A bit of nostalgia for the wildest two years of my career

[jducoeur]

I occasionally mention my time at Looking Glass Studios. If you're interested in what that was like, check out this fine article about the company and its history. It leads off with LG's final meeting, which I remember pretty vividly. I was never significant enough to get mentioned in the story (indeed, it glosses right past Tom Leonard, who was much more important than I), although I worked with most of the folks mentioned in one capacity or another. For reference, I got involved at the point where Intermetrics/AverStar comes in, having jumped companies under the guise of being loaned from Intermetrics to LG as a temp programmer and never leaving. I did a modest amount of the coding for Thief, and a fair chunk of System Shock II.

Crazy days: LG remains the only job I've worked harder at than Querki, culminating in one stretch of five months, 29 days/month, to get the SS2 multi-player patch debugged and out the door. But game design entirely aside, I learned more about software engineering during those two years than I ever have anywhere else: it was a remarkable hotbed of really talented, innovative people, and I credit Doug, Marc and especially Tom for teaching me tons in the course of working with them...

Comments

[fredrickegerman.livejournal.com]

Oh my gosh, there's a section on 10 Dumb Guys. I remember going to GM meetings there...

[jducoeur]

Yeah, well, of course the postscript to the story for me was (IIRC) not very long after The Final Meeting, while I was still slightly in shock and packing my desk, getting a call from you about Trenza, and by the following evening, I had been hired with a 50% raise. Things were very, very weird in 2000, but that phone call marks my switch to Internet tools (as a career path), so I thank you much for it...

[fredrickegerman.livejournal.com]

Wow, I remember referring a bunch of ex-LG folks, but I totally thought you'd come in through Michael in the end.

[laurion]

Heh. I just finished reading Grossman's 'You', which is so very much the love child of Looking Glass.