Will, how did you get hooked up with the project?
TL;DRWill Weissbaum met the team at a job fair after layoffs at his previous studio, clicked with Dave and John, and fell in love with the project through the quick feedback on his early writing.
Previously I'd been working at Sony Santa Monica, and...
On what?
It was an unannounced project that ended up not going forward, and so there was a bit of a reduction in workforce that caught up a whole bunch of people, and...
Are you allowed to say what it was?
No. I mean, previously I'd been working on the God of War titles, but they were trying to develop a new IP and it didn't end up happening. And so Sony, as kind of a consolation prize, held a job fair with all the local game studios and invited them out to be like, hey, unfortunately we're letting a bunch of talented people go, come and meet them, which was a really nice thing. And I had done all my research before about who was hiring narrative and blah, blah, blah. I hadn't even planned to go to the Cloud Imperium booth because they weren't hiring narrative, and I was just having a soda at a table and I started chatting with someone, and they were like, oh, we might be looking for writers soon, you should give me your information. I ended up talking to Dave and John and we ended up clicking really well. Started working on the project. And it was funny, at the time, in our smaller office in Santa Monica, I would be sitting on a little chair like this with my laptop on my keyboard with Dave and John in the office.
Well, wasn't it the irony that the day you started, I was out of town?
Yeah, I think something like that. They also gave me a desk, and then the next week when I came in, it was gone. And I was like, what happened? And apparently they had moved all my stuff without telling me, and I was like, I just got fired.
Well, because they put you across the office, and we were in this sort of icebox corner office thing, which is the coldest place on earth. But yeah, they for some reason put Will across the office, and then we were like, move him.
I mean, it was great. One of the first things that I got a chance to write on was the commercial for the M50. It was coming out. And before that, Dave had done a bunch of really cool commercials that were all very much like car commercials in vibe. So it was kind of a challenge at that point of, okay, could we do one of the ship commercials that wasn't in that tone? And that's kind of how the idea of Jax came about.
Yeah, it was the first Galactic Gear.
So who created Jax?
Yeah. So totally original idea, not based on anything. Legally distinct. So it was kind of mind-blowing too, because I was used to working on video game projects where you did something and then worked on it for four or five years in secret and then it came out. But I wrote that script, and I think within two months or something like that they had produced this amazing cinematic and it was out there and people were reacting to it. And that's kind of how I fell in love with the project, for the immediacy of writing a lore post and going and reading what people were saying about it and being like, oh, they're right about that. Or, oh, they didn't understand what I was going for, I've got to get better at doing that. And it was a really interesting way to write. I've never had that experience before.