San Francisco is a fine vacation spot. There are In-N-Out Burgers,
Luchador masks, and this amazing antique arcade museum I hope to tell people more about later. But my main reason for going was to see what it's like to work at a gaming website office, something I hope to eventually. Luckily,
IGN.com's First Friday tour was the glimpse I was waiting for.
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| podcast room |
Truth be told, there isn't much to describe. Imagine what an office full of people who loves games enough to write about them professionally would look like and you are probably on the right track. The surreal part was just seeing people like Daemon Hatfield, Peer Schneider and others who, to me, had only existed as voices on the internet, become real. Personally, that was far more interesting than watching Dead Island/zombie Fallout being played in their pimped out demo room.
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| bad pic of the game library |
There were about twenty of of us on the trip but apparently there were over fifty applicants so I guess we were the special ones. However, while I do feel really bad saying this because I have absolutely no right to judge, some of the kinds of gamers who like IGN enough to visit it aren't people I would particularly like to hang around with. HYPOCRISY!
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| bottom left, Mark Ryan Sallee and Colin Moriarty |
But whatever. It was still awesome. I won a copy of
Total War Shogun 2 for knowing that the most overrated console of all time, the Sega Dreamcast, came out on 9/9/99. I told IGN Playstation Executive Editor and Mizzou journalism school alumnus Greg Miller (the dude hugging me in the opening pic) that I went to Medill and he said stuff I won't repeat. Their director of Tech Ops, Chris Ostertag, is also from New Jersey and went to Northwestern so I feel I'm still in the right. Plus,
HD Starcraft, one of the few Starcraft commentators I watch, was there too so that was neat and unexpected.
Now I just have to make the switch from tourist to employee.
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| They have this now though so I'm all good |
Who else thinks it's ridiculously awesome when franchises with no right to have stupidly dense mythologies, have, stupidly dense mythologies. That's the topic of this post where we'll be taking a look at The Fast and The Furious and the Saw franchises. 
Truth be told, there isn't much to describe. Imagine what an office full of people who loves games enough to write about them professionally would look like and you are probably on the right track. The surreal part was just seeing people like Daemon Hatfield, Peer Schneider and others who, to me, had only existed as voices on the internet, become real. Personally, that was far more interesting than watching Dead Island/zombie Fallout being played in their pimped out demo room.
