The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition

[Nebu]

I'll cut it off here before I turn into mega-negative Nancy and just end it by, again, thanking you for a great interview.

There's a difference between being cynical and a negative Nancy.  Most of us (like yourself) are the former.  

I'm finding much of this more interesting the more times I read through it.  Some questions have come to mind, particularly about the Microsoft involvement.  I find it hard to believe that Microsoft would be so blind to the early stages of this project and were so readily "duped" as it were.  I'm guessing that they knew what was going on and either a) hoped that it would resolve or b) that it was such an inconsequential amount of investment capital that it was worth it to walk away rather than attempt resuscitation.  If they were duped, it's a statement that Microsoft has gotten too big for its own good... but I rather doubt that's the case.  

[ericw66]

What has surprised me over the last two years is that very commonly (probably > 80% of the teams that have come to my training), both artists and designers/producers have little to no understanding of the limits and best practices of the underlying technology, and basically say "coders make that shit work", and move on. The teams that I am confident will be successful are those where the coder(s) are strong enough personality wise to say "hey, no, that's not going to work, and here's why", and the producers/artists sit back and say "hmm, ok, how can we make it work then--this is what we want", and the team works together to solve the problem.

Little anecdote: back when I first heard about Vanguard, I checked out their web page, and the only team members that were listed were artists and producers--not a single "initial team" member that had credits on the web page was a coder by trade...and I said to myself, "I don't care if they are using Unreal, or any engine--this game is going to suck horribly"...and it turns out that what we got as customers turned out to be exactly what I predicted.

So true.

While I was a 'lead developer/manager' type for a small business doing business apps (wish I could break into game programming, I'm a good coder/designer/analyst, just not up to my C++ snuff anymore), the first word out of my mouth when a member of the support/analysis team came into my room was 'No, now what's your question'?  It irritated them of course, and perhaps I shouldn't have, but when it was me and 2-3 newbies vs 'almost no design documents' + '10+ year old code in DATAFLEX to be rewritten with tons of updated features and new stuff in 3 months' + 'Keep all our existing stuff up to date, and fix bugs in them too, in both DATAFLEX and VB (and SQL, and a few other things)' + 'help design the next project coming down the pipe' + 'keep all the PC's and servers running in the office' + 'help with every technical support call we get, even if it isn't our problem'... I had to. Sure, I didn't have to worry about how many poly's a given scene might have, but I did have to make sure everything came out clean as a whistle as having a city mail 100,000 tax bills wrong would REALLY irritate a few people...and when you have 400+ towns, cities, and counties using it, it wouldn't be just one client having a problem. And I had to design software (with huge amounts of fields of course) that could work in 640x480 resolution in 2002... I finally got that upped to 800x600 by the time I left lol.

Prior to my arrival there (I worked my way up), the coders were the 'bottom' end of the business, everything flowed downwards to them, they had no say in timetables, design, or anything else. I put a stop to that in a hurry. By the time I left (to assist my family, not because of the job) I actually had the coders *above* the telephone support people. And I had design documents that weren't just an email saying 'look at that DATAFLEX program written in 1985' or a single sheet of paper saying what the person thought would be nice. And I'd taught the tech support people the 4 'RE's' of support: 'Reboot, reregister (we used a lot of DLL's), reinstall, and reformat'. If those things don't do the trick, they need to buy a new PC ;).

But that comment about 1 tester, egads. Even in this small business, I had my own team do its internal testing (of course), and I had 6+ people in support to test as well. And this is a teeny tiny company. And when something was ready to ship, we'd test it in a town or two as a beta first. Sounds like we outdid Vanguard's testing by 1000x... and that scares me.

[tkinnun0]

Whoah.  Derail, but you are lumping Isaac Newton in with the producer of Walker, Texas Ranger?!?  I think you needa fifth category, there.

Whoah, I knew he has been involved in lots of projects, but that's a surprise. Still, apparently he wrote one episode, didn't get paid and left to make B5. Hardly a blemish.

[Endie]

Whoah.  Derail, but you are lumping Isaac Newton in with the producer of Walker, Texas Ranger?!?  I think you needa fifth category, there.

