Lemony Snicket
From AboveTheGarage
My mom said, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."
I can think of a few nice things to say about this project but even then in order for those comments to make any sense I would end up saying some not-nice things.
Suffice it to say this project did me in.
All right, I'll come clean. The basic problem was that I couldn't stand working with the producers at Activision.
Okay. I said it.
And they couldn't stand me! Not one bit.
It got to the point where I would sit in a meeting with the actiprods and just glare at them the way Chloe on 24 stares at people she doesn't like or understand. (How awesome is it that a fictional character has a Wikipedia entry?)
So that's what did me in. I thought, Activision is a real big time publisher! This is about as good as it is going to get for us and it was miserable for me. And the stories I heard from other teams about EA made my skin crawl. So it wasn't like there was a better publisher out there.
So I couldn't stand those guys, and like I said, they didn't like me either.
There were other contributing factors. It was a ton of work to get the studio up and running starting literally from scratch. But those times were over. The job was much more of a maintenance job. The producers handled the day-to-day for projects and I just looked at spreadsheets. I did the reviews for 70 people and that kept me busy because I like to put a lot of effort into reviews. They are important! But in general the job was getting boring - always a dangerous thing for me.
So that was it.
Anything else you might have heard about why I was quitted were really just effects not causes. The cause was I couldn't stand working with publishers anymore. (Amaze was a fine place to work - I worked there longer than any place I had ever worked.)
One of the principles of Capitalism is that in a free market people do what they like and that's more productive. And so it was appropriate for me to find work that I liked. As much as I liked my organization, which was quite a lot, it was counterproductive to have me around. (And truth be told, when it comes to management, I'm more of a 'start-up guy'. I like the excitement of getting the place up and running and watching it grow. Steady-state organizations ... not so interesting.)
After quitting, I thought to myself, "Self, there was a couple of years when you were independently wealthy ... and how did you spend your time? Did you manage people? No, one of the goals for Above the Garage Productions was to be a virtual studio with no employees. So what did you do, Self? What? You spent your free time programming? Well, Self, I think you should return to programming."
So that's what I did.
