Give me a production horror story, without naming names.
TL;DRPhilip Becerra recalls, at a different company, finding the Steam go-live date unset 30 minutes before launch, while Jake Ross recalls late nights and broken air conditioning before the first Arena Commander release.
It was not at CIG. It was a different company. I think it was probably 30 minutes before live, and we would release our game on Steam, right? So on the Steam backend, there's this little thing that you have to put in if you want something to be able to be purchased on the actual store. That's the go-live date that you have to set. And 30 minutes before the go-live date, we realized that nobody had actually set anything in that field. So panic sets in. And fortunately, I was working with a company that had good relationships with Valve. And so we kind of picked up the red phone and said, Gabe, make this go live, please, effectively. But in those 30 minutes, I've never been this stressed out. This was a crazy moment. And I'm happy that five minutes before live, it was actually live.
So up until the day of release, nobody had noticed that there wasn't a go-live date on the Steam page?
Yeah, but it's one of these things that you should have known. It's probably on a checklist somewhere. But nobody triple, quadruple checked.
I mean, I was thinking about this. It's funny, some of what I would call horror stories in the moment, I now kind of weirdly look back on fondly. I don't know what that says about me, but I remember the early days here, trying to get that first publish of Arena Commander out the door.
0.8 or something.
Yeah, I think it was 1.0. I can't remember now.
No, the very first one was 0.8.
Yeah, so the days leading up to that were intense. I'm just going to say it for what it is: late nights, people sleeping under their desks and stuff like that. But what was great about the whole thing was that at that time, the Austin studio's air conditioning would go out for no reason. So it was really, really nice to be up super late at the studio with no air conditioning in hot Austin summers. Or I guess at that time it was in spring. But it was things like that that I look back on and go, man, that was trying. Let's just put it that way. But I look back now and I kind of laugh about it, because it's like this camaraderie building that also happens. Some of those people are still here, I still work with them, and I built relationships with them, and you build those friendships that last a lifetime through trials like that.
If it was spring, it was 1.0, so you were right.