Whoah, I knew he has been involved in lots of projects, but that's a surprise. Still, apparently he wrote one episode, didn't get paid and left to make B5. Hardly a blemish.

Oh, he doesn't get off that lightly: he may only have written one episode, but as the original supervising producer, didn't he pick up the idea initially (along with Broostad) and develop it?  He only left because of [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shXK4SmpVlM]Babylon 5[/url].

[Tcharels]

TGB, it's already been pointed out, but.. you are incorrect. There were options, though not necessarily in the traditional "sell on wall street" sense of the word. All the original founders and some small number brought on after were part "owners" of Sigil. They never hid that fact. I don't know anything about the specific ownership numbers, or if the company was bought, how their ownership shares would be bought out, but... it was the case.

Many private companies have concepts of shares of ownership and options, usually in case they ever plan to go public, but also because it's an easy way for a partner to have his or her shares bought out by one or more of the other shareholders if they decide to leave the venture. This is nothing unusual. Might need to check your references again. And for the record, Mr. William Fisher was one of those partial owners, a fact he never hid.

[Ironwood]

Hey, have we all got so high and mighty that instead of saying 'You're full of fucking shite' we say that people are incorrect now ?


I'm incorrect daily.  Fortunately, a quick trip to the toilet and I can get rid of that incorrectness.

[AcidCat]

What has surprised me over the last two years is that very commonly (probably > 80% of the teams that have come to my training), both artists and designers/producers have little to no understanding of the limits and best practices of the underlying technology, and basically say "coders make that shit work", and move on. The teams that I am confident will be successful are those where the coder(s) are strong enough personality wise to say "hey, no, that's not going to work, and here's why", and the producers/artists sit back and say "hmm, ok, how can we make it work then--this is what we want", and the team works together to solve the problem.

Nice post, you made some really insightful points.

And damn, kudos schild, this is quite the scoop you have going on here, it's fun seeing F13 linked everywhere. :-D

[Yegolev]

Hey, have we all got so high and mighty that instead of saying 'You're full of fucking shite' we say that people are incorrect now ?

So... the monocles and tophats are not fooling anyone?

[Morat20]

I think Morat discussed the "iterative process", which is something I personally recommend whole-heartedly when it comes to finding the fun factor in a game--and it sounds as if every time the team leaders got feedback that the fun factor wasn't there (or the technical capability wasn't, or whatever), they ignored it completely instead of applying the feedback to the product...and I hope that a lot of the red names posting here think about that 20 years from now (or 10, or whatever) when they are the team leads.

Iterative development is pretty nice -- I can see ditching a lot of the things our text considered important (hell, we do ditch a lot of it), but in the end what it offers is the traceability and structure of the waterfall model with the flexibility and adaptability of rapid-prototyping.

Hell, it's the way I've always designed personal projects -- start small with proof-of-concept stuff, focus on the basic architecture (doesn't have to be optimal, tweaked, cover all the potential stuff -- just prove to myself it'll work later when I start building the good stuff on top of it), and slowly go through "design/develop/test/assess" cycles until I've got a nice feature-complete sort of thing that does everything I want it to do - by that point, I've probably added a dozen or more features, tweaks, changes, upgrades and the like that I came up with mid-development as I got a real handle on what I was doing and where I could go. Sometimes my end product looked nothing like what I had initiall envisioned, and it was almost always better than what I had hoped I'd make.

I'd think iterative design would be critical in terms of tools for designers. I'm not a designer -- I could, with a few conversations with them, rough out the sort of tools they'd want. BUt then I'd basically want to hand those tools off and say "Go build some stuff on our bare-bones engine, and see what's missing -- or what'd you like". A few rounds of back-and-forth on that, and hopefully we'd have something professional and I'd understand what the designers needed -- so as the engine evolved, I could slap on new functionality to the designer's tools to take advantage of it.

