The subject matter really isn’t that important in computer programming. My work was all with databases and web pages. At WON I wrote an online tournament system, which I got to do entirely by myself because it was such a small organization. At Fred Hutch I worked on a system where clinics around the world entered test results, biopsy data etc. for cancer research projects. My own daughter had been cured of a brain tumor (which is what made that job meaningful to me). I planned on spending the rest of my career at Fred Hutch, until shit happened. On the plus side, after Fred Hutch I got to work at Wizards of the Coast (more db and web dev), which always impresses people. I would say that place was more fun thatn World Opponent Network except at WON we had Unreal tournaments and occasional nerf gun fights.
Odd question but I’m trying to remember a old game that I think was on WON. It was a top down hover tank muiltyplayer battle game. Was alot of fun but dont remember the name of it for the life of me.
Edit found it!
Attack Retrieve Capture
edit: Right, didn’t see your edit. Yes ARC was Attack. Retrieve. Capture. It was created by two guys, Brian and John, who were at WON when I was. They created the game in college (Duke University I think) before dropping out to come work at WON. They had formed a company called Hoopy Entertainment so we called them the hoopies. At one point somebody found out they had been coming in on weekends, working 7 days a week for months, so they were basically ordered to take some time off. Bona fide nerd life - the hoopies were the real deal.
Those guys were a lot of fun - one time they ran another guy’s speaker wires under the partition to their cubicle and through one of their computers, so they could mix sounds into his audio. Occasionally they would fade it up for a while but usually they kept it very faint. He was going crazy, thinking his hardware was picking up a radio station or people’s phone calls, he couldn’t tell. After he figured it out he retaliated by attaching a spare wall section across the opening between the hoopy guys’ joint cube after they left, so they had to climb over it to get back in. The hoopies actually left it that way for a while because it was kind of like a fort.
I remember Brian writing a really nice connection simulator that artificially added network latency for testing. They also created a game based on cops and robbers driving around a city, but the prototype turned out not to be fun enough so they scrapped it. Eventually I think Hoopy became PopCap. I’m sure those guys both got rich.
The subject matter really isn’t that important in computer programming. My work was all with databases and web pages. At WON I wrote an online tournament system, which I got to do entirely by myself because it was such a small organization. At Fred Hutch I worked on a system where clinics around the world entered test results, biopsy data etc. for cancer research projects. My own daughter had been cured of a brain tumor (which is what made that job meaningful to me). I planned on spending the rest of my career at Fred Hutch, until shit happened. On the plus side, after Fred Hutch I got to work at Wizards of the Coast (more db and web dev), which always impresses people. I would say that place was more fun thatn World Opponent Network except at WON we had Unreal tournaments and occasional nerf gun fights.
Odd question but I’m trying to remember a old game that I think was on WON. It was a top down hover tank muiltyplayer battle game. Was alot of fun but dont remember the name of it for the life of me. Edit found it! Attack Retrieve Capture
ARC?
edit: Right, didn’t see your edit. Yes ARC was Attack. Retrieve. Capture. It was created by two guys, Brian and John, who were at WON when I was. They created the game in college (Duke University I think) before dropping out to come work at WON. They had formed a company called Hoopy Entertainment so we called them the hoopies. At one point somebody found out they had been coming in on weekends, working 7 days a week for months, so they were basically ordered to take some time off. Bona fide nerd life - the hoopies were the real deal.
Those guys were a lot of fun - one time they ran another guy’s speaker wires under the partition to their cubicle and through one of their computers, so they could mix sounds into his audio. Occasionally they would fade it up for a while but usually they kept it very faint. He was going crazy, thinking his hardware was picking up a radio station or people’s phone calls, he couldn’t tell. After he figured it out he retaliated by attaching a spare wall section across the opening between the hoopy guys’ joint cube after they left, so they had to climb over it to get back in. The hoopies actually left it that way for a while because it was kind of like a fort.
I remember Brian writing a really nice connection simulator that artificially added network latency for testing. They also created a game based on cops and robbers driving around a city, but the prototype turned out not to be fun enough so they scrapped it. Eventually I think Hoopy became PopCap. I’m sure those guys both got rich.
Good memories.