Tag: company

The Best “Rise And Fall” Stories Of The Video Game Industry

When it comes to the video game industry, I have a weakness for “inside-baseball” style stories. Obviously, it’s better  for everyone when a company completes its development cycle and successfully releases its game. The only problem with all the successes is that few of them make for interesting reading. “We all worked very hard and then we released our product” is rather dull, even if it’s the goal everyone strives to attain day after day.

No, what makes a good “inside the industry” story are the companies that don’t make it; the ones that go down in flames. What goes on in those companies is as interesting to an observer of human behavior as it is to speculate about their products and what could have been.

Obviously, taking an interest in this topic has to come with an understanding that these were not characters in a book, but real people whose lives and livelihoods were affected by these events. Nevertheless, the collapse of these two companies was, in my opinion, nothing short of spectacular. I think it’s worth revisiting the stories of their respective demises.

Ion Storm
Article: A hardcore elegy for Ion Storm (Salon.com)
Original publication date: Jan 2, 2002.
Choice quote:

No place was more aptly named. John Romero was the focus of this industry love-hate affair: his popular games and extravagant lifestyle made him an icon in the industry. But with great success came great antipathy, not just for John, but also for many of his employees.

What started out as a video gamer’s heaven turned into a public hell of walkouts, firings, lawsuits and litigation. Chat rooms and Web sites devoted daily commentary to analyzing, bemoaning or laughing at every move John made. He went from being one of the industry’s most respected figures to one of its most pilloried. Few bothered to defend him or the company.

 38 Studios
Article: End Game: Inside the Destruction of Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios (Bostonmagazine.com).
Original publication date: August 2012.
Choice quote:

Schilling’s harshest critic in the online exchange was Bill Mrochek, the vice president of online services, whose wife required a bone marrow transplant at the time their healthcare disappeared. “Are you going to admit that your stupid hubris, pride, and arrogance would not allow you to accept that we failed — and help shut it down with dignity?” he asked Schilling.

Mrochek was talking only about 38 Studios’ dramatic final weeks, but as interviews with Schilling, members of his former staff, and others associated with the company show, he might as well have been describing 38 Studios from the moment that Schilling — lacking any business experience, but full of the same confidence, bravado, and determination that made him a baseball legend — decided he could build a billion-dollar video-game company.

If you have any other stories of game developers or publishers collapsing in a dramatic fashion, feel free to share your links in the comments. I’d be interested in seeing what else is out there.

If you’d like an even deeper look at Ion Storm’s demise, I recommend Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner. It’s a fascinating read.

Amy’s Bug Company

I originally titled this post “Amy’s Buggery Company” which I thought was a hilarious joke on the subject matter, but after about two seconds of thought, I realized I was making a very different joke from the one I intended. So there you go; enjoy the watered down version.

Speaking of watered down versions, have you heard the latest from the insanity cesspool that is Amy’s Baking Company?  Man, did you see that smooth rhetorical transition I just did there? This is why I get paid fat sacks of cash money absolutely nothing to write on the Internet.

The latest from Amy’s is that when you order a vodka martini, you’ll get dead flies added to your drink at no added cost. This is an incredible value. You have no idea how hard it is to find a restaurant willing to add insects to your drinks. Usually, they’re all “oh god, how did that get there, I’m so sorry, let me fix that for you.” Or worse, they don’t even serve insects with their drinks to begin with! How is that fair? I argue that it is not.

The best part is you also get an example of what really, really great customer service looks like:

When our meal at Pita Jungle was finished, we jokingly asked our waitress if she could go to Amy’s and buy us a slice of the chocolate mousse cake we had heard was so good, (and possibly not baked by Amy, according to several reports). To our surprise and delight, she agreed to walk over there and buy it for us. We gave her the money to do so. The slice of cake was $10.90.

How can you not love that? I hope the servers at Pita Jungle wear identifiable uniforms; it would really add to the punchline of this whole thing.

I Can’t Stop Watching This Trainwreck

My parents owned a restaurant when I was a kid, so I got to hang out there a lot and saw how it all worked. I’ve also heard plenty of “restaurant stories” throughout the years about what that kind of business was like, how things are supposed to be done, etc. The most interesting thing to me was my family’s perspective on the service of other restaurants; it’s amazing how many things I, as a member of the uninitiated, was ignorant towards. There’s this whole metric for how things should run, like how quickly your water should be depending on the size of the restaurant, the number of servers and the number of tables. It’s not just a single hard-and-fast rule. It’s actually really interesting to see how much tactical consideration goes into all the stuff I took for granted in food service, especially since I’m the black sheep of my family who hasn’t had a restaurant job.

Well, there were those two food delivery jobs I had, but that hardly counts.

With that said, I’d like to direct your attention to this little restaurant meltdown that’s making the rounds on the Internet. It’s funny, because I don’t like reality TV shows and I don’t really care about restaurants except for the aforementioned familial connection. And yet, I can’t stop watching this particular train wreck of a restaurant. The icing on this particular schadenfreude cake, if you’ll pardon my expression, is that they’re from Arizona. Of course they’re from Arizona.

Watch the clip. Even after that, it still flips my wig to see the clip where the owners threaten an angry customer and prevent others from trying to leave (link here, it’s the first video about halfway down the page). I think you’ll be impressed. Just don’t watch any it with the sound turned up too high. You’ll thank me in a few minutes.

For me, the best part is the vindication of the server who got fired during the filming of the first clip. True, she did get verbally assaulted to the point of tears which really sucks, but she got the best possible retribution: her asshole bosses made complete and utter fools of themselves for the entire world to see and she didn’t have to do a single thing to help them along. I tried to make a lame pun about revenge being a dish that was better when it’s self-served, but I couldn’t do it.