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Every year, one or more of you has to step outside the regular day-to-day and help with CitizenCon, Gamescom, PAX and our other events. Each of you has been the point person on one of our major events at some point. What is that experience like?

TL;DREvent work is frantic, with only a day to set up venues and networks, including a multiplayer LAN, while builds arrive until about an hour before showtime, but an experienced team handles it like a strike team.

Paul VadenDirector of Corporate Technology

So my first experience at Cloud Imperium was, I started about a month before we did the PAX Australia event. And part of my role is that I am at all of the public events. So the phrase we like to use here is drinking from the fire hose. So my introduction to CIG was, okay, get everything ready and ship it all off to Australia to do an event out there. And I was like, what's an event? But it's probably one of the most rewarding experiences in my career, because each event has its own separate challenges, and just being able to show up and know that I've got one of the best support teams available. To describe the situation: we generally get access to the event space the day before. And so we have to come in and set up. Recently we've been doing a whole lot of multiplayer demos, so that's a 24 PC LAN. Plus we've got demo machines for player demos, but also the onstage demo machines. We have to network all of that. And then we always have to have a method of getting the latest updated builds. One of the, I don't know, insider information about the events is we're usually getting new builds right up to about an hour before the event starts. I don't think that's a secret. Because the events aren't punctual. We don't normally start exactly on time, but that's because...

Jared HuckabyHost, Community

We did last year. And we ended on time, too. First time we ever ended on time. Sorry, go ahead.

Paul VadenDirector of Corporate Technology

Yeah, and the reason we do that is it's a very clear message from Chris that we want to show the best stuff that we can. And so the whole team, the whole company really kills itself to get everything in and working so that we can show off the stuff to the fans and the backers. And so there's been a couple of shows where they were literally typing up the PowerPoint five minutes before he was going on.

Jared HuckabyHost, Community

Which was 30 minutes after he was supposed to be.

Paul VadenDirector of Corporate Technology

Exactly. And so it's just very frenetic. But having the team that we have, it allows me a lot of confidence to know that when our event planner says, hey, you're only going to have a day ahead of time to set up at this venue, I'm like, okay, that's fine. Because I know that the team on this call has all done it before, plus many of our other IT staffers have all been part of the events at some point. And it's like a commando strike team. We come in, lay everything out, get it all working, and then just start pulling builds and getting everybody going.

Reverse the Verse›LIVE - The IT Crowd·
Published on this date.15 Mar 2019