Category Archives: Electronic Arts

Tiburon Trick-or-Treat

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I moved to a new desk at work which is near a window. It’s amazing how much of a difference that makes. They always keep it very dark at Tiburon and I’ve always complained that it’s like working in a cave. I’m hoping that when we move to our new building soon that everything is more open and has more natural light.

The kids came up to Tiburon to Trick-or-Treat today. The Rose and Mermaid Princess made their grand entrance and wandered up and down the halls in search of candy. Abby would say “Trick-or-Treat” and Emily would do the waving goodbye. They were pretty cute and hauled out a ton of candy.

Today’s picture is of Cinderella’s Castle when we went to Disney World for Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party

Mickey’s Not So Scarry Halloween Party

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Today we went and toured the RDV Sportsplex for a new place to go work out. Tiburon is moving to a new building in December which is directly across the street from the place where the Orlando Magic train. This gave them an opportunity to bring their gym up to the level of other EA studios. Currently Tiburon subsidizes our YMCA membership, but this will end once the deal with the RDV starts. It looks like we are going to cancel our YMCA membership and I’m going to join the RDV by myself since it is going to be pretty expensive for the kids to join.

Tonight was our trip to Disney’s Magic Kingdom for Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party. The kids get to dress up in their costumes, ride the rides, get candy, and watch some fireworks. This year Abby was a Rose Princess and Emily was a Mermaid Princess. The weather turned out to be great as it is starting to turn cooler. The fireworks show was amazing as we had a good spot right in front of Cinderella’s Castle. Abby and Emily both had fun, but the evening was pretty much a bunch of errors for the parents. First we got a quarter of the way to Disney World and we realized we forgot the tickets, so we had to turn around during rush hour traffic and go back and get them. The kids got tired of wearing their costumes and we brought Emily’s clothes, but we didn’t bring any for Abby, so we had to buy a T-shirt and shorts from the gift shop for Abby. Then, I forgot to put the kids’ juice in the ice chest, so this led to buying some juice in the park which ended up spilled in the bottom of the stroller, getting everything wet. Besides all that, overall it was a great night. Emily passed out in Jennifer’s arms around 10:00 so we started taking turns riding some rides with Abby and then headed home around 11:00.

Friday Night Lights

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Today started out the morning with the whole family sitting in the new Sequoia watching the first part of Toy Story. We wanted to give the new TVs in the truck a test run. While watching the THX intro to the movie we realized that we have a better sound system in our new truck than in our living room. The sound moved from speaker to speaker and sounded really good.

Today at work we celebrated Tiburon’s Tenth Anniversary with a happy hour at the end of the day. We had drinks and appetizers and they had all of Tiburon’s old games setup so that people could play them. I was able to meet one of the founders of Tiburon, Jason Anderson, who I’ve only talked to over e-mail. He left Tiburon to start his own company, Budcat, right before I joined Tiburon. They’ve been one of our external developers and I help field some of their questions as they worked on the PC version of Madden NFL 2005.

Finally, Tiburon paid for us to go see Friday Night Lights, a high school football movie that takes place in Texas. It’s the story of Odessa Permian High School and their fight for the football championship in 1988. I didn’t really think it was a very good movie. The characters were pretty weak and way to stereotypical. The only good thing about it was it’s portrayal of football in a small Texas town was pretty accurate.

Madden Hits the Arcade

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I’ve known about it for a while now because we had an early version up at work, but it’s officially out: Madden NFL Football, the arcade machine. What’s pretty cool about it, is that it’s based on the last PC installment that I worked on: Madden NFL 2004. Tiburon didn’t have much involvement except for some Production work, the bulk of the work being done by an external developer: Global VR. Now a lot of stuff I worked on has been gutted out of the source code, but it’s still cool to think some of the code that I worked on is now in a coin-op cabinet and being shipped to arcades around the US.

Preparing for Frances

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Today has just been one long wait as our impending doom, Hurricane Frances, is still way off the coast of Florida. Tiburon decided to go ahead and close the studio today, so I didn’t have to go into work. I had already told them I was going to be taking today off, so I will end up getting my vacation day back. It turns out Frances has decided to stall over the Bahamas. At last report it is only moving four miles per hour. The current projection takes is just south of Orlando. Unfortunately it will be over us for a full 24 hours. They are predicting that we will start feeling the effects at 8:00 p.m. tomorrow and it won’t be over until 8:00 p.m. Sunday. I will write another entry tomorrow night and report what is happing. If we still have power and an Internet connection, I will get the entry posted.

