Krondor Confidential - Part XVII

My Kobayashi Maru Scenario

“You are wise and fearless and fair, Lady Galadriel,' said Frodo. 'I will give you the One Ring, if you ask for it. It is too great a matter for me.”                                                    

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

There are some gifts that only come at a terrible price. Even as Dynamix’s reigning CEO Tony Reyneke had delivered me from weeks of paranoia and depression by handing me the keys to what I’d thought was the permanently cancelled Thief of Dreams, I knew that I was going to be in over my head. John Cutter had taught me most everything I’d needed to know in order to take over the entire design, but I knew virtually nothing about the producing side of the project. Until then, the majority of my time had been devoted to making the mechanics and the storyline of the game work together. Though I’d had assistant designers answering to me creatively, it had never been my responsibility to manage budgets, schedules, or to directly answer to the head of the company. My skills were with things and ideas, and not so much with people or company politics. Having a million-dollar project suddenly thrust at me all at once was honestly a terrifying prospect, but all the more so when I was given the directive that the sequel would have to done with a new team, in half the time, and on a third of the budget that we’d spent on the development of Betrayal at Krondor -- and every line of text in the game had to be recorded. In my very first outing as a project manager, I’d have be a smarter producer with no experience than the man they’d just fired who had five years more experience in game development than I did. 

No pressure. 

As you might expect, I instantly had many reservations and told Tony that I’d need a couple of days to think about it before I gave him an answer. I needed to review budgets and schedules from BAK and see what I thought I could reasonably accomplish within the given constraints. I knew for certain that it couldn’t be the sprawling epic that we’d planned, but I wasn’t even sure if we’d have the resources to try the episodic concept that John and I had been toying with before they’d cut him loose (and his unexplained release didn’t inspire a great deal of confidence that management would appreciate that approach). 

That night, with the beast of a design document we’d had for BAK and the beginnings of the one we’d started for TOD, I began a reckoning of mind-numbing proportions. I shuffled around people and dates and salaries, trying to find a way that we could make anything that could satisfy fans while also turning a good profit for Dynamix. No matter how I moved the pieces, however, I didn’t see a winning solution. I felt for certain that I’d been handed a Kobayashi Maru scenario, but unfortunately, I wasn’t clever enough to know how to work my way out of it. 

The next morning, I went to go see Patrick Cook who worked on the floor above mine at Dynamix. I’d known that he and John Cutter worked together at Cinemaware on Rocket Ranger, and that John respected Patrick’s work very much. With John no longer around to consult, I desperately needed an experienced second opinion, and I figured Pat was probably my safest bet in the building. 

In Pat’s office, I laid out the case for Thief of Dreams. I went over all the essential details of the project, as well as the conditions that Tony had placed on the sequel, and shared what little I’d knew about why it had been cancelled in the first place. Patrick was very understanding, and listened carefully, nodding as I spun through everything. I told him that I just needed to know if I was overthinking things, or if I was just plain crazy, but I couldn’t see how it would be possible to make a quality game within the constraints I’d been given. I wanted desperately to be able to say yes, of course, but to put it in the terms that I knew that Patrick would understand (being the producer of the Front Page Sports titles), “I don’t want to step on to the diamond to pitch if they won’t even give me a ball to throw.” We agreed he’d go home that night with the design document and look things over, and we’d meet before the company’s annual meeting that was scheduled in the afternoon of the next day. 

I didn’t sleep well following the meeting. I went to bed fully aware of what it had taken to make BAK work, knowing what Ray Feist’s fans would want, and knowing we could get nowhere near what would be expected by anyone. By the time I blearily slogged my way back to Pat’s office the next day, I already knew what he was going to say. 

“You aren’t crazy, Neal,” he told me as he gave me the design doc back. “You can’t make the game you need to make with those constraints. And it’s not just about you, I wouldn’t know how to make that work either.” 

