DEAD CERT

For hundreds of days, Brian Hicks battled to finish DAYZ – and didn’t quite get there.

- Jeremy Peel

You may not be able to see them, but there are secret PC gamers hidden deep within the bowels of the major console companies. Back in 2013, Brian Hicks was a project manager at Microsoft Studios – a professional Xbox evangelist. But behind the scenes, he was working to build relations between his bosses and the makers of a quintessential PC game he had fallen in love with: DayZ.

“You know, I’m doing this so much,” Hicks wrote in one email to DayZ creator Dean Hall, “you should just hire me.” Asked to fly out to Prague for a two-week working interview, Hicks was shocked to discover that the DayZ team, as development on the standalone game began, was roughly five people.

“It was a very, very barebones team,” he says. “It’s hard for me to overstate how garage development it was.”

That turns out to be literally true. At Bohemia’s Mnisek campus – a collection of countryside cabins 30 kilometres south of Prague, once used for weekend retreats during the communist era of Czechoslovakia – the garage was converted into a motion capture lab. The DayZ team was squeezed into 120 square feet above the laundry room.

“I was very charmed by this small village life,” Hicks says. After a couple of awkward months back in the US awaiting budgetary approval from Bohemia, he got the thumbs up, took an 80% pay cut, and packed a couple of suitcases.

“I remember walking out of Microsoft on my last day at 11 pm because I didn’t want to leave anything undone,” Hicks says. “There was a big LED clock in the lobby, counting down to the launch of the Xbox One, and there was less than 48 hours on it. The next morning I flew to Prague and started working after maybe a four-hour nap.”