Ok, one story you'll only hear on HN. There was one notoriously very high payed engineer behind Battle.net. (I think they payed him $500k per year) Anyways, he loathed coming down to QA and intermingling with us minions. But one day he needed to come down and check out a bug in person. He pointed his arms like he needed to take a seat and look at the computer screen. He then pointed at me and without thinking I scurried to find him the nearest chair I could. But there was no such thing as a working chair on the QA floor. And as he sat down the entire chair collapsed and he fell back first on the floor. The QA manager gasped like I dropped the most expensive decorated egg in the world. But it was the most hilarious thing we've ever witnessed down there. After the incident he even stayed and played a round of X-Men vs StreetFighter so it was cool.
Another interesting story is that the engine came from an engineer at Nihilistic who made Descent, a PC pre-cursor to StarFox. It's just that it was never put to work as complicated before, Descent had just 4 perspectives and only a handful of models. WarCraft3 was another beast entirely.
Wow, Descent, man that one just took me way back. I remember one thing: PC struggled as much as I did to go through the game, haha. I can't believe that engine eventually made it to WC3, such a small (and wonderful) world. Thank you so much for the memories, and for sharing!
Yeah, that one took me way back, too. Descent was the first time I'd ever done multiplayer gaming on a computer. I was maybe 12 or 13 and a guy in my neighborhood was some kind of software developer who would take me and my friend to his office on the weekends sometimes to play it on their networked computers.
if you ever decide to write a collection of these memories.... like a little blurb for reach story, and the things like 40 pages of 40 small stories or something. please put them on gumroad or some easy site where we can buy them . Id' gladly drop a 5$ bill to read a bunch of these on my way to work.
It was one medium sized building in an Irvine office park next to the UCI campus. Basically you had an auditorium that opened to QA with 3 awesome coin-ops in free play. I’m still having a hard time finding exact replicas of these games in any arcade. Then you had a small upstairs section with a few offices.