Accidental Careerist Part 4

...continued from Part 3

I’ll have to give you the condensed version of the Diablo/Blizzard experience. It would take a book to give the story its proper due. So here we go. Two years into the development of Diablo Blizzard decided to buy Condor. We became Blizzard North and Max, Dave, and Erich became millionaires overnight. Diablo was released in the first week of January 1997 and stayed at the top of the software charts for 7 months and ushered in the era of online gaming. PC gaming ruled the industry. At the time Blizzard acquired us they were being acquired by software publisher Davidson. Warcraft 2 had been released in 1996 and was Game of the Year and Diablo followed suit in 1997. The success was continued with the release of Starcraft in 1998 giving Blizzard Game of the Year three years in a row. Blizzard North stayed small, we had only grown to 15 people for the making of Diablo. By 1999 we had grown to 45 people for the making of Diablo 2.

By then things had started to change. In a large part due to Blizzard’s success the gaming industry went through a rapid expansion. Annual revenue started to rival that of Hollywood. Corporations started buying their way into the industry and snapping up the small independent studios and publishers. Soon after the release of Diablo Davidson was bought by CUC, a corporation that made their money on memberships for discounted services and products. CUC soon merged with HFS, a real estate and hotel based corporation and formed the conglomerate known as Cendant. Wall St. was on a roll. Yahoo and Amazon, two new internet companies, were the hot stocks. Google at the time was just one of many search engines trying to find their niche. In April 1998 Cendant became the first corporation to get busted for fraud during the mid to late 90’s meteoric rise of Wall St. To us lowly workers they made stock options seem like gold. Our bonus money for the success of Diablo came in the form of stock options which became worthless once the fraud went public and the SEC started their investigation. I remember the day, it was April 15, 1998. The Cendant execs sold their stocks two weeks before the bust because they knew better. For me and my friends at Blizzard North our stocks became worthless. Cendant’s assets were frozen for a week and by the time they were unfrozen the stock had dropped to well below our option price. I was two years vested and my portfolio was worth $240,000 and almost overnight it became worthless. It was my wake up call to the nature of the corporate beast. The Cendant fraud was soon followed by the Worldcom debacle, which was followed by the Enron travesty.

There were many other high profile stock based frauds. Cooking the books was the business of the day. This was all paralleled by the dot.com boom and bust which I had a front row seat from living and working in the Bay area. Unlike Condor which was started on a small loan and money from parents I witnessed the birth of one dot.com outfit after another hitting the ground running fueled by venture capitalist money. These companies had made no revenue but they had the best offices with the best technology and handed out high paying jobs like cheap beer at a frat party. These companies had lavish perks and threw massive parties. Young people flocked to the Bay area for the high paying jobs, which in turn forced the rent and cost of living up in San Francisco disenfranchising the City I had known. It was like a technological gold rush. Many of my friends in San Francisco who were mostly artists and working class were priced out of the City.

Diablo 2 was released in June of 2000 and it was a monster hit setting a Guiness Book of World Records for game sales. Gaming had gone international and Blizzard was well known around the globe. We were especially huge in Korea due to Starcraft. Right before the release of Diablo 2 Cendant sold its gaming division to Vivendi, a French water utilities company, for $885 million. We didn’t know it at the time but it was the beginning of the end for Blizzard North. We had grown to 65 strong. Most of the people were new and had not worked on Diablo or Diablo 2. Many of the people who came on at the end of Diablo and the beginning of production for Diablo 2 left the company after the Cendant fraud. We were now fully corporatized. We had rules, we had overseerers, and we had several levels of management. We were no longer the small maverick studio that did whatever it took to get the job done. We started working on Diablo 3 with a crew that was not cohesive and leadership that had become more concerned with maintaining their wealthy lifestyles than leading the studio. For two and a half years we were like a rudderless ship. By the summer of 2003 we should have been putting the final touches on Diablo 3 but instead we had nothing to show. We had started on five different versions of game, spending 3-6 months at a time developing ideas that we eventually trashed. Max, Dave, and Erich came in to work one day and announced they were leaving Blizzard North to form a new studio. The scuttlebut was that they approached Vivendi for more money and not only were they turned down they were asked to resign. Blizzard South had been working on World of Warcraft since 2000 and had already sunk tens of millions into the game. Vivendi was trying to sell off Blizzard and was asking $1.5 billion but found no takers. To cut their losses they decided to consolidate Blizzard which meant liquidating Blizzard North. The guys (Max, Dave, and Erich) left to form Flagship Studios and they only took a select few with them. I wasn’t one of them. They had a plan to have a small group of designers and leads to create a game and outsource all the development for the assets. Soon after they left Blizzard, Blizzard North was downsized by a mass layoff. After being told in a private one on one meeting with the management that I was one of the so called important people I was shown the door. I had been with Condor/Blizzard North for 9 years and this is how it would end. I helped build the studio from nothing and helped the guys become millionaires

I had been working for 22 years straight without a break and for the first time in my life I was laid off. The day of the layoff was the same day escrow closed on the home (a one bedroom apartment) I had just purchased in San Francisco. I hooked up with a bunch of ex Blizzard guys who formed a studio called Castaways, the name a direct reference to how we exited Blizzard North. We secured a contract with Electronic Arts to make a Diablo like game based on Greek and Persian mythology. After a year and a half our contract was cancelled. Electronic Arts had a CEO change and went in a new direction and cancelled all of their third party contracts. After about six months of unsuccessfully trying to find a new publisher Castaways was forced to lay off all of its staff in December of 2005.

