What was your first impression of the office and CIG in April 2015?

The first one was that when I went to my interview, I wore a suit, and I'm standing outside trying to get in, and one of our co-workers comes out in baggy shorts that have paint on them and just runs right by me, and right behind him I see one of our co-workers in a tank top, and I was like, I made an awful mistake, I'm wearing a full suit. And then I got in, and you see a dark space with a lot of artists and a lot of cool-looking people, and you're just walking around with a leather notebook and wearing a suit. And I got to have my interview in what we call the war room. And at that time, the AC used to have a very interesting vibration, and I have a very sensitive ear. So yeah, that was my very first impression. And I came the first day to work, and I'm not sure if Mike will like the story or not, and I found a Windows PC. And I had not been a Windows user for quite some time. It's quite common in my field that people use Linux. And I was like, what is this? They're like, it's your computer. And I think that's how Mike and I got to be friends and know each other. He came to my office and knocked on my desk, and he said, my name is Mike Jones, and that's all you need to know, and walked away from me. And the next night we were hanging out assembling my Fedora Linux machine, and that's how things went. But if you're talking about memorable moments, I still remember our concurrency. We had times when we used to cheer because we had 200 players online, and we're a big magnitude above that right now. I still remember when we first launched Area 18 and the whole QA team had their buggies with them by the elevator for every player to come in and ram into them.

I have a confession on that. So we're about to put Area 18 in for the first time, and in one of my very first conversations with Jake Ross... Now, I'm going to preface this by saying I didn't know what my limits were or what I should be involved in or what I shouldn't be involved in. I was kind of all over the place in 2015. Anytime somebody did something we didn't have a person to do, I'm like, I'm going to do it. I was the events manager for a while. I was the platform guy before Eric Green. Eventually, like, wait, Jared's doing the platform? Oh, we need to hire somebody. Keep Jared away from the platform. But we're a day away from launching Area 18, and I go to Jake Ross and I say, you know what would be fun? Put some Greycat buggies in there. And he goes, oh, yeah, we should put some Greycat buggies in, let people drive around. And it was just this innocent little suggestion, and it took 24 hours to turn around. And then when Area 18 launched for the first time, it was carnage. It was absolute carnage. People were just mowing everybody down with the Greycats. The Greycats, you could look at them intently and they would explode and whatnot. But I remember Jake Ross did not throw me under the bus. When Chris goes, where did the Greycats come from? he was just like, it was a decision made internally, we'll take them out in the next build. But he had a chance to throw me under the bus that day, and he didn't.

Yeah, so many great moments. 2.0, I still remember, I think it's one of the longest times I stayed awake. Not because I was able to do much; we were crashing, and then watching the streamers just counting the crashes every single time, and they keep going back in again. 3.0, I think one of our coworkers, I'm not going to name him, was about to propose. And he was literally on his laptop right in front of their in-laws saying, hey, guys, let's launch the game so I can go inside and meet these people for the first time and prove that I'm a responsible man. So we have a lot of amazing moments, and I think right now, we're talking a lot about the future because we're here to have a summit, laying out the plans for the next two years, and we just keep dreaming of what 1.0 will look like and how we get to see the game get into the shape that we all dreamt of. So yeah, it's very difficult to pick a certain moment, but there's a lot of memories, a lot of sleeping under the desk. I think you and I one time were on a call at 2 a.m. in the morning, and I was leaning back on my desk, and I flipped backward. I'm not sure if you remember or not. And we were like, that's it, Ahmed's gone.