There was one point that class of mine really hit on -- the guy writing the textbook (Royce) had a serious fetish for "Architecture first". I agreed with him in the first place, but watching Vanguard's fall, I'm seriously inclined to think he's got a damn good point. If your architecture -- the underlying engine and the toolsets used to create the game -- aren't 100% rock solid, your game is going to suck. I don't care how vast it is, how pretty it can look. It's got to fucking run, and run well.

I've been playing LoTR and cursing the video issues I'm having with my wife's PC. I love the game, and the engine is pretty solid (and part of it is my PC's are almost three years old and I haven't upgraded them aside from an extra hard drive) -- but Turbine's engine simply isn't in the same class as WoW's. Blizzard's architecture is simply the best I've seen on an MMORPG. It's better than the vast bulk of single-player games.

Blizzard could have taken that solid architecture and still turned out a crappy game. But it would have been a crappy game that ran well, and probably done a shit-ton better in that respect than Vanguard did. And Blizzard could still reuse the engine (with better designers, of course) and turn out something great. The foundation of any game is it's architecture -- something I don't think Sigil's management ever really believed.

[Sir Fodder]

I think the references to failings in project management are right on, even with some of the wonky/broken design and horrible failings in community management, my sense is that by far VG's main failing was in projet management.

Also, yeah, design of game systems is not the same as content creation, and "game designer" used in common parlance seems to often lump the two together.

I liked VG before (yay for messageboard drama!), now I really like VG!   Many the of the new faces popping up are informed and interesting, keep those posts comin'.

[Sairon]

Traditional development methods works pretty bad for games since they aren't deterministic. The longer you can stay small and be in a prototype state the better. GDDs are a thing of the past, most studios seem to move torwards a design as little as possible from the get go and design as much as possible as late as possible.

[TGB]

TGB, it's already been pointed out, but.. you are incorrect. There were options, though not necessarily in the traditional "sell on wall street" sense of the word. All the original founders and some small number brought on after were part "owners" of Sigil. They never hid that fact. I don't know anything about the specific ownership numbers, or if the company was bought, how their ownership shares would be bought out, but... it was the case.

Many private companies have concepts of shares of ownership and options, usually in case they ever plan to go public, but also because it's an easy way for a partner to have his or her shares bought out by one or more of the other shareholders if they decide to leave the venture. This is nothing unusual. Might need to check your references again. And for the record, Mr. William Fisher was one of those partial owners, a fact he never hid.

A stock option is a contract that gives the owner the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell a particular stock at a fixed price for a specific period of time . The contract also obligates the seller or writer to meet the terms of delivery if the contract right is exercised by the owner.

What owners had were shares in the company.  Those shares, don't get paid out until after all of the debt owed has been paid off.  Any options that were issued aren't worth the paper they are written on because the company never went public and was never sold in its entirity.  Any shares or stakes someone had in the company itself won't be paid off until unsecured and secured creditors are paid off first.  After creditors are paid off, then investors get paid off, and the owners are last in line to be repaid if the company fails.  While someone may say they received options, they actually didn't. 

If Fisher did make that statement it was false on a few levels, first if he had stock options he won't see any income from them, second his stake or share in the company is paid back last.  At the end of the day he might walk away with some money, but I still think the Cubs have a better chance of winning the World Series.

If people refer to an apple as an orange it doesn't mean that the apple is now an orange.  The apple still holds the properties that made it an apple and the orange still has the properties that made it an orange.  You can call shares in a company stock-options, but it doesn't make those shares turn into options.

[Morat20]

Traditional development methods works pretty bad for games since they aren't deterministic. The longer you can stay small and be in a prototype state the better. GDDs are a thing of the past, most studios seem to move torwards a design as little as possible from the get go and design as much as possible as late as possible.

That is traditional development methods -- at least for anyone using a modern process. Rapid prototyping and evolutionary development has been pretty much sucked into the mainstream, except for a handful of shops where the old way is better (certain types of embedded systems, certain systems that lend themselves to really long requirements documents by the very nature of the product, etc).

You start small with a solid proof of concept. One group starts adding features/toolsets for the core, while another group refines and optimizes the core. That becomes the new "core design" and you rinse and repeat. Part of the process is sketching out the goals, timetables, and milestones of the next cycle. The "overall design" you're working from -- what guides your project total -- should be high-level and abstract.

