John Erskine · Head of Publishing

Well, my first firefight came about five minutes after Chris announced the crowdfunding project and the website went down. I got involved peripherally with that project because, like I mentioned, Chris's team was camping out in our office and we were comparing notes and so forth. At that time, we didn't have an office. Chris was still getting things off the ground. There were a few members of our team that had already been working with Chris on the prototype, and I think everybody was working remotely or from around the world. So in January of 2013 was when we got our first office, and it was in Austin. There are these historic homes that are like three or four stories tall, and it's funny, because this place where CIG had our first office, my wife had actually worked in that building before, in an environmental firm that had offices there on the first and second and third floor. And when I went to meet the team and really talk about switching from Portalarium to early CIG, they gave me directions. And I said, well, I know right where that is. That's perfect. And so I go up and I knock on the door of the first floor, and the nice lady that met me there said, oh, no, you've got to go downstairs. And she directed me to the basement. So it was funny: earlier I told my wife, hey, they're officing in your old building. And I had to go home and say, actually, they're in the basement of the building. And she said, oh, that's where the archaeology department was. And that was kind of how it was for us in the early days. When I joined, I think there were about 12 people that worked there. And there were some people in Los Angeles; Chris and a few other people were in Los Angeles at the time. In the early, early days, we had an art outsource team that was in Monterrey, Mexico, CGBot, with Sergio's team. We had another outsource team that was in Montreal at Behaviour. And that's actually how we met Benoit and the team at Turbulent, by a referral from Behaviour, to help us work out these website issues that we had because we overwhelmed our initial platform. So anyway, that first office was a hoot. It was a perfectly functional office. We did have a few windows, even though it was mostly subterranean. For those veteran backers, I think there's a couple of walk-around studio tours of that office that may be still hanging out on YouTube. And we used to broadcast the original Wingman's Hangar weekly show from there, with the green screen and all kinds of stuff. That was an interesting experience. We stayed there for about a year. We grew to the point where I think we had about 35, maybe almost 40 people in that space. And it was very crowded. We literally had, almost to the point of people sitting on each other's laps and so forth. So it got out of hand before we moved. But we moved into a nice new office in Austin in January of 2014. And in fact, we're still in that same office in Austin to this day.