What do you remember of those first days [before Will joined]? What was CIG like?
TL;DRDave Haddock recalls the early days as sparse, with the announcement overwhelming the site, him writing several weekly fiction and news pieces, and starting to flesh out the Vanduul and Squadron 42 story.
I do know Dave ate at the same restaurant every day before I came on board.
That is true. Yeah, I'm a very lazy eater. It's more about just needing sustenance, so I found, that place is good, I'll just go there. And so I just went to literally the same place.
Was it that sandwich shop on Santa Monica?
No, it was Tender Greens. Which you could do a lot worse, but... It was a lot sparser. The reaction to the initial announcement was kind of overwhelming. It crashed the site while Chris was giving the presentation. But yeah, a lot of it, once it was like, oh, okay, so this is happening, it became... I was doing three dispatches a week. I had the Cal Mason story, the Kid Crimson story, and a news dispatch. So Monday was Cal Mason, Wednesday was news dispatch, and Friday was Kid Crimson installments. And then we started doing Jump Point on top of that, so I was doing short stories for that and fiction. But it was kind of solidifying, like, oh, okay, so we need to figure out all the things that we sort of glazed over in our initial conversations of, well, what's the Vanduul really like and stuff like that. Starting to dive into that, starting to test out storylines and outlines for Squadron 42, what's the story going to be, talking with Chris about that and kind of getting his download of where he'd like to see the story go, and starting to sketch out ideas for that, characters. Yeah, it was an interesting time, because it was very like, oh, wow, we're doing this thing. And again, at the time, I was hoping it was going to do well as I was working on it. I was getting excited about the project. But again, you have projects that start up, especially working in films, where it's like, oh, there's a lot of interest, and then it wanes, or something comes together, it seems like it's going to happen, then it falls apart. So you get kind of guarded about getting too excited about stuff so you don't get too crestfallen. When it actually starts to kind of kick off, it's like, oh, okay, well, where do we start? What do I do now?