[Trippy]

TGB, it's already been pointed out, but.. you are incorrect. There were options, though not necessarily in the traditional "sell on wall street" sense of the word. All the original founders and some small number brought on after were part "owners" of Sigil. They never hid that fact. I don't know anything about the specific ownership numbers, or if the company was bought, how their ownership shares would be bought out, but... it was the case.

Many private companies have concepts of shares of ownership and options, usually in case they ever plan to go public, but also because it's an easy way for a partner to have his or her shares bought out by one or more of the other shareholders if they decide to leave the venture. This is nothing unusual. Might need to check your references again. And for the record, Mr. William Fisher was one of those partial owners, a fact he never hid.

A stock option is a contract that gives the owner the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell a particular stock at a fixed price for a specific period of time . The contract also obligates the seller or writer to meet the terms of delivery if the contract right is exercised by the owner.

What owners had were shares in the company.  Those shares, don't get paid out until after all of the debt owed has been paid off.  Any options that were issued aren't worth the paper they are written on because the company never went public and was never sold in its entirity.  Any shares or stakes someone had in the company itself won't be paid off until unsecured and secured creditors are paid off first.  After creditors are paid off, then investors get paid off, and the owners are last in line to be repaid if the company fails.  While someone may say they received options, they actually didn't. 

If Fisher did make that statement it was false on a few levels, first if he had stock options he won't see any income from them, second his stake or share in the company is paid back last.  At the end of the day he might walk away with some money, but I still think the Cubs have a better chance of winning the World Series.

If people refer to an apple as an orange it doesn't mean that the apple is now an orange.  The apple still holds the properties that made it an apple and the orange still has the properties that made it an orange.  You can call shares in a company stock-options, but it doesn't make those shares turn into options.

Wrong again. The company wasn't sold. Assets were sold. However for those major assets to be sold, a majority of the shareholders still have to agree to it. And there's nothing that says SOE can't give certain shareholders a chunk of cash (or Sony shares, or whatever) to agree to vote their shares in favor of selling those assets.

You are correct about options, though. Tcharels was confusing shares and options in his post.

[Tcharels]

Yah, sorry. I was using the wrong terms, even if the basics of what I was stating was correct. I should know better. It is teh intarnets after all.

Thanks for clarifying and not flaming. :)

I would put a wager on the fact that all the share holders, or stake holders, or whatever the exact term that would be most accurate, did see profit from this transaction. How much, I doubt I'll ever know, but I'm fairly certain they did.

Cheers.

[Ironwood]

Hey, have we all got so high and mighty that instead of saying 'You're full of fucking shite' we say that people are incorrect now ?

So... the monocles and tophats are not fooling anyone?

Hello, I'm a British Person !

[denny2687]

Looks like another Sigil employee has posted on Slashdot:

http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=235123&cid=19176759

I am also an ex-Sigil employee. I was not there for the mass firing... I left earlier. But I have no doubt that it went down exactly as this person says. That's how things are run at Sigil. It's the most unprofessional place I have ever worked. Hell, the McDonald's where I worked when I was a kid was more professional and had better morale than at Sigil. My quality of life went up about 100% after leaving there.

The meeting was even worse than this guy said. I heard that someone asked if there was going to be any kind of severence for people getting fired and when he didn't get an answer and asked again, Donna Parkinson... a direcor... managment... was overheard to say "would someone please answer this asshole." Nice touch, huh? That doesn't surprise me either.

There were dozens of problems with this project. But the bottom line comes down to mismanagement. Brad and Jeff isolated themselves from most of the company, leaving management of the the project, company, and personnel to the directors, namely Platter, Gilbertson, and Donna Parkinson (the former Office Manager turned Director of Business Development). And I can't think of one person at the company that has any respect left for any one of them.

