A lot of people who read these posts don’t know me. This post comes from my blog site (http://draginol.joeuser.com) but gets syndicated out through Stardock’s various forums too.

I’m the President & CEO of Stardock. My day job handle on the forums is “Frogboy” (I post occasionally on WinCustomize.com and the other Stardock sites).  But I never intended Stardock to be my career.  I started this company to help pay for college at Western Michigan University, which was the cheapest university in the state at the time that offered engineering classes.

At the time, I had multiple jobs at once.  I taught Assembly language labs for the EE department (micro controller stuff), substituted for professors in freshman lecture classes for the EE department, was the assistant to a Geography professor, worked at Babbage’s (game store).  This was all until I could get a real job.  And when I finally graduated, it turned out Stardock was the best opportunity, so I stuck to it.

Most of the things I’ve worked on have been extremely cool but not necessarily commercially successful.  If we had patented our stuff, I suspect we’d be having a different discussion.  

The thing about the technology industry, whether it be game related,  enterprise related or non-game related it is that it’s always changing. You hear that a lot but I mean seriously, it changes fast.

There’s been a lot of highs and lows over the years. The biggest professional heart breaks of my career were small projects (relative to the rest of Stardock) that mattered a lot to me personally. The most recent was a PC game called Elemental: War of Magic. 

I wasn’t that involved with that game until the end and at that point, my job was to salvage what I could.  It was that project that I discovered cognitive dissonance (technically, there was an incident with an Impulse released title called Warlords: Battlecry that gave me a taste of that).  I thought the game was really good at the time we released it.  But it wasn’t.  I lost a lot of confidence in my judgment on such things.  I was fortunate enough to be able to bring on incredibly talented people who I am proud to say have become good friends to direct these endeavors going forward.

Right now, the games group is concentrating on a new game, Fallen Enchantress. I think the new beta is pretty awesome. But then I remember War of Magic.  I’m a lot more distanced from FE than I was War of Magic so I feel a bit more confident.  But I also wonder whether I’m just becoming part of an increasingly smaller generation.  That is, gamers now expect to be hand-held.  Put a “!” above everything. Walk them through it all.  I really hate that. I liked Ultima IV where I had to question people in town, take notes, and put together the next steps myself. I seem to be a minority.

I don’t really have a theme to this blog post.  I just really hope people like what Derek and his team have done with Fallen Enchantress.  This week will be Beta 2 of that game.  I hope people like it.  I know I do.