I was at the job interview. My wife was impatiently waiting for the good news. I did my best to stay focused. The image of her with our newborn baby under a mountain of overdue rent notices and unpaid bills haunted me all the time.
A Swedish IT company with an office in my home town. It smelled like new comfy chairs and regular payments. The only multipurpose suit I wore at my graduation, wedding, and countless job interview prior to this one still looked good.
Officially, as included in a job ad, they were looking for an in-house paralegal. Unofficially, as presented at the beginning of a job interview, they also needed someone to organize the documents jungle, and assist the CEO. Not exactly how I imagined my career as one of the top law students in my class. Not the time in my life to be picky either.
So far so good. Both, a young CEO and I, knew that there was no easy way to deal with the mother of all job interview questions. I couldn't be more relaxed and prepared. In this round of my Mortal Kombat, I was Sub-Zero about salary expectations.
"One final question." A dramatic pause. "The most important one." Sure thing buddy, bring it on.
"What's your favorite video game?"
Oh, I'm so funked. If he's not a Half-Life dude, then he must be one of those GTAddicts.
Of all the things and possible scenarios, a video game was to decide whether or not I had to ask for more money from my family.
Here goes nothing. Let me get over with it as quickly as possible.
Time to go home with the tail between my legs.
"Sorry to disappoint you, but I have to be honest about this one."
The CEO raised his eyebrows.
"It is what it is. I'm an old-school guy. StarCraft is all that I know, love, and want." I was already eyeing the door when he jumped off a chair.
He wasn't blinking while pointing the finger at me like a gun.
"Would you like to be the pylon of our company effective immediately?"
"Dude, You Are So Hired!"
(If you haven't seen the movie, wait for it till the end of this clip)
I didn't just get a job, but a ticket to a gaming paradise too. My Protoss boss embraced me as a Terrain ally. It's good to have something in common with your boss.
We both didn't like Zergs. Those guys were brutal, man.
I didn't only become a reliable provider, but the hero in my wife's eyes. Every Friday at noon, not a second later, wartime baby.
You have no idea what it meant to have a happy (casual) Friday till Saturday dawn. With my eyes blood red, fingers still shaking, and ears still ringing, I could barely see and hear my wife.
"Those heartless monsters! What they're doing to you?! Unbelievable! You should quit right away!"
"It's not as bad as it looks, honey. I'm doing it for us, for you, and our baby."
Lord is my witness, I had never been so loved and admired by my own wife. "You're my hero. I keep telling everybody, how much you sacrifice yourself without a single word of complaint. All of my girlfriends are so jealous. Oh, my poor baby. What would you like for breakfast? You must be starving."
I had so much pizza and soda the night before that I could barely breathe, but that's me. Always willing to sacrifice for the greater good.
Warcraft and The Frozen Blizzard's Creativity Throne
Here's the thing with all software companies, more or less. People come. People go. New people. New gaming habits and preferences. There was a World of Warcraft group of devs. They were never into the good old StarCraft. I'm not saying that was necessarily bad.
If there's one thing you should never discuss with your colleagues or friends that's politics, and more importantly games. We, the StarCraft people, stayed frozen in times with Warcraft: The Frozen Throne. That was it, the farthest we were willing to go.
Around the same time, I couldn't help myself noticing that Blizzard got frozen too, in terms of creativity. I found a new company to work for, but I kept my old StarCraft buddies to play with.
We were loyal and stubborn. We also felt like Blizzard's outcasts. If it hadn't been for the StarCraft fanatics from South Korea, we would've asked ourselves what was wrong with us.
The rise of new powerful machines with shiny graphics made StarCraft look obsolete. I mean, you could still play it. You could also stretch it to fit the full screen, but the price was too high. The old graphics made you feel old like nothing else in real life.
Then, twelve years StarCraft 2 was released. It was beautiful to watch and terrible to play. I wasn't the only one to ask, hey Blizzard, was that the best you could do? Seriously? It's a mess.
I quickly lost all hope and a desire to play. While we are at it, I had a beautiful and emotional Mortal Kombat moment with my, now a young teenage daughter.
I never go through their Xbox games. I respect her choices. But, one day, I saw her playing it. We even saw both movies, the old one with Christopher Lambert, and the new one with stunning visuals. We got Mortal Kombat face masks at the premiere. I showed her how this game used to look like when I was her age. She laughed. The first game we've ever played together.
I consider myself to be a reasonable father in terms of gaming expectations for my only child.
For the record, daddy's little girl is one heck of a CS 1.6 and CS:GO player. OK. The GTA phase for her whole generation was unavoidable. She surprised me with Red Dead Redemption, though, in a nice way, of course.
It sucked that the Blizzard torch won't be passed to the next generation in my family. But hey, we weren't to blame. Then, one day, out of the blue, I sweat this is true, my daughter asked me to order her
Diablo III: Reaper of Souls. I kid you not, I had tears in my eyes.
Quo Vadis, Blizzard?
StarCraft: Remastered proved me right that StarCraft 2 sucked, plain and simple. Then, they reforged (remastered) Warcraft III too. For me, that was a clear sign that Blizzard was running on creativity fumes.
All this time, I've been totally unaware of the harassment lawsuits. It was heartbreaking. While I was in gaming paradise, the poor girls were in Blizzard's hell. I felt bad, dirty, and betrayed. Once brilliant, now dirty minds were coming up with "creative ways" to hurt people. Talking about game makers who were playing games with real people in the most despicable ways.
The tenth circle of hell is reserved for those who ruin gaming innocence, purity, and legacy. For f's sake, all of my desktop wallpapers were Blizzard's artworks for years. Not to talk about all the merchandise that ended up in the garbage.
More than twenty years, more than one generation, and gaming legacy ruined. For what? I don't buy that "the dark side of the Moon" or "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" BS excuses.
Nietzsche said that "without music, life would be a mistake." He was so right. You have to listen to some awesome music while you're playing your favorite game. Have you noticed how many words rhyme perfectly with gamer: writer, developer, Nooner, Critical Thinker, and so on.
For the end, a quote from the movie "Tag" (2018). You can tell a lot about people based on the games they play, and whether or not they play at all. Beware of those who don't play games in the virtual world because they certainly do in the real world with real peoples' lives.
There's one word that also starts with "B" and rhymes with Blizzard, but I'm not going to use it. They aren't worth my words and time, not anymore. Yup, the whole article about Blizzard without a single Blizzard picture.
Someone once said, “We don't stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing.” We just never stopped playing. And I like to think that simple thing, playing a game, is what made me the man I am today. "Tag" (2018)