The thing that sucks is that most of us there at Sigil left other jobs to be there. Some people turned down other offers and stuck it out to finish the project and finally get some kind of pay off for the rediculious hours and demands we had put up with. Now we all walk away with nothing. Oh, wait.... not all of us. Some people are house hunting with what they made from the sale of the company. The rest of us got nothing for our years of work and the sacrifices we made.

I keep reading comments like none of these people should ever be given management positions again. I agree. Hell, I wouldn't hire them to run a hamburger stand. And I will leave any project that they are ever attached to in the future. They don't deserve another chance or one bit of my respect.

To all of you in management that are moving on to SOE or got paid for your share of the company, I hope you all sleep well tonight and enjoy your new jobs and your money from the sale (I don't care how much you did or didn't get, you got more than the rest of us). I still believe what goes around comes around. So I am hoping that all of us that you have screwed over the past few years find a way to land on our feet again in spite of our names being attached to your company. And I hope other people finally see you for the back-stabbing, greedy, childish assholes the rest of us from Sigil already know you are.

Wow.... just wow.

Edit: Actual text added by schild.

[schild]

He doesn't say whether he quit properly or was fired. And is posting 2nd hand information about the meeting. Not a single person I've spoken to, WHO WAS AT the meeting said that. If she did, I have a feeling she would have gotten reamed in my first interview and I would've asked Brad about her in the second. Also, without Zonk backing this guy up or him contacting an outlet to do an interview (and THEN someone fact-checking the shit he says), well, I could have been the one to post it. Score: 0, Anonymous Coward indeed.

Not trying to be high and mighty, but if he has an axe to grind, there are better ways to do it.

Edit: Also, there are a number of people I've discussed ex-staff with and it seems there were a good number of jokers that were canned long before The Parking Lot Incident. And from what I hear, a lot of these people deserved to be fired. Though, I bet had they not, I'd have had a lot more people knocking at my door to get their story out.

[Morat20]

Edit: Also, there are a number of people I've discussed ex-staff with and it seems there were a good number of jokers that were canned long before The Parking Lot Incident. And from what I hear, a lot of these people deserved to be fired. Though, I bet had they not, I'd have had a lot more people knocking at my door to get their story out.

Tangentially -- I've heard the games industry can be more than a tad incestuous, and comments have been made that there's a lot of friends getting hired because they're friends -- not because they're skilled or suited for the job.

The impression I got was that it was something of a problem at Sigil -- frankly, you only need one or two of those guys in the wrong spot to really fuck over a large number of skilled people.

Admittedly, people bitch about "that fucking idiot the boss hired" and rarely praise "That genius the boss hired" (even if they were both friends of the boss), but the two games who personnel I've tracked even a little seemed to have a surprising number of unqualified or inexperienced people in odd spots. Is that churn? A buddy-buddy relationship among high-end designers?

[Jobu]

...but the two games who personnel I've tracked even a little seemed to have a surprising number of unqualified or inexperienced people in odd spots.

What's the other game?

[Xanthippe]

Hey, have we all got so high and mighty that instead of saying 'You're full of fucking shite' we say that people are incorrect now ?

So... the monocles and tophats are not fooling anyone?

Hello, I'm a British Person !

I thought you were a Scot.  Furthermore, I thought Scots did not like to be called a "British Person."

School me please.

[Roac]

I thought you were a Scot.  Furthermore, I thought Scots did not like to be called a "British Person."

I think it means he's more the tea and crumpets type of guy, less the lumber tossing and skirt wearing type.

[Morat20]

...but the two games who personnel I've tracked even a little seemed to have a surprising number of unqualified or inexperienced people in odd spots.

What's the other game?

SWG -- I kept an eye on personnel and turnover because the game shocked me to crap. I kept seeing promotions that didn't seem to track with what I knew of their experience, and quite a number of examples of the Peter Principle. Developers, designers, and coders who did seem qualified and with relevent experience for their position didn't seem to last long.

Admittedly, I started keeping tabs on that about 10 months after launch.

[Signe]

British is okay.  Just don't confuse them with English or they'll go right off on you.  I have seen it happen! 

