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.

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…