Mom’s House
Rehoboth Office
Meanwhile we kept expanding. The living room was turned into a communal work area.
Finally, our business advisors thought we were ready to show our stuff to the outside world. For this grand opening, I took a trip to the “Online Game Developers Conference” in September 1995, run by a major market research company. With nothing but a one-page screen snapshot and our company story, I met and mingled with lots of companies in the online world. Until then, it was only an informed guess that we had a hot company with a solid vision. But we started to get feedback from people in the industry. At the conference, Turbine did better than we had hoped. Large companies like America Online and Compuserve were approachable. People loved the concept. I met many people from game companies that didn’t seem to have the same vision and technology. We were ready to begin a serious search for a publisher.
Would anyone want to bring our game to market? How else could we get onto the shelves of all the stores that sold software?
-
- Jeremy on the phone
-
- Me, designing the huge module scheme that defines the overall software plan for the game.
-
- Geeks in their natural habitat. We considered naming the company Sleepless Geeks Incorporated, but “SGI” was already taken.
-
- Chris figures out the file format for Lightwave so we can read in the artists’ animated 3D models.
-
- The living room work area. The saw horse thing in the back is a high table my brother built for me, so I could pedal my exercise bicycle while using the computer.
-
- Guess whose code works and whose doesn’t from this photo.