It couldn’t be made. Not within those bounds. I had a second, very-experienced opinion from a man that John trusted, which in my book meant as reliable a source as I could find. The only question now was what I was going to do about it. I could try to go back to Tony with a more realistic budget, but I knew that I was likely to meet the same fate as John had. No other teams had openings for writers at the time, and there were no other new projects on the foreseeable horizon for which I would have been a good fit. The only question now was whether I was going to be fired, or if I was going to leave on my own terms. 

Going into the company meeting that afternoon was a bit like walking into a party at an ex-girlfriend’s house. The mood was generally up, and the teams were all enjoying one of the few opportunities where they all got to see one another. It was good to see Nels, and Steve, and Timothy, and Shawn, and all the rest of my Krondor family -- but at the same time, they were seated with their new teams. I had no team to sit with. It felt a tiny bit awkward seeing them again and with other people. Even in the imaginary circumstances that I could have somehow figured out how to make Thief of Dreams work on a vaporous budget, I knew that these amazing ladies and gentlemen were already assigned elsewhere. If I got them back, all I could have promised them was a slave-driving crunch on a project with a very dubious chance at success. And if I made the foolhearty decision to forge on without them, I wouldn’t have the very people who had made Betrayal at Krondor such a success in the first place. 

Already feeling as though I had one foot out of the door, I opted to stand at the back of the room as the meeting began. Tony Reyneke talked about achievements in the company, and profits, and grand new ventures, and everyone hooped and clapped in all the appropriate places. I clapped along with them because even though I suspected I’d soon be gone, these were my family after all these years, and I wanted them all to do well.  We got the obligatory slides and pep talks and everything you usually expect from a company meeting, but then at the end Tony paused and told the audience he had one last special announcement to make.  And in one prescient instant before Tony spoke, I felt my heart fall into my stomach. “I’m very happy to announce that Neal Hallford will be taking over as the new project leader for the sequel to Betrayal at Krondor.”

Three hundred people simultaneously turned to look at me, all of them whooping and clapping with more thunderous enthusiasm than they had for anything else during the meeting. None of them had any idea what was going on. I tried to keep my cool because my urge was to be sick all over my shoes, but I kept my professional face on and just struggled to smile back at them. Silently though I was cursing Tony for making the announcement without getting my final evaluation about the project. To this day, I’m still haunted by that confusing moment of simultaneous gratitude, and pride, and humiliation, and rage. 

Late that evening, I sat alone at my desk in my deserted wing of Dynamix, and I made my final decision. I would not hire a brand-new team of people who didn’t know me to give more than was reasonable on a project that was under funded, unrealistically scheduled, and had the impossible goal of following up on a hit game. I also didn’t want to risk my life twice for a company that hadn’t valued John’s expert opinions when he gave them a reasonable answer about what a successful sequel would take. My only option was to resign for the sake of my health, and also for the sake of preserving the legacy of Betrayal at Krondor. Without me, and without John, I knew there would be no Raymond E. Feist, and thus no chance of Tony ruining a franchise we’d worked so hard to build. 

Once the decision was made, it took me only a few moments to bash out my letter of resignation. Walking it upstairs in the dark, I slipped it underneath Tony’s door sometime around 11 PM.

Two weeks later, on my final day of work, I began the painful process of saying goodbye to my Dynamix family. I gathered up all of the design docs, and books, and plants, and toys, and lamps, and my special chair with which I’d feathered my home away from home. I threw open the blinds to say goodbye to the ducks paddling around in the muddy pond that was outside my window, and to enjoy that last view of the moon hovering over the Millrace. I moved to the main hallway of Dynamix and “liberated” my company portrait, and decided I’d rescue John Cutter’s at the same time since he hadn’t been given the opportunity to grab it.

After several trips between my office and my overcrowded Geo Metro, I grabbed my last box of stuff from my office and headed down the hallway to the door that guarded our wing. I slid the nameplate out of its holder on the outside of the door. The words reminded me so much of my first days at Dynamix when John and I had started our work on creating the sense of wonder and adventure we’d hoped to create:

Shoving the nameplate into my box with the rest of my things, I ended my last official day at work at Dynamix. But as luck would have it, it wouldn’t quite be the end of my involvement with the world of Midkemia. 

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