turbine

It’s a point of pride for me that I oversaw technical operations for a pair of very smooth MMO launches at Turbine. Back in the early 2000s, this was by no means a foregone conclusion; in 2004, World of Warcraft had a very rocky (yet successful) launch, and EverQuest had a bad launch in 1999. I’ve had people compliment me on the Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online launches at the Game Developers Conference. One person, anyhow. I even did a talk on why Devops is important for online gaming companies at GDC back in 2012, but I can’t figure out where my slides went so I’ll spare you the somewhat outdated evangelizing. ...

Time for another “how I got hired” story, this time about my entrance into the video game industry. I’ve really enjoyed the time I spent working in games, and Turbine was maybe the best of it. Despite being the only job in my career where I had to support Windows servers. A couple of years before I got to Turbine, I’d started playing their first MMO, Asheron’s Call, fondly known as AC. At the time, particularly if you were an AC player, AC was one of the big three massively multiplayer online RPGs or MMOs. The other two were Ultima Online and EverQuest. They were way bigger than AC, which was a distant third, although big enough to claim that third place status legitimately. Later on, Blizzard would destroy all of us with World of Warcraft (and cause me some difficulties getting datacenter space), but that’s another story. ...