I didn’t start looking for work right away. I decided to do take some time off from working and do some traveling. I went to Costa Rica and had a fabulous time. A few months after that I went to Peru to hike the Inca Trail to Maccha Pichu and I went to Tulum in Mexico to see the Mayan pyramids. I took a summer job to be the director of the ID Gaming Academy, a three work residential program run out of UC Berkeley where high school kids were given a crash course in game art and game development. It was the perfect job for me since it combined my two careers. It was a challenging job. I worked from 7am to 1am, seven days a week. When that ended I landed an animation job working for Backbone Entertainment in Emeryville.

I had only been at Backbone for two months when I was contacted by my old friend from Blizzard North Michio Okamura. He and another old time Blizzard Northy, Eric Sexton, were forming a new studio. They had secured a deal with a Chinese publisher. I was hired to be the Lead Animator. It was just like the Condor days, we were starting a studio from the ground up except this time the stakes were much higher. Where in the Condor days it maybe cost a few hundred thousand to operate the studio now the annual cost was in the millions. The new studio was called UI Pacific Games and we were making an MMO (massive multiplayer game) based on the Chinese legendary story, the Three Kingdoms. All the core management people were ex-Blizzard North. We hired about 25 people and started production on the game. We also had a studio in Seoul. In March of 2007 we visited Beijing, Shanghai, and Seoul to meet our new publishers in person. All was going according to plan when the Chinese pulled out of the deal abruptly after nine months.

Brad Mason, our CEO, managed to find another publisher for us in less than a month. This time it was with Gravity of Korea. Gravity built its success around the game Ragnarok and wanted to establish itself in the US market. Our new studio was named L5. Gravity had an office in Los Angeles and owned a few licenses based on Hollywood films. This was actually very exciting because at first we thought we were going to be making the companion game for the movie Avatar. For some reason the deal could not be worked out. Gravity had a license for Ice Age so that became our new project. It was a bit of a letdown because that is not what we signed on for plus we would only have an 18 month development window to make and ship the game. We weren’t even sure what kind of game we wanted to make so we spent the first few months negotiating with Gravity what type of game it was going to be and who would be the target market. Once that was settled we started working on the game. I was promoted to Art Lead responsible for all of the art assets. We were on a tight schedule but we were making good progress. We had most of the main characters modeled and animated and we were actually starting to get some momentum. Even the Blue Sky people who made the movie were digging our game. I have been in some whacked out situations in the gaming industry but I wasn’t at all prepared for what was about to happen.

In August 2008 I came into work and was told by Brad that the management team was going to resign from L5 to go work for T3 and Hanbisoft, another Korean company. I was told I could join them or stay at L5. The same offer was made to the entire staff which numbered about 30 people. Apparently there was some concern with Gravity’s commitment to L5. Of course I took the offer, what else was I going to do? So here I was heading into the third company in three years with basically the same people. The irony behind this move is that we were going to be working on a game that had shipped a year earlier that was made by Flagship which was run by our former bosses at Blizzard North.

Flagship had shipped Hellgate London in late 2007 under much controversy. They made a deal with Hanbisoft late in the game to get much needed funding. They took a sizeable loan from Hanbisoft and put their game up as collateral. The game was released before it was ready and it didn’t meet expectations. They had to liquidate Flagship in summer of 2008 because the loan was called in. Hanbisoft took over the game and the rights to distribute it in Asia. We were brought in to polish the game for its Asian release. Like Gravity, Hanbisoft was making its play to get into the US market. They were riding the success of a game called Audition. Our new studio was named Redbana US. Right after we began with Hanbisoft the global economy tanked. Audition was launched in 2009 in the US and it failed to garner any attention with the Guitar Hero/Rock Band dominated US market. In the spring of 2009 T3, the parent company began to downsize Redbana. Eric Sexton, who started the original studio, myself, and some other management staff were laid off in April 2009. Once again I found myself out of work, getting my ass scorched by corporate politics and decision making.

Seven months later I am still trying to reboot my career but this might be the end. With the economy in the shitter jobs of any kind are almost non existent. Fifteen years I have worked in the gaming industry, starting at the very bottom and reaching the top of the mountain only to find myself on the bottom again, on the outside looking in. My savings are rapidly dwindling and soon I will not have health insurance if I don’t find a job by January. If I go a few more months unemployed I’ll have to sell my apartment and probably move out of San Francisco, the city that has been my home for the last 18 years.

Has my luck run out? If there is a new career out there for me I haven’t had the chance to meet it yet. I have some ideas about some new directions I want to go in but the clock is ticking and these are hardly the best of times. I can’t say I have any regrets. It was a great ride that ended in a wreck but I had some great times and I met a lot of good people. Who knows? Maybe the gaming industry has one last silver bullet left for me. It would be nice to go out on my own working on a game that ships that I can be proud of. I’m down but I am not out. Perhaps if you follow my blog you will get to witness my resurrection.

The future is not yet written.