When I was on vacation a few weeks ago, I struck up a conversation with another Dad that was waiting in the same area we were, and as most conversations go, the topic of what you do for a living came up. Turns out he had moved to the region to learn how to become a Professional Golfer. Which, being a person who enjoys playing the game, I thought was pretty cool. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to ask him about it because he then asked what I did for a living. Now, working in videogames is undeniably a cool job, but whenever someone finds out it’s what you do, for whatever reason, they always want to flex their limited (by comparison) knowledge about video games.

So of course, he asks me “did you work on…what game was that…Call of Duty 4?” It’s great that he’s aware of the mainstream popular game titles, but it’s comparable to me asking him “is Tiger Woods going to be your instructor?” We all can’t work on the kickass multi-million sellers out there.

Some of us have to make the single million sellers.

Or the 250,000 sellers.

And sadly, even the 27,000 sellers.

So when I read Travis’s script for this one, I wanted to jump on it and get it done because I knew it would strike a cord with our game dev brethren out there. It’s funny, all that Dad had to do was ask “so what games have you worked on, have I heard of any?” but without fail they always want to ask if you worked on the last popular game they heard of.

I imagine there’s a touch of that “star” aspect to it, that they’re secretly hoping that you worked on it so they can meet someone “famous,” but it always leads to them feeling let-down.

And then I’m reminded that I haven’t worked on anything that the mainstream is even remotely aware of. And then I’m feeling a bit let-down.