In a near panic attempting to find a job around Christmas time, I took a job at an arcade machine company called Tsunami Visual Technologies, where my old college friend Jason Powell was working.

Tsunami’s claim to “fame” was a motion platform arcade machine that had a PC running windows inside of it. The Tsu-Mo, as it was called, had a seat, usually inside of a giant colored acrylic ball, mounted atop 6 huge german stepper motors with linkages.

We worked on Starwars Starfighter, Revolt, and few other games. Basically we licensed the source code to these games and hacked away like mad scientists to make them fun for arcades, and to add synchronized seat motion to them.

I think the greatest story I have here, was my last day of work. I had been looking around for job’s and interviewing because I hated working there. At 11am I received a job offer letter via private email from The Collective, located in Newport Beach, CA. I went to lunch at noon, came back and worked for about an hour more when I was suddenly called into Chuck’s office. He told me that Tsunami couldn’t afford to keep me on and that they had to let me go that day. Business had clearly been dwindling for some time, but I was just as surprised as everyone in the office. My eye’s widened in disbelief, my head sunk to really think about it how they cold have possibly known, but then I just looked up, smiled, and said “ok”, then walked out and left. Later Chuck said he was totally shocked that I took it so easily. I never told him why I was so easy going about it. LOL.