Year 4: 1996

[New York] My main memory of this trip is coming in from the cold to Dad’s warm dry half-dark apartment, slipping into bed in the guest room and closing my eyes every time I found myself with more than an hour to kill. The static crackle of the sheets. The walls bare, spackled and plastered preparatory to being painted. My only communication with the outside world the ancient Code-A-Phone, its code forgotten, the green light flashing to greet me whenever I returned to my little room, blinking its message of friendship and invitation from the dark cold city outside...

I’m getting back in touch with my other selves. In every place there are parts of you that habit wears down and finally erases. To find them again you just need to leave.

I’ve given myself a week to decide whether to hire John Eaton.

Maybe it’s time to start letting go. Accept that Smoking Car, in its first incarnation, is over. It can grow or it can die, but it’ll never be the same as it was.

If I hire John, Robert will probably start distancing himself emotionally from Smoking Car and will leave for Boston sooner than later.

There’s Robert, Netter, Nicki, Tomi, Patrick, Jon, Mark, Noel, Mitchell, Guido, Kevin, Dana, Juliana, Eugene, John, Anita, Chris, Graham, Charles, Matt, Randy, Greg, Amber, James, Dennis, Sean, Brian, Ken – Geez, we got a lot of people.

Just returned from another day at the smoking car. Left Mark, Noel, Mitchell and Eugene still there.

This is fun. Soon it will be a real game.

I’m getting used to the John Eaton Future.

Jim Tso came in the morning and presented us with our new schedule. Part 1 alpha Feb. 3, beta June 6, sign out in August, ship in October. I think we can do it. I think we should set our internal beta clock for April 30.

Hiro Fukami stayed all day long. Good meeting. We signed off on 16-bit only, Win 95 only, Japanese subtitled version in October to be followed by dubbed version in December. Still excited.

New title: Orient Express: The Eve of War.

Lunch with John Eaton, Robert and Patrick. Dinner with Tomi. Drink with Patrick. Tomorrow I have dinner with John and we decide if we’re going forward.

I say yea. Patrick’s on board. Tomi’s on board. Robert’s invited, but he’s going to Boston. Patrick and Tomi both think he’s making the mistake of his life. Mark N. is still an open question. Patrick convinced me to give him another chance.

“You’re Othello, we are all Iagos,” Patrick said cheerfully.

Things are good. Better than I would have thought possible two weeks ago.

Jan Putnam came up for the Softbank visit. We hit them with the double whammy – (1) Christmas is unlikely for PSX and (2) we need more money – and still had a pleasant dinner that night at Aqua.

John Eaton has been handling himself very well. Tomorrow will be his first official day. It was definitely the right move to include him with Jan and Softbank. He helped a lot. It turns out Hashimoto-san knows him by name (he’s pals with the chief of T&E who said ‘John Eaton is a good manager for our US office, I have confidence in him’) and thinks he will be a good thing for Smoking Car. John has no official title or deal yet, but that will come. Robert and Mark and Patrick and Tomi are all OK with him. Thank God. It was the right decision.

Tomorrow, Hashimoto and Kaji are coming by one last time and bringing Irimajiri and Toyota, the princes of Sega. Jan says we should feel honored that they’re visiting us; they rarely visit developers.

It’s been quite a week.

The weather suddenly turned nice this weekend. After weeks of cold and umbrellas and the office, all of a sudden the streets were full of colors, girls and shoulders and legs.

Sunday was even nicer. But still I went to the office.

I’m burned out. I’m so ready for this game to be finished. April 30 — I’m there.

Robert let us down, gave Jim Tso a screwed-up CD at the last minute, took off for Boston leaving a mess, hasn’t called.

Stress on top of all the work there is to do.

The future of Smoking Car is growing brighter. Patrick and John Eaton are making it glow bright.

I want to move Smoking Car south of Market to the industrial part of town. Or to an abandoned warehouse/factory on the waterfront.

I want to finish this game but I can’t do it myself. It all rests on the shoulders of Robert, Mark, Noel, Justin, Randy, Sean, Matt, Mark N., Dan, Gretchen, Charles, Kathleen, Nicole, Michael, Anita, Lawrence, Ian, Claudia, John P., Jerzy, Juliana, Dana, Chris, James, Patrick, Eugene, David, Kevin, Sandrine, Brian, Donald, Mitchell, Guido, Amber, Ken, and Greg.

