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.”
WAKE UP DEAD
This story is from the October 2021 edition of PC Gamer.
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This story is from the October 2021 edition of PC Gamer.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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