Accidental Careerist Part 3

…continued from Part 2.

It can sometimes be strange and mystifying the random occurrences that dictate our fate. What leads us down this pathway vs. that? What leads us down the road less taken? For me it has been because I have never had a burning desire too travel down any specific path, I trust the universe to reveal itself to me. Pathways and doorways are always opening up it’s just a question of how aware I am and how much am I willing to risk the unknown. How willing am I to let go where I am to get to someplace new and different? For most of my life not only have I been willing I have relished the moments when the strange and unknown have taken the reigns of my life.

In the fall of 1993 circumstances not directly related to me had a profound change on my life. One of my best friends, Megan Feeney had moved to New York and she met a guy named Ken Williams. They were living together in some hole in the wall apartment with a brick and chimney view in Manhattan. That summer Ken’s parents died in a car crash in Los Angeles where he was originally from. This unfortunate and devastating event called Ken back home to LA so he could settle the estate and put his parents to rest. Megan called me and told me she was heading up to San Francisco while Ken took care of his duties in LA. Ken’s best friends from his childhood in Brentwood, CA., Max and Erich Schaefer, lived in San Francisco and Ken planned on coming up to San Francisco later to be with his buddies while he was in mourning.

Megan arrived in San Francisco in October. She called me and asked me if I wanted to hang out with her and Kenny’s best friend Max who she didn’t know to well just yet. I agreed and suggested we meet at the Up and Down Club. At the time the so-called acid jazz scene was really happening in San Francisco. It was the last true live music scene the City has seen. I was deep into it, going out to the clubs two or three times a week. Alphabet Soup, one of my favorite local bands had a regular gig on Monday nights at the Up and Down Club and that’s why I chose it. I was very happy to see Megan and I was always up for meeting new people. My first impression of Max turned out to be way off the mark. He was 26 years old and a graduate of the University of Colorado. It was the way he dressed that threw me off. This was light years before the dot.com boom and bust. Most young San Franciscans dressed down by choice. Doc Martens, tatoos, piercings, Grateful Dead t-shirts, and American Spirit cigarettes was the standard uniform. Max showed up in a blue blazer, wrinkled and tucked in plaid button down shirt, and Dockers. He had the kind of look that suggested he didn’t go out much and was probably very conservative, possibly even a Republican. Boy was I ever wrong about Max.

Listening to the funky beats of Alphabet Soup Max told me about a new company he and his brother and a friend had just started called Condor. They had a contract to do a fighting game for the Sega 16 bit console based on the DC comics superheroes. They were just starting out. They had no employees and no office space yet they were working on the game. They were looking for an artist to draw superheroes like Superman and Batman for the game. It never crossed my mind to tell Max that I used to draw superheroes but Megan knew and she volunteered the information to Max. Max handed me a napkin and a pen and asked me to draw something. In about two minutes I drew a sketch of Superman. Max liked it a lot and asked me if I would be interested in doing some art work for their game. He was only able to offer me 20 hours a week with no benefits and no guarantee the company would even survive the first year. Although I was flattered by the offer it wasn’t enough for me to leave my job at the YMCA where I had built a career.

Even though I didn’t take the job I did become friends with Max. He lived with his brother Erich in an apartment at the top of Twin Peaks. Max was far from being a conservative. He was a classic ultra liberal San Franciscan who hated dressing up. He didn’t own a tie or suit. He was a sharp minded fellow who loved to talk politics, play video games, and smoke tons of weed. When I would go to hang out with him and Erich I felt right at home. Erich was an interesting guy in his own right. He was an easy going guy with that live and let live philosophy about life. He was the older brother but he didn’t have that older brother attitude. He had a wry sense of humor and we could relate to each other because he was into stuff I was into, like underground comics and weird magazines. He also was a lover of film, not the mainstream stuff, he was into the arcane and off the wall stuff like Eraserhead and the movies coming out of Hong Kong, especially Jackie Chan and John Woo films. They also loved playing video games, specifically Sega NHL hockey. They were experts. I had played video games growing up but lost my taste for it after getting beaten badly by my younger brothers Kenny and Kirk who were video game savants. They could beat anybody at Intellivision. When you can’t beat your younger brothers at something you just give it up because it’s just not cool to lose to your younger brothers at anything. It puts a dent in the older brother aura. I had fun hanging out with Max and Erich. We played video games, watched cool movies, ate burritos, and smoked bong hit after bong hit. They were self proclaimed “slackers” which was a term that was still new at the time. Their main inspiration for starting the video game company is that they didn’t want to work for the Man or work in some tight assed corporate environment. They were anarchist. They weren’t into rules or traditions. That was what defined the young people of San Francisco. Everybody was trying to find their own way to work and live, not for money and upward mobility, but for freedom and peace of mind. It was a City full of young people living on the cheap and by their own rules. Nobody had a nice car, nice clothes, or their own apartment. We all had 3 or 4 roommates. Everybody I knew was doing something creative and that’s the way we preferred it. The dot.com would change all of that and not for the better.