It’s not how hard I can work or how well I can focus. It’s how hard THEY work and how well THEY focus... times 40.

Time to learn to direct again.

Chinese New Year. Wet streets, the ripple of firecrackers through the mist, gun-metal clouds overhanging the city. From the roof deck it looks like Blade Runner. I broke up with Lisa this morning.

“Six months to the day,” she said. “Did you know that? Of course you didn’t; you’re not a girl.”

Cycles, beginnings, endings. We’re nearing the end of a cycle that began three years ago; the end of Express. It’s time to start the drive to the finish line.

The Year of the Pig was about establishing stability. Gestation, consolidation, healing, preparing. Now it’s time for big changes in... THE YEAR OF THE RAT!

Softbank was here yesterday. After the usual preliminaries, they presented us with a piece of paper stating that they will pay us $840,000 in advances, which we duly signed.

Also, we made a suicide pact: If the game is a success, Hashimoto-san will pay for the celebration party out of his own pocket. If not, we all have to commit suicide. I hope he was joking.

John E. is doing great. I hope he stays.

Patrick and I have been kicking around ideas for the title after next. 18th century castles and all that.

Cuba shot down two private planes that the U.S. claims were in international airspace, so now Yoana’s chances for a student visa seem to be scotched once and for all. Still trying.

Got an unexpected $48K royalty check from Prince of Persia. WOW.

Working 70-hour weeks, as usual.

I miss Europe.

I miss not working 70-hour weeks.

I’m not gonna know what to do with myself when this thing finishes.

John E. gave me a proposal for our partnership in building the future of Smoking Car. I’m thinking...

What do I WANT?

Like, if I could have anything?

• Time off after Express ships. To travel, recover, let my creative batteries recharge.
• Time to develop the next project idea at leisure, without too much pressure to get it started quickly or to go in any particular direction.
• The choice (when it does start) of whether to throw myself into it with 60-hour-a-week passion as writer-director-auteur-tyrant, like on Express, or take a more limited role as creative guiding force/executive producer/mentor/what-have-you.

• My million dollars back that I put into Express.
• Smoking Car to continue, as a platform for me to do projects I want, when I want... but not in a way that traps me into a 60-hour-a-week daily grind where if I take a vacation, the whole thing starts to fall apart.

Freedom... Power... No Guilt.

Sure, easy.

Asked Dad for his advice on John E’s proposal. His reaction was interesting: He flipped out. “There is nothing you have that is more precious than control,” he said. “Giving up control is the biggest mistake you could make. There is no way a manager like John Eaton deserves equal partnership, no matter how good he is.”

Last night Sandrine called up and invited me over for a steak. She wants me to move back to France, find a nice girl, and have a kid the same time as they have their second one, so they can grow up together.

CGDC. 4,000 people in the Santa Clara Convention Center. Mark and Nicole gave Express its first public expo. They did a pretty good job. I’d say people were intrigued.

The rest of the show was mostly depressing. Fighting games, 3D motion capture, Doom clones, flight simulators. Chris Crawford spoke on AI. Panel on the making of The 11th Hour: it looked like a bad student film, and they were so proud it was playing at 30fps instead of 15 and “it really looks like TV.”

Express is light-years beyond anything I saw today, even if it’s a flop.

Rented Kieslowski’s Blue tonight. Can it be true he’s dead at age 55?

Why am I doing this? What am I doing here?

Watched Seven Samurai. My favorite movie. It felt like it was about Smoking Car.

I’m flat on my back with the flu. My whole body aches.

I can’t be sick. I gotta go into work tomorrow, even if it’s only for a half day. You think Kambei or Gorobei would have called in sick?

I told Eileen about the suicide pact with Hashimoto-san. She doesn’t think he was joking.

The work progresses. We’re all of us run down, stressed out, tense, especially Patrick, who is working weekends and living on coffee and cigarettes and looks more haggard every day, but you can’t tell him to slow down because he wants to make his schedule.

Robert and the programmers, comparatively, are taking it easy, but only compared to Patrick and me.

Vox Record IV is looming. Gotta write dialog.

Tomi and Doug threw a party with a treasure hunt for all of Smoking Car.

Twelve, fourteen hour days. Gearing up for Vox Record IV. Wrote 60 pages of dialog in three days. Casting madness, production madness.

Tomi’s in the hospital. It’s her birthday.