[Tcharels]

Whoever the poster on Slashdot was, they chose a very bad forum to, as schild put it, grind their axe. In addition. I have no love lost for Donna Parkinson, but I've seen her close to tears at someone getting fired from the company (Long before any of this came down). Unless she was hopped up on goofballs, I call complete and utter bullshit on that particular account.

I've said my peace about the company, and my life is much better for having moved on. But I wanted to clarify that. Sigil had it's fair share of ego driven maniacs. Donna, for her faults, was not a nasty person.

And schild, for every "joker" who was fired and/or encouraged to leave the company, there were 3 more who quit or were fired because they either completely gave up hope or tried too hard to change things for the better. "Deserved" to be fired is a very subjective term, depending on who's side of the fence you're standing on.

That's all.

Cheers.

[T.King]

The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition

After the jump, you're going to read an interview with an ex-Sigil employee given just over 24 hours after being let go. I honestly don't have anything more to say than that.

» Read More

Well...I certainly hope a lot of that is not true. I don't remember things that way, but then again- I left long before some of that went down.

I’d like to extend my deepest condolences to those who were let go in that manner.

There are a lot of people ostracizing Brad McQuaid, Jeff Butler, Dave Gilbertson, Bill Fisher, Andy Platter, and Donna Parkinson. I simply don’t remember them the way they are being portrayed. Though I do personally believe that they made the monumental mistake of allowing some key people leave the company during development. People closely connected to EQ1, the very community that had once stood behind Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes can move forward with SOE’s backing, but they are going to have to make amends, and reach back out to that former community that once supported it. Performance and stability needs to be addressed first. The economy needs to be stabilized, and the treadmill needs to be adjusted so players don’t burn out before hitting level 50.

Vanguard was and still is an ambitious project. It required no less than a solid commitment from a publisher - beginning to end. I think that it is fortunate SOE picked it up. They have the potential to bring Vanguard to AAA status. Vanguard is by no means a failure. It really is a fantastic MMORPG, hallmark to the many creative individuals who worked on it. It just lacked a solid commitment from the original publishers beginning to end. Microsoft did the right thing; they focused on the Xbox 360. Unfortunately, Vanguard suffered from this shift in mandate of making a AAA MMORPG, to making the Xbox 360 the success that it is today.

Brad McQuaid is an awesome and very talented guy. I have nothing but respect for him. He often mentioned his concerns for a team member, and their families. That he has to lookout for their livelihood while employed at Sigil. He'd walk around office, and tell people what a great job they were doing. Doesn't anyone remember this? If Brad said he was working hard getting necessary funding, that is precisely what he was doing. I know how much Brad cared about the project, and knowing him- he probably wasn't sleeping very well. The gaming community is coming down pretty hard on him for some of his decisions. He’s just going to have to make things right by the community not just through words, but by his actions here on out.

Dave Gilbertson is an awesome guy. I have the utmost respect for him. If anything went wrong under his supervision, he was probably over-tasked.

Donna Parkinson was the “mother bear” of the office. When people had problems, they went to her to talk about them (and to get their hands on the candy in her office). I find it hard to believe she would have referred to someone as an “asshole”, unless they were actually being one. She’s super cool, and married one of the coolest people I’ve ever had the honor to work under.

Bill Fisher is a fun outgoing- though eccentric guy. He’s also very sarcastic, as I remember him. If he made any bad remarks, it wasn’t because he’s being insidious. It was most likely a poorly timed sarcastic remark. Anybody that knows him totally understands that he had no ill intentions with any of his remarks.

Jeff Butler is a very nice guy. He was extremely passionate about Vanguard. Jeff is probably the most humble person I knew in his position at the time. I never got the impression that he took anything for granted. I am sorry to hear about his split with Michelle. She was truly awesome. Michelle is from the same area in the Midwest that I am. She once commented that she could still say “pop” around me and not get a strange look. She has a very outgoing and glowing personality; she’s fun to be around.

Andy Platter is a good guy. I remember him being kind of a quiet person. It seemed like he kept to himself- but did his job well. I don’t know him very well. But if he was the one that delivered the speech, he was likely asked to carry out that terrible task (I doubt anyone would want to do it). I don’t know what to say about that speech, other than perhaps it was for lack of better words. Sometimes telling people straight-up, as in this case- was profoundly prudent.

