearing it out in the desert, I tripped on my own roots and ended up putting a 2' dent in my camp mate's truck. Oops. Upon returning from the desert, I decided to try out the crazy master cleanse diet with my friend Bo. We I ate no food for 7 days straight in an attempt to detoxify our bodies. I didn't really notice any change during or after the cleanse. Throughout the year, I periodically kept up my correspondence with Kristin while she was teaching about sustainability in Vanuatu.
'08: At Slipgate, the entire game design rebooted (again) and I helped redesign the game from the ground up. I attended the San Diego Comic Con on behalf of Slipgate's Design team and learned that it has very little to do with comic books now. I began putting my collection of pasta sauce jars to use and started building my LED jars during comotivated art nights with my new found friends Jen and Jean. Version 5.0 of the cardboard suit was created which folded down tight enough to be flown out to Colorado for another Halloween party at Guido's. I flew out to visit my friend René in Hawaii and realized that even a four day weekend is not enough time to visit either Hawaii or René. Kristin suddenly stopped writing me back. I only found out that she never wanted to talk to me anymore, after I got worried enough to email her telling her I was going to contact her family. I don't think I'll ever really understand what happened there.
'09: At Slipgate, the entire game design rebooted (yup, for a third time) and I helped redesign the game from the ground up. My car was stolen forcing me to upgrade my transportation with a slightly newer Honda Accord. With help form some friends, I built and brought four cardboard suits to Burning Man as well as a hexayurt. This burning man was my second best burn ever (the best being the first). In addition to showing up at Burning man, the fifth version of my cardboard suit also made appearances at the Gazillion/Slipgate offices in San Mateo, Decompression, and the DNA lounge where it won 1st place in a halloween costume contest. Shortly there after the internet found my pictures on line of the suit, and I became famous for a week. One last scope change for the project at work resulted in nearly everyone, including myself, being laid off. In experiencing my first video game industry lay-off I finally felt like a real game developer. On my annual trip back home to Indy, I got to meet my nephew Dylan for the first time.