First day of dialog recording. Abbot and August, Sophie and Rebecca. Two years since the first recording session. TWO YEARS. Jesus Christ.

Franny and Mark and Jordan at Poolside: a well-oiled machine. We’ve done this together before, so there’s no hysteria; we just do it. Still, after seven hours in the studio, I’m as wiped-out as ever.

This project has taken a year too long.

We’re in the midst of a heat wave.

Another day of voice recording at Poolside: Sophie, Rebecca, Conductor 1, Trainmaster. Then back to the smoking car for a few more hours for good measure.

If it takes four days to record all this stuff, I should be able to edit it in a week, no?

Softbank is worried about their investment.

I’m cracking, and everybody expects me to hold them together.

Call time is 9:30 tomorrow. My car won’t start, so Franny and Mark are picking me up again.

Tomi’s still in the hospital.

Speeding towards beta. A rendezvous with reality. Will we make Christmas? We’ll know soon.

Charles is about to get the ax.

The pressure’s really on. We’re supposed to be at beta in three weeks. Last night there were 20 people in the office at ten p.m. for pizza. It was nice.

Dialog editing, renders, NISes, meetings, TEDIT. Burning 3 CDs tonight.

Tuesday we recorded five Arabic women and four French waiters. It was the last “production” of the project, so after that I had to go out drinking and dancing with Dave and Christophe and Mark and Franny and Andrea until two a.m.

I’m wiped. I don’t know what I’ll do if we miss Christmas. I don’t have the stamina to keep this up for another three months even if we had the money to pay for it, which we don’t.

Dinner with Patrick, Sandrine, David King, and David’s roommate Jennifer at a new restaurant on Columbus. It was a setup from start to finish. Sandrine wouldn’t tell me who was coming to dinner, and of course she’d planned it all. Jennifer gave me a ride home after dropping David back at the office. We have a date on Saturday.

She’s Australian, by the way. Studying geology and working at Green Apple Books.

We went to Miss Pearl’s Jam House and the Bitter End. She’s sweet. She’s only 25. She smokes Camels.

Spent the day at the office, editing dialogs and trying to playtest. Frustrating. There’s so much work to be done. No Mark, no Noel, no Robert this weekend. We’ll never make Christmas. Today it feels like beta might be two months away. Two months too late.

Why do I feel so unreasonably happy?

The L.A. Times mentioned Express as #1 in their “Best of Show” article. Our first press! They also said it would be out “early next year.”

Frustrating day at work.

Eric Chahi and the entire Amazing Studios team came by the office at 11 pm to see the game. Matt was working on the server, so it was hard to demo. Patrick and David K. attended.

I always learn something new demoing the game. This time was tough. For this game to work, it’s got to be seamless. Right now, it just doesn’t play. It’s not a matter of two weeks, or even a month. There’s a lot of work to be done.

At dinner today I told John and Robert my gut feeling about where we really are:

“Asset ready” for beta: June 30

True beta: July 30

Sign out: October 30

If true, this would mean we’re, like, $350,000 short.

Eric advised me to make sure the game grabs players right from the beginning. Nothing must break the spell until they’re good and hooked. I knew that, but it’s good to be reminded. Most people will make their decision in the first five minutes; they won’t stick around to see if they get involved in the story and characters.

Patrick and David and I hung around outside after the Amazing guys had left and did a post-game analysis of what’s right, what’s wrong, etc., with the way things are going. Patrick says all renders will be done by June 6.

We just gotta finish this game.

Gonna see Jennifer Friday night. My stomach does a happy flip-flop every time I think of her. Is that juvenile?

Demoed the game Thursday for Hugh M. of 3DO. It went well. Maybe we can get some extra cash from Matsushita for an M2 version? Long shot.

Jennifer said: “I really like you, but I don’t think we should see each other any more often than this. You know, it would just get too...”

“Too couple-like,” I said.

“Yes, that’s it exactly. I’m a student, I’m working, I’ve got a lot of things to think about, and a great romance now would be...”

“Too much of a distraction you don’t need. I know, I’m in the same boat. Don’t worry.”

John called an impromptu meeting this morning to talk about downsizing and impress upon everyone the importance of letting people go by certain dates. Patrick went ballistic. It took another blowup later on and a walk around the block to get him back. We reconvened at 4 pm and this time he acquitted himself decently.

Whew — this is a lot of work.

Message from Jennifer: “Okay, we’re in trouble now. I can’t stop thinking about you all day at work.”