Trading Palms and Sun for Pines and Rain

December 19, 2008 10:17 pm Sir Haxington Game Development

Back to the motherland for me – the Pacific Northwest that is. Microsoft liked me enough to decide to hire me for a new project they’re working on. My last day with Activision at Treyarch was today, December 19th, with my start date at Microsoft being the 12th of January. Seattle here I come!

I tell everyone this, but when you come from a place that has seasons (Oregon) and go to a place like Los Angeles, time feels like it stops. I’ve been here for about five years and it feels like I’ve only been here for a few months. It’s always roughly 70 degrees and sunny – even during “winter” which to me feels unnatural. It’s nice, don’t get me wrong, but something just doesn’t feel right about it. When you see people busting out sweaters and scarves and it’s like 65 degrees out it’s laughable. I’m rolling cargo shorts, t-shirt and flip-flops during the winter because I appreciate the fact that I can.

Oh, and the rain in LA is ridiculous too. Well, I mean people’s reaction to the rain here anyway. The rain itself is not that bad. When it rains in Los Angeles though it’s classified as a “storm” and the local newscasters go into tizzy, wearing giant raincoats and using giant umbrellas. If you’re a real Oregonian, you’ve never touched an umbrella – it’s a point of pride. I can barely operate one, no joke. Reporters will stand on street corners and talk about how much slower traffic is because of the rain. Really? You could have fooled me, I thought the traffic always stopped from 4 pm – 7 pm everyday anyway (go ahead, if you’re in West LA, please try driving down Olympic or Gateway going east during those hours). The rain isn’t making anyone go any slower, you’re always moving that slow.  Now it’s just wet.

Speaking of wet, car washes. So many car washes here getting used all the time. Again, another slightly foreign concept to an Oregonian since it’s so wet up north. You might wash your car during the summer, but it’ll be dirty within a week anyway, so might as well wait until the next rain. By the way, the cars in LA are insane. The standard car here is a BMW or Mercedes (or a Prius now it seems). Up north, people usually have Toyotas or Hondas. In LA, daily sightings of a Lamborghini, Ferrari, Rolls Royce or Bentley is not uncommon. I don’t think I saw a real model of any of those exotic cars until I came down here. There’s a lot of people in LA with lots of money to spend on stuff like expensive cars.

So, for me, back the to the place where it rains all the time. Or at least, that’s what we tell everyone. I’ll let you in on a secret: The rain isn’t as bad as you think. New York has more annual rain fall that Seattle, but people from the Pacific Northwest will propagate the rain rumor to keep people away (I’m guilty of this). We like our territory sparsely populated. And with pine trees! Sweet Jesus, pine trees again. I never got used to Palm trees either it seems. Although people from SoCal think pine trees are weird since they’re always green, so maybe we’re even.

One thing I’m going to miss about LA is seeing something on TV or in a movie, and having that odd satisfaction knowing that you’ve actually been there, probably multiple times. My wife seriously can’t go a day without recognizing something on TV that’s within five miles of us. It’s very surreal. You know, you always think of TV being made in some far off, magical place until you actually go to that far off place and live it in for five years. Then you wonder why it looks so much cleaner on TV. Especially Venice.

Contrary to popular belief, LA has good people. The thing I most often here though is that the “good people from LA are the ones that aren’t from here.” That maybe true, but two of the nicest people I met in LA are from here, so that doesn’t hold up.

Crazy LA stories? Walking into a Paquito Mas restaurant near where I live. One of the patrons waiting in line went into a seizure and her boyfriend was trying to figure out what was going on. Everyone in the restaurant, at least 30 people, 40 if you count staff, just sitting there dumbfounded. Since no one was doing anything, I ran past the gawkers and asked if they needed a 9-1-1 call. They did, so I ran over back to the counter and told them to call 9-1-1, at which point they did. The feeling in the room, both from the staff and the patrons was they just wanted it to go away, or someone to take care of it for them – they didn’t want to “deal with it.” A lot of people tend to just ignore each other here and I’m not what’s up with that. Maybe people around here are afraid of being tricked onto a reality show or something.

Car accidents galore. I’ve seen multiple horrific accidents on the 405 first hand. Two of which happened directly in front of me. The first one happened within the first week of being in LA, and happened right next to LAX. Just plain crazy stuff I barely avoided and I’ll never forget. Of course we dialed 9-1-1 and reported those too.

Meeting famous people? Sorta. I’ve met and hung out with a handful semi-famous people. I’ve seen a lot of famous people and semi-famous around, but I don’t watch a lot of TV or movies so my wife always points them out. Then I don’t believe her because people never look like they do on TV anyway. For example, I “saw” Harrison Ford at a coffee shop near work, but I thought it was some random old dude. Everyone I was with was like “Oh my god we’re standing behind Harrison Ford.” I thought they were full of shit until I stared at him for a bit and thought, “Well, maybe that could be him.” Then the coffee guy asked for his autograph and started fawning over him and I still thought the guy was maybe someone who just happened to look like Harrison Ford. Make-up does some amazing things.

As far as gaming goes, I’ll be honest – I’m not going to miss working on World War 2 games at all. Literally every game I’ve worked on in my career and my early mod work had WW2 elements in some way. It’s going to be nice to be working on something different for a change, which I why I think I pushed so hard for Nazi Zombies in CoD:WaW. It’s about the least WW2 you could get while still being WW2 (sorta like Return to Castle Wolfenstein). I actually like WW2 as a backdrop and could go back to it again someday, but sticking to period weapons (and enemies) really sucks creatively. Bolt action, Semi auto, SMG – its like Rock, Paper, Scissors!

Leaving working on Nazi Zombies is the hardest part for me, since it was my baby and it’s grown beyond my wildest dreams. I think Treyarch will take good care of it though. You can tell by how much people love working on it at the studio. People just seem so much happier when they get to meet about and work on Nazi Zombie stuff. There’s just so many ideas for good stuff from so many people; all that bottled up creativity from working on World War 2 for so long is waiting to explode.

All in all, I met some amazing, awesome and talented people over the past few years that I’ll continue to be friends with,  I got to realize my life dream (and realize that once you attain your dream you need to come up with new ones) and now I get to continue that dream in a place I can feel comfortable calling home. How awesome is that? I really do feel like one of the luckiest people on the planet.

Plus, the people I used to work with will finally stop having to hear me bitch about how much better the Pacific Northwest is.