I do think the way people were let go was in bad form. It could have been done with more tact. It’s the least that could have been done at that point. But I’ve found in stressful times, not everyone says things with tact or eloquence for that matter.

The most important thing right now is that all those who lost their jobs at Sigil find great gaming companies to work at. The work they did on Vanguard is amazing, and any gaming company would be fortunate to have these talented individuals.

As for Vanguard, it has the potential (a lot of it) to become one of the best MMORPG’s. It stands as testimony of the excellence crafted by many creative individuals, and all of their hard work. It would be a shame to see that their efforts were in vain. So it’s important for so many reasons, that Vanguard reaches its full potential. I believe it’s in good hands now. So long as the lessons learned from past mistakes are given full consideration here on out.

Yours Truly,

~T.King

[schild]

What.

[T.King]

What.

...I hope I didn't reply to the wrong post. =/

[Signe]

You looked like you were responding to the right post. 

Maybe you didn't type loud enough?

[squirrel]

EDIT: Ooops. Wrong thread. See brad bashing thread. Carry on.

[Mandrel]

The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition

After the jump, you're going to read an interview with an ex-Sigil employee given just over 24 hours after being let go. I honestly don't have anything more to say than that.

» Read More

Well...I certainly hope a lot of that is not true. I don't remember things that way, but then again- I left long before some of that went down.

~T.King

No offense , but from what I gather, you left the team 2 years ago in August, well before a lot of the problems seem to have fully manifested, and the reason you left was because you couldn't commit to working on site.  You weren't there when the apparent breakdown in morale and "crunch time" really hit, so I'm guessing your impressions of everyone are from the "golden age" of Sigil.

I can still appreciate your impressions of the people while you worked with them, but people can change quite a bit in that amount of time.  Given the strain they were under and the situations that changed, you may not feel the same if you were there for the whole project.

BTW, did you end up getting credited even though most of your work was scrapped to ensure artistic continuity?

[T.King]

The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition

After the jump, you're going to read an interview with an ex-Sigil employee given just over 24 hours after being let go. I honestly don't have anything more to say than that.

» Read More

Well...I certainly hope a lot of that is not true. I don't remember things that way, but then again- I left long before some of that went down.

~T.King

No offense , but from what I gather, you left the team 2 years ago in August, well before a lot of the problems seem to have fully manifested, and the reason you left was because you couldn't commit to working on site.  You weren't there when the apparent breakdown in morale and "crunch time" really hit, so I'm guessing your impressions of everyone are from the "golden age" of Sigil.

Indeed it was during the golden age as you refer. I really hate to think that people could change so drastically, but it does happen I suppose. I'm just having trouble coming to terms with the way they are being portrayed. I heard of troubles after I left, but didn't realize it was to the extent that I've been reading. The interview was definitely intriquing, and deliberate. I certainly wouldn't blame anyone in the parking lot that day for wanting to grind an axe, and an axe someone did grind.

There was an issue with rellocation, but for very personal reasons I won't get into here. I was never acredited, not even for the wallpaper I made in my sparetime that has been up on the official website. A lot changed after I left, and totally understand what needs to be done for the sake of continuity.

I wasn't there when things apparently headed south, and I guess that is a good thing. That doesn't mean I didn't have my own issues with the way things were at the time I was there, but that's another story. Believe me, it wasn't easy to come here and post what I did. But I did it out of respect, for people the way I had known them. I'd like to think anyone else who cares, would do the same.

~T.King

[schild]

What's it like in the womb?

[T.King]

What's it like in the womb?

A little hot and stuffy, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

[Ironwood]

Hey, have we all got so high and mighty that instead of saying 'You're full of fucking shite' we say that people are incorrect now ?

So... the monocles and tophats are not fooling anyone?

Hello, I'm a British Person !

I thought you were a Scot.  Furthermore, I thought Scots did not like to be called a "British Person."

School me please.

It was a South Park quote.