Star Wars Galaxies: Team Comments - Kurt "Thunderheart" Stangl

It was the first movie I had ever seen "by myself". I was a young boy of ten when I first saw Star Wars in 1977. I was with my aunt and uncle and all my cousins and they had decided on a family trip to the movies. They decided on seeing this new movie titled "Star Wars" that everyone was talking about.

We were late and ended up purchasing some of the last available seats and since we were late, there were no seats together in a group, so we had to split up. Excited that I could escape the others and head off on my own, I zipped down to the front row of the theater and I was in luck. There was a seat in the front row just off to the left of center. The old-style 70 millimeter format cinema screens were huge and curved and with me sitting in the front row of the theater, the silver screen literally wrapped around me. I was very excited to be all on my own and before I had a chance to get into trouble, the lights dimmed and "it" exploded on the screen around me. That immortal scene of the Corellian Corvette streaking across the sky trying to escape from that huge, wedge-shaped Star Destroyer; soldiers readying themselves a stark white hallway; armored stormtroopers cutting their way in and a huge space battle unfolding before my young eyes. I was forever hooked. I grew up, but never lost my love of "the saga".

The other path of this origin story starts with a new invention called "video games". Way back as a lad of 10, sitting in that theater, I was already a big Pong fan. 1978 would bring the world Space Invaders and thus my obsession with video games began. Along with dumping an obscene amount of quarters into arcade stand-ups, I fell in love with the home PC too. I came from the "Atari" camp (as opposed to the Apple, TI and Commodore camps ;)), learning to program in Basic and Hex and my friends and family always assumed I'd grow up and work in the video game industry. Video games and Star Wars were my hobbies and obsessions for a very long time, but for a bunch of reasons, my career path followed a family driven motivation and into construction I went. For many years, I walked a path of managing projects with a focus on being a liaison between different groups of people. Sometimes I read the specs and blueprints and communicated with the construction project owner, the engineering teams and the construction workers. Other times, I managed the organizational back and acted as the conduit between the design engineers and the field teams out on site, building the project. In each case, my career path took me farther and farther from what I wanted, but it was still all very challenging and exciting. For fifteen years, each career move became more focused on managing projects by understanding one set of design materials, learning the goals of that material, communicating those designs and goals to all the involved teams and then negotiating project changes based on all the various groups input.

So it goes. I kept on doing what it was I was doing, but in my early 30's I felt I wasn't happy. It was driving me nuts actually. Then, sometime around April or May of 2001, my buddy Scott tells me, "Hey, you gotta check out this new game that Sony is making about Star Wars. He tells me "it's called Star Wars Galaxies and it looks really cool." Now, my buddy Scott and I used to MUD a lot back in the old green monochrome text days, so I was curious. I had never really played many graphic based MUDs, but since it was Star Wars, it was enough to draw me in. He sent me a link to the site and I checked it out and I was interested. Even still, the idea of a Star Wars MMO seemed fantastic, but I was NOT prepared to sit around and wait for a game for two years. Or so I thought...

As it turned out, I found that I couldn't get enough of the discussion forums. For the first time in my life, I started logging onto an internet forum. I knew what forums were and how they worked, but I was never that interested in the content to spend a lot of time posting and getting involved. Then this whole SWG thing took off like crazy and before I knew it, I was posting 6, 8, 10, 12 hours a day. For two years, I lived on the boards and it was the place that made me happy, sad, frustrated and a whole gamut of feelings. No matter what happened, it was what I loved to do. Most of all, I enjoyed the community. It was always the people in the community that kept me coming back for more.

Then 9/11 happened and it changed everyone. I still remember the day because I got all my best news from the SWG boards; system administrators, journalists and people just watching and sharing the news from on television and radio, from around the world, with other board members. Like everyone else in those early days in September, I sat around, feeling upset and uneasy. When that happens, I always try to find some semi-interesting, semi-mind-numbing "busy-work" to do to keep my mind occupied until whatever the situation is, improves. The busy work I had chosen was to sit around and catalogue all the threads on the forum and organize the links by title and subject and that was how scomplink was born. Scomplink was my old fan site. I put a video capture card in my box at home and took a bunch of movie screen shots, stylized them a bit and maintained the SWG link library. Over time, I added more and more features, including links to all the other fan sites, fan articles, posts, pictures and whatever else the community produced - - I kept it all catalogued in one easy-to-find spot. I maintained the fan site, argued, laughed, joked and filled my days with your company and it kept me coming back every day.

