Thread by @3spce

Internet toxicity usually misses me, but I was waiting for someone to be shitty about the #stadia tattoo in Wired. I haven't told the full story, so here, dear void, it is.

Before Stadia was Stadia, a few of us made a pact that if the name and logo was great we'd get tattoos. 1/

Tattoos can come from all sorts of places, but I think all of them are powerfully emotional in nature. This was an intuitive reaction to something we were feeling. It wasn't a prediction -- it was a feeling of closeness, of mission, of risk. It was dangerous. 2/

The days before the Stadia PVA were a whirlwind like few I've experienced in my career (gamedev is mostly a constant whirlwind). The presentation itself came together in the last days -- I didn't know I'd be on stage until February, I think. 3/

Once the script was dialing in, it still didn't have the name in it. There was so much concern about the name potentially leaking that it was redacted from everything -- including the script drafts we were rehearsing from. I was still using the codename bc it was all I had. 4/

I finally tracked down the marketing director one or two days (time blurs) before the announcement and said dude, I'm going to say the codename on stage if I can't rehearse with the real one. So we went into his office and he showed me the video. 5/

I fucking cried.

It wasn't about the platform. It wasn't even about the people in that moment. It was about this truth that we were speaking about games. This truth that has been missing from games for a long time, for a lot of us.

"Our need to come together remains." 6/

I went on stage, I did my thing -- enormously, joyfully proud of the Starlab team in particular for the world's response to our style transfer demo. When I stepped off the stage, Phil took my hands and said "that was magical".

But none of these moments decided the tattoo. 7/

After the show, the audience dispersed, but some folk lingered -- mostly those closer to Stadia (or who wanted to be). The team, of course, was elated.

But I remember walking across the hall and seeing San Mehat -- tears in his eyes. He couldn't speak. That was the moment. 8/

San is one of the chief architects of the Stadia technology, and GameBus in particular. He is terrifyingly smart, and equally generous -- an astonishing human. The person who made me realize how special a place Google was then -- the place where people like him gathered. 9/

I felt, I think, what he was experiencing in that moment -- pride, joy, wonder, astonishment -- at the debut of this incredibly difficult, incredibly amazing thing he had built for a field that he truly loved. All of that together was in that moment. 10/

The tip of the spear is where I live; I know how it goes. I knew there were two paths: on one, Stadia radically democratized game access for billions. The other, the path we stand on today -- we throw ourselves into it, but in the end -- sunset. They were equally probable. 11/

I knew that on either of those paths I wanted to carry that moment with me. And I wanted to scare some people -- I wanted powerful people to understand there were real lives, real skin in this. Exceptional people who were giving it their all. 12/

And doing something that was profoundly the right thing. Democratizing access is Google at its best. I had been in the warrens of the games industry for close to 20 years. If followed through, this was going to be radical, it was going to enable an era of incredible games. 13/

Of course it was hard and statistically improbable. But if it were easy we'd have been somewhere else. And it's a special kind of person that craves a frontier. My kind of person.

So I found the 'pact' trio on the demo floor and I said I'm doing it, are you in? They were. 14/

We had no plan. We pulled out our phones and found the geographically closest legit tattoo parlor, which was (now closed) Mermaid Tattoo. We went. I got mine first because I had to rush back for some event, can't remember which.

And that's one of the stories of the tattoo. 15/

In sum, yes it's real, and it represents more than you can possibly imagine. If you're reading this, I hope you get to do something big and near-impossible someday. And I hope you can think of this team, including its GM -- who fought like hell btw -- with kindness. We bleed.