1/2 week before I started at The Collective (7/16/2004) my dad died in a hospital in Indiana. I had a house that I had to rent out in San Leandro at the same time I had to move down to Irvine and deal with the loss of my dad. To say this was a stressful time is an understatement.

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.

In October 2002 I was informed by Sean that the money was running out at Cinemaware and that several of us would have to be let go so that a few could continue to wrap up the final pieces of Defender of the Crown and get it out the door. My sections of the game were done and ready to ship, but a few other people still had bugs to work out.

At the end of November 2002 I left and began searching for what would be next.

I’m immensely proud of my contribution at Cinemaware, but to describe everything that went on there in the end really makes me sick to my stomach. Sean went on to be development director at Crystal Dynamics, and Lars had a rather disgusting run-in with the law, after which he sold the Cinemaware name to a budget games company. Lars now runs a distribution company for Latin America & Brazil.

Along the way we lost an excellent artist and good friend when he died of a brain aneurism. I’ll never forget his late night drunk dials and genuine personality.
John Cameron R.I.P.

Near the end of Slave Zero, Accolade sold themselves to Infogrammes, which we all know better as Atari. Infogrammes seemed to have no clue what they wanted to do with the new studio. So after Slave Zero, they gave us all a few weeks to figure out whether we wanted to leave or join crappy internal project #1 or crappy internal project #2. I rode it out to the maximum, but had been talking to Sean Vesce and Lars Batista about their idea to re-found the classic Amiga game company named Cinemaware. Lars had purchased the name out of bankruptcy and was really keen on remaking the classic titles.

Somewhere around Feb 2000, I finally left Accolade to become Cinemware’s first full time employee and first programmer. I worked from my apartment for months while they paid me out of their own checking accounts.

Eventually Lars rented an apartment in a marina near 3DO and EA in Redwood shores and we all began working there every day. It was pretty awesome times, but money was tight and no one knew if we could turn it into something great, or even if we’d ever find a publisher.

Here I followed Sean Vesce to Accolade and wrote many character scripts, weapons, and again explosions.

My greatest story here was from my first day of work. At the team meeting that evening our producer Matt Powers said he was going to Burning Man for the next week and if anyone wanted to go, to let him know. I had heard of Burning Man a few years before and had wanted to go but I didn’t really think it would be possible considering I had just started the new job in San Jose. But Matt was cool with it and I spend the next week in the heat of the northern Nevada desert with Matt and his friends that I barely knew. It was hilarious and fun. We had a great time, and I went the next year as well.