Career Highlights

Here are some of the top things I'm proud of from my career.

Disclaimer: While I'm taking credit here, I acknowledge that much of this involved support, work, and/or learnings from others. Also if I say "first", I mean to my knowledge. I would not be surprised if other people or products did similar things before me, but at time of creation and this writing, I don't know of them.

• SAG Card: While doing craft service on Trancers 2, I got to know Helen Hunt. She kindly talked to me about my ambitions and when I mentioned that acting was one of them, she asked Charlie Band to give me a minor part with a single line, enough to get me into the Screen Actors Guild. I've only done a couple SAG jobs, mostly puppeteering, but I've used their credit union for my entire adult life. 

• Extra for Army of Darkness: While doing craft service on The Army of Darkness (an achievement in itself as Evil Dead 2 was a cult classic with my college friends and myself), I got in good with Sam Raimi and he let me switch from being Craft Service to being a full time extra. The rest of my time on the film was being a background player in most every scene with more than six people as a peasant or deadite or double for the guy who filled the Death Mobile's coal furnace.

• Body Double for Chechov: As luck would have it, I happen to be the exact height, build, and hair color of Walter Koenig and an extras company got me to be his body double for Star Trek Generations. Myself and a Scotty look alike was helicoptered out to an open field where they spent all day flying down at us to get the POV of Kirk skydiving from outer space. The current news that week was about the trial from The Twilight Zone film where a helicopter killed actor Vic Morrow and two kids. It was a little nerve wracking.  

• Pioneering internet game events - M59: Meridian 59 was the first graphical MMO (in fact, I was in the room when Massively Multiplayer Online was coined, though I'm pretty sure I had made other name suggestions). In it, I pioneered live events from PVP tournaments to unexpected monsters attacks on towns. I created the Bard program for CS staff and players who auditioned to volunteer used limited god-power command to run an array of events. I hired the first full time Community Events Manager employee to organize ongoing events.

• Saved a Life - GDC: While being a conference associate at GDC, I came across a passed out intoxicate guy. I tried to rouse him but he was not coherent. Perhaps he needed to sleep it off, but my instincts had me contact my lead and then 911. The paramedic told me that the guy would have definitely died if I hadn't interfered because his blood alcohol level was lethal. No, I didn't single handedly save somebody, but if not for me, that random guy probably wouldn't be alive. 

• FPS Healer Class - Delta Force 2: The lead designer at NovaLogic wants to have the players pick classes to play in the voxel FPS Delta Force 2, such as Sniper (who had a sniper rifle), Demolitionist (who had a grenade launcher), etc. I was enjoying the healer class in the beta of EverQuest at the time, and championed for a healer class. While rudimentary (had 3 healing packs to rez dead allies), it was the first healer class in an FPS to my knowledge. 

• Sarcastic Cheat Shaming - Tachyon The Fringe: Many games had come with cheat codes, but for Tachyon, I wrote dialog for Bruce Campbell (the player character Jake Logan) to chide the actual player with whenever they used cheat codes. I also had a lot of fun filling the narrative with in jokes, such as naming the Jake's parents after my own parents. 

• Wrote Opening Role - Star Wars Galaxies: I got to write the opening scrolling paragraphs for Star Wars Galaxies. Lucas Arts was treating our MMO as a major release, so while over time there have been many opening rolls written for different products, at the time I was one of a handful of people who got to write an official one. 

• Pioneering internet game events Part 2 - Star Wars Galaxies: In SWG, I built on the learnings from Meridian 59 and created a 3 month story arc live event for players ("The Cries of Alderaan") where the story actually branched based on the results of the Rebel and Empire players. I talked LucasArts into letting us do a Wookiee Life Day holiday event even though George hated the Star Wars Holiday Special it was based on. I hired another Events Manager to run a host of different live events on all of the servers. While we couldn't hit all the players at scale, the small percentage of players who were lucky enough to be on at the right time and relatively right place (or saw the server announcement, if there was one) would spread tale of meeting Lord Vader or helping defend Theed from a battle droid siege. We then went a step further and started creating tools for players to host their own events for each other. My favorite was swoop racing, where players could places waypoints around a city or planet, set up a protocol droid, and other players could interact to race to the waypoints and get a best time for the day from it. I also hand placed a permanent race track on each planet to give players an example of the possibilities, some were based on actual races from the extended universe. 

• International spy for spy game - The Agency. Sadly The Agency, a spy MMO from SOE, was never released, but I did get to demo the game at a German game expo. I talked my producer into extending the trip for several days so I could go to Prague and take pictures for the artists. Prague was a major setting in the game and the artists didn't want pictures of iconic things like the castle or astronomers clock which could be found all over the internet and in reference books. They wanted pictures of manhole covers, door knobs, alleyways, and embassies. Mostly embassies. I'm certain that I'm on some list for spending a day getting pictures of various embassies from different vantage points. "Honestly, I'm not a spy, I'm just working on a spy video game!"

• Cooperative Mode Match 3 - Bejeweled Blitz: Match 3 games were traditionally solitary games, or in the case of Bejeweled Blitz highly competitive with weekly leaderboard resets. My favorite pet project addition to Bejeweled when I was Lead Designer at PopCap was Party Mode. Instead of competing, this mode gave you a curated score for you and a friend you chose to beat by adding your scores together. Do well and earn rewards. Do poorly and you can use party tokens to submit a better score before your partner sees it.  It was fun and led to a sustained increase in revenue on our Facebook version of the game. 

• Cooperative Mode Solitaire - House Flip/Let's Dish: Had a lot of fun putting together a prototype of a synchronous cooperative puzzle solitaire game and a soft launched version of one for Match 3 at Big Fish. I not happy with management's decision not to finish those, but I feel pride in the small teams accomplished in terms of unique and fun gameplay. As a bonus, Let's Dish featured a level using my Grandma Reed Rolls. Beta people and my family got to see awesome art based on my family favorite food (see below).

• Non-Binary Character - Destiny 2: For the Lightfall expansion, we had the opportunity to create a new tough action hero character. Leadership was desiring a strong woman in the vein of Sahar Connor from Terminator 2. Luckily Bungie had invested in several strong lead women in Destiny like Ikora, Eris, Mara, Amanda, etc., so I saw this as an opportunity for us to introduce our first major non-binary heroic character of Nimbus. More importantly, after succeeding in getting that decision approved, I worked closely with our internal Trans@Bungie team to ensure we were creating a positive role model that didn't fall into bad tropes. I stepped back from the creative process so as not to impose my own perceptions on the character (other than necessary story beats for the overall narrative). So to be clear, I'm not taking credit for Nimbus as a lot of artists, writers, and experts work hard on them, but I made it possible and then got out of the way. 

• Diversity Hiring/Mentoring - career spanning: I'm proud of my track record for interviewing and hiring underrepresented people in the video game industry, one that historically had heavily skewed to young, white males (no surprise). I've hired and managed a lot of women and non-white writers, artists, producers, and designers. I have also hire some white males as my goal wasn't to exclude candidates, but I took extra time to find the best candidate I could, worked with HR on writing more inclusive job descriptions, and ensured that my teams brought different backgrounds and perspectives, which is vital to making richer and more broadly appealing games.