Ive had a rough as hell week so I'm just gonna throw out some positivity just for funsies (and maybe to affect a karma shift). I worked with @CarlMuckenhoupt for roughly 8 years before I left TTG. We worked on several titles together, especially earlier on in our tenure.
He was very different from me - much more of what I think of as a Real Game Developer. He'd worked on real titles like System Shock & was active in the interactive fiction community. I'd worked on bullshit titles that no one had ever played and wasn’t active in any communities.
1 thing I noticed early on was how helpful he was. Not just the easy kind of help, lobbing ideas over the cube while working on his own problems. When I had a truly odd bug - anyone who has worked on games has seen of these - he would sit there with me and work through the angles
I could tell when something was truly strange it put a certain kind of itch in his brain that needed to be scratched by fixing it. He would take time & ask probing questions. He was on my side and the bug was the enemy, and he wouldn’t quit until the bug was squashed.
He is also a hilarious dude. He sometimes struggled to get out what he wanted to say, but I quickly learned that if I waited for him to coalesce his thoughts, there was always something worthwhile at the end.
He is a great dude and anyone who is friends with or works with him should be grateful. Thanks for putting up with me all those years, Carl!
PS Fun fact: Carl's visage is immortalized in several games. I put an easter egg into Puzzle Agent 2 where, if you finish the game 100% w no mistakes, you get a few extra hard puzzles. Beat those and you get a bonus image of a character I made up - The King of the Hidden People
At some point I need to replay PA2 to make sure it works and I'll post the image since I have no record of it (unless @grickle happens to have it laying around somewhere and wants to post it...).
Anyways the coda to this story is Carl refused to play or see it. I REALLY wanted him to see it, cuz I loved it. He refused. To this day I still don't think he has ever seen it. I find that quite charming.
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