Oh jeez, here goes. The worst managed project I ever worked on? Mechwarrior 2. It was unbelievable. It'd take a zillion pages to explain all the bullshit and anyone trying to read it would die of boredom, but holy shit. The producer was out to get me, and in the last year and a half of the project I never found out that a demo was due tomorrow morning until 7 PM the night before at the earliest. I zinged the fucker real good, in the end, and it finally came out, but it could have been released a year earlier and been ten times the game it was.
The punch line is that I started saying to myself "this is the worst managed project ever in the history of history." The worst. The absolute worst.
The producer's dimwitted fuckery let to me losing, oh, a hundred and fifty thousand bucks 'cause I was sort of counting on the project finishing in time for me to salvage my mortgage, but nooooo, it was more important to make me look bad. He'd set the project back three weeks every time he pulled that kind of stunt, because I'd end up working thirty hours straight hacking all sorts of bullshit into the code to please Her Highness, who had the ear of management and I didn't, and I put up with it because a) I was young and stupid and b) he made no bones about how my ass was fired if I stopped with the blowjobs.
I lost my temper one day and he was fired with extreme prejudice a few days later -- in hindsight, I should have been screaming bloody murder a year before, but I was scared and thought if I could just pull it off, all would be well. I'd just think "this is the worst managed project ever," which was true, and go back to pounding keys.
What screwed the pooch was when I found out what the BEST managed project ever was.
I'd sold my house in an emergency-kind-of avoid-foreclosure last gasp thing at a huge loss and was living with a couple of the MW2 artists in a rented house in El Segundo. I had a copy of Scientific American that I'd read through and through except for one article -- "The Best-Managed Software Project" -- which I had no interest in, seeing as I lived on the far other side of the coin. Until one night when I was bored as fuck and read it anyway.
According to the U.S. government, the best managed project ever was the Space Shuttle flight-time code, the stuff that ran on the Shuttle's computers. They could statistically predict the number of bugs in a new release, and the bugs were thousands of times less in proportion to just about any other software package ever written. New version of Word: five thousand bugs. New version of the Shuttle flight-time code: two bugs.
I sat there and thought about it for about an hour. Then I called the Shuttle software flight-time code project manager on the phone, even though it was eleven-thirty in Houston. We talked for a long time, but I didn't mention why I called, it was all about how to run a project and what you do and what you don't do. He had a bunch of great advice.
After the story hit, he got on the cover of Inc. magazine and a couple of others that I don't remember and could have basically written his own paycheck but he dug working on the Shuttle and was making good coin. He started at IBM when they were the Shuttle software contractor, then the project was bought out by Loreal and eventually someone else.
He was the younger brother of the vice-president of advanced technologies at Thiokol (now ATK propulsion), a manufacturer of solid rocket boosters. Thiokol was the biggest employer in my home town -- in elementary school, everybody's dad was an engineer who worked there -- and onceuponatime when I was far too young to remember, Robert Oppenheimer was visiting and had a family dinner at the young engineer's home, cooked by his wife with their young children at the table. Anyway, Dad's younger brother was the Space Shuttle project manager. I'm named after him.
The best-manged software project in history, and the worst-managed one, all in one family.
I quit Activision about a week later. Bobby Kotick left messages on my answering machine that I never listened to or replied, and I feel bad about that. I'd really, really like to apologize, 'cause I like Bobby a lot (he's not the evil Satan the press would have you believe), but there's no way for pond scum like me to get through the layers and actually talk to the dude and it was a long time ago and who cares except me. The End.
Post Scriptum:
Uncle Tom went to BYU, while Dad was a Utah man. When I was a little kid, Uncle Tom always gave me BYU sweatshirts, which I wore all the time. He did it as a joke to piss Dad off, something I didn't figure out until years later.
Dad's side of the family is from Mexico. They were ranchers. The family moved to Arizona and southern Utah at exactly the wrong time, and Dad, Tom, and their older sister all died of cancer in the '90s. The gub'mint would wait until the winds were blowing away from Las Vegas and toward St. George / Kingman before conducting above-ground atomic bomb tests. A downwinder is not a good thing to be. When I was in first grade or so, we had a heavy snowfall followed by one of those beautiful clear sunny winter days that you only see at altitude, and the teacher warned us not to eat the snow because "there are germs in it." Bullshit, teacher, this is beautiful white wonderful snow and we ate all we anted. Holy shit, if she had told the truth and said there was fallout in it I would have understood even then that no, the snow is not good to eat.