In the March of 1994 I was up for a visit at Max and Erich’s and I saw a stack of drawings of Batman on the kitchen table. They had finally found an artist and he was pretty good. He was a Japanese guy named Michio Okamura. Michio had been in the states since he was 9 but you could still still see the Japanese influence in his drawings because they had an anime look to them. The guys were excited beyond belief because they could finally get the project rolling and get more money from the publisher which meant they could hire more people. A few months later I left the Buchanan YMCA to work at the Hilltop YMCA in Richmond. I was hired to run a community center in the Iron Triangle, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the Bay area. I looked forward to the challenge. I had been working with teens in gangs when I left Buchanan and thought I had the chops to do it in Richmond. Unfortunately I ran into the same problems that I left the San Francisco Y for. The Hilltop YMCA was a new branch and was literally on top of a hill. Like most hilltop neighborhoods it was fairly affluent and seemed a million miles from the weed encrusted, broken glass strewn streets of the lowland where the community center was located. I was spending way more time on the top of the hill attending meetings when I should have been at the community center getting to know the staff and the people in the neighborhood.

I had only been on the new job for two weeks when Max called me and again offered me a job. This time he was offering full time hours and 50% benefits. The pay was a few thousand less per year than my job at the Y but Max said I could earn an extra 5-10 thousand a year through royalties. I didn’t think twice. I accepted the offer right away. Something inside me told me this was the thing to do. I gave the YMCA one week notice. They were stunned. I had just started and already I was leaving. I knew I was done with the YMCA. I departed without looking back. I took nothing with me. I left my library of books and manuals on the shelves and left my plaques and certificates on the wall of my office. I walked away from 11 years with the YMCA almost as if it had never been. My outlook was completely forward. I had no idea what this new job would bring but I was ready for it. I had no fear, I had no hesitation, and I had no doubts heading into a new job without really having any idea what exactly it was I would be doing.

My new official title was game artist. My job was to paint DC superhero characters with pixels. Before I started I had an interview with Dave Brevik who was the third partner. Max and Erich were the art and story guys and Dave was the programmer. I rode my bike from San Francisco to Redwood City for the interview. I had a flat about ¾ of the way there. I called Max and he came and picked me up in his old war torn VW Vanagon. The interview with Dave was short. He didn’t even want to see my artwork, he just wanted to meet me in person and give me the stamp of approval. I wasn’t nervous at all. I had been in so many meetings with people in power suits much older than me it was quite refreshing to be interviewing with my future boss who was 26 years old and wore shorts and a t-shirt. I was 31 at the time. We had a few laughs and talked about comic books and I was officially hired.

I was the 7th employee and the oldest guy working for the company. Dave and Max were 26 and Erich was 27. Michio Okamura, 30, did the paper drawings using a pen and a light box. He didn’t even have a computer. Richard Seis, 24, was the first hire and was the other programmer. Tom Byrne, 26, was a pixel artist. Matt Uelmen at 22 was the baby of the group and fresh out of college. He was our sound and music guy. We basically had a three room office. Matt inhabited one room where like a mad scientist he concocted sound effects for the game. Max, Dave, and Erich shared a small, closet like room adjacent to the large room that contained the rest of us. We had used, large, oaken desks and worked on 486 computers running the DOS operating system which was all command lines. I had never worked on a PC before. At the YMCA I had used Mac Classics and at home I had a Mac Performa. On my first day on the job Max had to show me the basics of running DOS. Michio made full page drawings, each representing a frame of animation. The drawings were scanned and Tom and I would paint them with pixels. We used a program called D-Paint. We had a 16 color palette and basically we just clicked all day painting in muscles and details one pixel at a time. Pick a color, click, zoom in, click, zoom out, click, pick another color, rinse-wash-repeat. At times it could be maddening work. Completing three frames in a day was considered a good day. We worked hard and we played hard. Our philosophy about making games is that you have to love games to make games. We didn’t make games from the viewpoint of artists and programmers we made games from the viewpoint of a gamer. Our goal was simple. Get the game on the shelf. We didn’t worry about how many copies the game sold or critical praise we just wanted to get the game into the hands of the gamers and give them a great gaming experience.

We finished the game and it was released the following November in the fall of 1994. It did ok, it wasn’t a blockbuster but like I said we were just happy to get the game released. We were a miniscule, obscure, no-name studio with seven employees. We were building a studio from the ground up, creating an egalitarian work environment that lacked formality and rules. We reveled in our anything goes attitudes. We had no CEO, no Directors, and no Leads. We were all just programmers or artists, even the owners. We all did the same work at the same level. To survive we needed the maximum effort of each individual. After finishing Justice League Task Force we started shopping around a role playing game designed by Dave called Diablo. We secured a small publishing contract with Blizzard Entertainment, then and up and coming studio that had just released Warcraft: Orcs vs. Humans. Blizzard was actually sort of a rival for us. They had worked on the SNES version of Justice League Task Force and we used to get builds of their game and compare it to ours. Of course we always thought our version was better. Diablo drew interest from other larger established publishers like Acclaim but we felt comfortable with Blizzard because they had a similar studio environment to ours. At the time neither Blizzard nor Condor had any idea we were just a few years away from skyrocketing to the top of the gaming industry.

Ok, there is still a substantial amount of this story to be told but out of respect for the one or two people that read this blog I’m going to stop here. The next entry will definitely wrap up the saga of my two careers. If you are still on for the ride thanks for your patience. The finish will be worth it if you like tragedies.

To be continued…