Jump Point magazine Issue 01.01 (n°01), December 2012 | Page 14

… but when I turned back to Michael and the
security guard, he had somehow transitioned
from meeting Richard Garriott to an incredibly graphic description of his service as a
sniper in the Vietnam War. Little did we know
that this crazy transition would set the tone
for the next day!
The event started off with a whimper rather
than a bang. The setup could kindly be described as makeshift. Joined by Martin and
then (soon after) Sandi and another investor (Denis), we rushed to arrange
our laptops and webcams.
A computer was placed
precariously on top of
a standing lamp,
others around
a conference
table.
As soon
as Chris
Roberts
arrived
on the
scene,
we very
quickly
got into
the swing of
things! Word
of mouth spread
throughout the
Austin game development community and we
began to have visitors (how

they made it past the trained sniper, I do
not know). Chris Douglas, the man
responsible for the look of the
ships in Wing Commander III
and IV, was the first guest to
Ben
stop in. A childhood hero—I
Lesnick:
still
memorized the bios in
wide
Origin’s playtesters’
awake.
guides instead of baseball statistics as a boy—I
think I had my first ‘woah,
am I really here’ moment
as I nervously
interviewed him
for the stream.
David Swofford,
CIG’s PR man
par excellence
arrived soon
after that.
And then,
of
course,
there
was the
lamp.

Wingman draws the
development plan
for Star Citizen
on the white board.

Wingman
had arranged for a
team dinner
next door for
everyone and we
decided it was best
not to broadcast it. Let’s
be clear here: you should nev-

14

er, even on the best of days, watch me eat.
How do we tell the viewers we were
going to be away? Michael hit on
a solution: tape a little note to
a square Ikea lamp (the same
type we’d been using to stack
our overhead camera on)
and leave it there.
After dinner, the party
atmosphere took over in a
way that it is truly difficult
to express. My mind became an
insane mix of responsibilities—getting new content up to meet demand
we’d never expected, answering design
questions with Chris on the fly and so on—and
genuine celebration as we ticked off stretch
goal after stretch goal and opened our doors
to various ex-Origin luminaries. You all saw
Fred Schmitt’s insane LED-lit interview (“He’s
like this all the time!” almost everyone would
later explain to me), the crazy antics in Wingman’s Basement, like taking your Skype calls
live, and Billy Cain’s alcohol-fueled rant, and
were likely as amazed as I was.
As the night wore on, we got tired. Sometime after midnight our special guests went
home and we were left with a core group of
five people to carry the flag until morning
when Richard Garriott would be stopping by
for an interview. I will go ahead and admit
here—unavoidable, as there is photographic
evidence—that I dozed off in front of the
camera. I humbly throw myself on the mercy
of the court and beg your forgiveness!