Mike, what was your journey to CIG?

So first of all, I had just stumbled into this. I had no aspirations. In fact, I didn't even realize that games were made. It didn't occur to me. I played them, but I never thought about what it takes to make a game and all of that. This is really a long time ago. You said where did the journey start, right? I got an opportunity to tour a video game development company, Sierra Online. That's way back. And at the end of the tour, it was really kind of blowing me away how cool this was. And I got to meet this guy, and it was a job offer, and he said, I have two openings: it's customer service and quality assurance. And I remember thinking, well, I don't even know. Is this for real? Am I actually getting a job here? I didn't even come to get one. But I guess they were desperate. And so I asked, which one pays better? And he said, well, customer service starts out better, but it's pretty hard. So then I remembered, here's what you're supposed to do, at least it's what they taught us: how do I get your job? And he said, well, if that's what you want to do, if you want to be in leadership, you need to start out in QA. So I did. And it went from there. I ran QA teams, and then I found that I had this real strong talent and interest in technology. And so I just kept focusing on that and learning as much as I could, and always going to the right conventions and shows to learn more about tech and get ahead of the curve. And then, I always enjoyed MMOs, so that was part of the journey. But what really brought me to CIG... because I had known about Wing Commander, I knew about Chris, but being on the West Coast, I wasn't as connected. And so this video came up on YouTube, and it was Chris at, I think, the first CitizenCon. And he was introducing his team and talking about what they were doing, and I was just blown away. How is this so transparent, so different than everything that I have learned in my career leading up to this? But the live stream started cutting out. They were having bandwidth problems. And I thought, good lord, whoever's in charge of IT there is probably having a really bad day. And you know what? I think it was two days later, John called me up and said, hey, do you want to come down here? We may have something we want to talk to you about. And so that was the real beginning of my journey. And I couldn't be happier, because of anything that I've done in technology or IT, it felt like it was always on rails. You didn't have a lot of creativity. Here, we're doing something no one else would try. And that means for me, I get to design solutions and work on things where we're actually encouraged to solve problems that other companies don't have. That's candy land for us guys.