The next thing I knew, they chose me for the beta and into the game I went. After 2 years of posting, I was in the beta, writing bug reports, writing monster posts, exploring and doing all the Star Wars geek stuff there was to do. I was even able to help edit the original manual a bit and at the end of Beta, I posted a feature on my site called, "Thunderheart's Vision Quest", which was a long series of screen shots and captions that showcased the came from the start of beta to launch. I have to admit that after the beta was over, I had a serious case of what I call "beta rash" and I had to take some time off and clear my head. I did that but when I came back to the boards, I felt a little lost...a sort of disconnection. Since the game went retail, I kind of lost my purpose on the boards and it made me feel sad. Then, something happened. At that moment, I knew that was what I wanted to do. Being part of this community and staying involved is something that made me feel happy and satisfied and the very best way to do that would be to apply for the Assistant Community Manager position. I sent Kevin O'Hara (Q-3PO) a quick e-mail to see if the team would be interested and the next thing I knew, I was emailing him my resume. I had a couple of phone interviews and then the Dev Team flew me to Austin, and boy what an interview it was.

I arrived early and I was sitting in the parking lot waiting for the team to come in and then a little Saturn pulled into the parking lot and Holo got out of his car. My heart skipped a beat and I knew this was it. After 26 years, I had a chance to get into the video game industry - - it was now or never. I went in a few minutes early and the security guy brought me to Holo's office. I tried to play it off real cool, but I was pretty nervous. You see, the thing is that I'm an outsider. I mean, sure, I love video games, love to play video games and I've worked very hard to learn everything about them (really none of it prepared me for what this is all really like), but being a fan and even being an uber-geek isn't the same as actually working in the industry. As they say, it's not WHAT you know, but WHO you know and when it comes to video games, it's BOTH. And like I said, there I was sitting across from Raph chatting about the SWG. I started to feel a little bit star struck (being a geek and all), but I shrugged it off and put my attention back where it needed to be: The interview.

It started with Raph, John Donham and J. Brack They grilled me for about an hour and a half about everything you could think of. They asked me stuff about the game, my opinions on books, movies, video games I was playing, stuff about the boards and even personal questions. Probably the toughest question in the interview was when J. turned and looked at me and asked, "So, what do you think your meanest post was?" I was certainly caught off guard a little bit, because there were certainly some toasty posts that I posted onto the forums. Catching me off-guard was of course his intention. It was important that we all learn as much as possible about each other in the 4+ hours we had set aside because it's a tight team and they needed to find someone that was going to mesh well with the group and also deeply care about the community. After about an hour and a half of getting grilled by the team leadership they led me into the library and 6 designers joined the fray. It was their turn to blast me. Again, I had to answer questions ranging from what I thought about all sorts of game design issues to my favorite movie, to what I was reading, how I would interact with the community, how I saw myself in the project and most importantly, why I felt all of these things. After another hour and a half, I went to lunch with the original group (Holo, John and J. ). We had some yummy pizza and had a chance to chat on a more informal level about game design. I really enjoyed that and still do.

We wrapped up lunch and headed back to the office for the final leg of my interview. There I was sitting with these 3 guys and Rich Vogel. This was probably the most unusual lesson learned. I was being interviewed for a dream job by a guy who I had mercilessly flamed on the boards. Remember when I told you that J . asked me what my meanest post was? The answer was when I found out that SWG was going to have Single-Character-Servers. I wrote a monster post and it was fraught with trollish flames and was probably a little too mean, but there I was facing the man I scorched. I did the only thing I could do, be straight-up, tell the truth and "fess up". Rich is a great guy and he didn't hold it against me. In any event, I learned an important lesson about mean posts and the real people on the other side of the screen. 20 minutes later, the interview was over and John was giving me a tour of the office and then I was off and racing to the airport to catch a plane home. Rich called me the next day and offered me the position. Since then, I've been settling into Austin.

All those years spent negotiating between groups of people about design details finally led me back to the profession I had always dreamed to be in, and what a rush. My name turned red and since October, we've had good times and frustrating times and I've been flamed for just about everything I can think of, but in the bigger picture, that's ok. Whether it's "clear domed" R2 units, SEA's, or some other issue, I' m here to be the community sounding board. Love me or hate me, I still read the boards, catalogue the issues and get those issues to the development team. Those issues get talked about and negotiated with the developers and over the past eight months, the developers have made many changes based on our input. They have made sweeping changes such as the Jedi Revamp, Combat Balance and the upcoming GCW revamp all the little changes such as removing camp restrictions, increasing player city limits and a long list of items to which there will always be pro's and con's and I'll be here reading your posts.

Looking forward, I'm excited to keep working with the developers and the community about Star Wars Galaxies as it evolves over the full life of the game's development. I've also had a chance to meet a bunch of people from the community at E3 2004 and with Fan Fest coming up, I can't wait to get together and hang out.

See you on the boards.