Since we had a lot of waiting to do and it was a beautiful day out today, we went to breakfast at the Peach Valley Cafe. This is starting to become a regular weekend event. Afterwards, we drove to the YMCA and went swimming. We are now not allowing Abby to have her float vest and she doesn’t like it one bit. However, she is starting to get a little more comfortable with the water. Hopefully over the next few months she will forget the vest and we can start really teaching her to swim.

This evening I went ahead and taped the windows upstairs. There’s a tree right outside those windows and we are affraid that the strong winds might make one of the branches break the windows. Right after Charlie, we had someone come out and give us a quote on getting that tree trimmed, but we told them to take their time and help people who needed to clean up after the last hurricane. Little did we know that another hurricane would be right behind Charlie and we should have told them to go ahead and trim it.

Madden Frame

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Today I got my Madden 2005 frame back from the frame shop. It is quite big, but it looks great. Framing the box cover and media has been a tradition since I finished my first game. This is the first time I’ve actually done four different versions of a game before, so that accounts for the size. I’m going to take it up to work to show everyone, but it’s so big I don’t think it will stay up on my cubical wall. We will be hanging it upstairs in the office.

Madden Wrap Party

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Yesterday we attended the Madden 2005 Release Party at a bar, Rhythm & Flow, in downtown Orlando. Jennifer finally got to meet a friend from work and his wife, Tom and Tina Carbone. It was good to get away from the kids and go out for a drink downtown. Meanwhile, Abby and Emily went across the street and stayed with one of our neighbors. Jane is a single mother with two young boys, five and four years old, Connor and Lucas. Abby often plays with them in the evenings after dinner. Jane reported that Emily was the best behaved of all of them. She had her blanket and milk ripped away from her, but she didn’t cry or put up a fuss.

This morning I went and played flag football with some of the guys from work again. This time I came prepared, I had Jennifer buy a water jug the other day. One of the main problems last time was warm water. This time I had nice cold water the whole time I was there. It was still extremely hot and we didn’t last very long, just over an hour. I came limping home, I fell twice jamming my knee into the ground and somehow I hurt my ribs. I’ve come to the conclusion that if I was in a little better shape, I wouldn’t come limping home each time I play.

We watched the movie Matchstick Men this evening. It was a good movie starring Nicholas Cage. He plays a conman with an excessive compulsive disorder, who discovers he has a fourteen year old daughter, he’s never met. I thought the movie dragged in a few places, but was overall good. It was a little predictable and I had the movie figured out about half way through.

Today’s picture is of Emily from last summer right after she started crawling. I chose this picture because she is playing with Dora the Explorer, which is one of Abby’s favorite shows. Lately when Emily sees Dora on the television, she says, “Dora!” Now that I’ve seen this picture, I realize that Abby’s has been training her sister to like Dora all along.

Madden Sells 1.3 Million in First Week

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Reuters has reported today that my game Madden NFL 2005 has sold 1.3 million copies in the first week of sales. This is defintely the highest selling game I’ve ever worked on. I think Madden NFL 2002 PC sold around 300,000 copies in it’s entire run. Our biggest competitor, ESPN NFL 2K5 has sold just under 800,000 copies in their first month of sales. They came out a couple of weeks ahead of us and their price is only $19.99. Our game is $49.99 and is kicking their ass in one week of sales vs. their one month of sales.

Madden In Stores

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Madden NFL 2005 starts appearing in stores today. EA has declaired this “National Madden Vacation Day“. However, I guess that didn’t include people who actually worked on the game. I’m still working on updating my Madden 2005 page. I will get around to getting the screen shots soon. We got our complementary copies today and I will be getting them framed tomorrow so that it can join the collection of all my games that I have framed.

Happy Birthday To Me

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Today was my 32nd birthday. We didn’t do much today. We mainly cleaned the house for Aunt Marci’s arrival. Jennifer and Abby made me a football cake. It was Abby’s idea for the cake to be shaped like a football. This day in history: 20 years ago I got my first computer for my birthday, a Commodore 64. Ironically I also received my first Electronic Arts game: Bill Budge’s Pinball Construction Set.

Abby went to one of the neighbor’s birthday party today. They were supposed to dress up as pirates, but Abby dressed up as a princess.

The fans drying the kitchen are driving us crazy because they are so loud. We’ve resorted to watching TV upstairs just to escape the constant noise. Today I equated it to Chinese water torture.