How did you connect with Chris Roberts and CIG?
TL;DRDave Haddock describes working as an intern and then on a film Chris Roberts produced, later brainstorming a story with him, and eventually being invited to join and build the lore ahead of the Star Citizen announcement.
So yeah, it was sort of a weird path. My background was in film, so I worked in production and I did sound, I did some editing, I did a bunch of writing on the side trying to get something off the ground with very, very little success. But I actually was an intern at Chris's production company in LA. So Adam Wieser, who's also on the narrative team, was there as well. That's how I know him. John Schimmel. So basically I kind of met Chris through that. I ended up working on a movie he was producing called Outlander and worked on that for about two years, two and a half years, and got to go up while they were filming it up in Nova Scotia and shoot behind the scenes stuff, and basically was kind of just hovering around. I was kind of a good gopher dude to do a bunch of stuff. So it was PA, director's assistant, VFX coordinator, whatever needed to be done basically. But that's how I got to know Chris. And so in the aftermath of that, we ended up kind of collaborating. He had an idea that he was thinking of developing that I ended up helping kind of flesh out, and we would just sort of work every day for a couple months and try to build a story and an outline and stuff like that. And then, it's kind of what happens with a lot of film projects. He got busy, other things took priority and stuff like that, and it sort of kind of fizzled. But it was a really fun dynamic. It was very open and free-flowing ideas and kind of throw stuff out. And no one was precious about anything. It was always a very collaborative kind of creative environment. And then I kind of kept in sporadic touch, but I was off doing other stuff and also slash unemployed for a really long time, but still trying to get writing off the ground with very little success. And then Chris basically reached out to me and asked, hey, I've got this thing I'm putting together, would you be willing to talk about it? And so I went over to his house and he showed me kind of the early prototype of what ended up being the GDC demo. And I got to fly a Hornet and I crashed into the Bengal a couple of times and stuff like that. And so he basically kind of pitched what he was sort of conceiving and thinking about trying to put together. And interestingly enough, we went out and had lunch and kind of talked about it a bit, and I had a job interview literally right after that. So I left there and went to a job interview at a VFX house that I did not get. But basically he asked if I wanted to come on board. And I was like, are you sure? Because I don't know games. So we started building the lore and the fiction in the build-up to the GDC announcement, and we started doing the framework for the fictional history of the game, which became what became known as the time capsules, which were the 30 days leading up to his announcement of what would be Star Citizen. We would do a drop every day basically to kind of flash forward through key historical moments in the game's fiction. And it ended with, the final post was just 'today'. And then Chris gave his presentation.