Postcard Memoirs

Ariel Lawrence

It’s ten o’clock and we’re all waiting, sitting on our desks, eating the intern’s jelly beans straight from the giant Costco jar with our bare hands, because she’s not here to tell us to use the spoon she put in there, being that we cut her a break and let her go at 8:45 because, well, she’s new and she can’t really fix bugs anyway, so now we’re playing the game to bide our time, gleeful that we got some of the localization done early and isn’t it great that we can watch the in-game cinematics in Russian or Dutch or Portuguese, and we’re smacking each other on the back and punching each other in the arm at how far along in the process we are and it only being 7 days from Alpha, and all I can hear from upstairs is the quick clack-clack-clack of the arcade controllers as the Combat Designers challenge the Animators to a head to head match of the latest Street Fighter installment, and then there’s the Level Designer who’s quaking it up over the LAN and yelling at one of the Level Scripters over the half cubicle wall (because they’re not wearing headsets) that he’s bogarting the damn ammo for the laser rifle and that he can’t fucking believe that the little vegan bicyclist from Tech Art just busted a cap in his ass from across the arena with a sniper shot, which is followed by a distant, deep belly laugh from the aforementioned Tech Artist on the mezzanine in Studio B, and it’s the first time in three games that the head producer genuinely smiles, almost relaxed this close to an Alpha delivery and he doesn’t notice, or care to notice, that the Environment Artists have found the last couple of six packs of Stella in the back of the refrigerator from our last “Studio Walkabout” and are now boozing and cruising through the office, looking at the their gleaming, shining art finally placed back in the game and hooked up by the level designers and no one is caring about the out of memory crashes that will come next week when we find out that rock has a 1024 texture instead of a 128, because all we really care about is that the assets we just bum-rushed into the database before a dinner of  double meat pizza when our Russian Bear of a Lead Programmer locked us out, will still build on his machine, and until then we’re just supposed to hang out, which was fine three hours ago when everyone was pumped on a self-induced high of Diet Coke and skittles, but it’s okay because one of the producer’s is just back from a quick run to Ralphs and there’s ice cream to fuel the little more time to wait for the Lead Programmer’s machine to build every level in the game, because it takes 45 minutes just to build the hero’s WAD, and then it happens; the Design Director’s deep vibrato from the programmer’s lair under the stairs saying that, finally, we’re all clear, that everything seems to build, and before the Senior Producer can finish saying “thank you for staying, you can all go home now”, we slip out the doors, back and front, hands clutching melting ice cream cones and keys to cars already covered in night dew from the ocean and we’re off, into the night, to our husbands and wives and kids, before anyone can call us back to our digital salt mine.

Ariel Lawrence is a gifted poet and prose writer, who needs to forward a one line bio, but in the meantime, I’ll say lives in California with a husband and some dogs?? And she runs, I know she runs.