It’s less than 48 hours from the launch of the Head Start for Warhammer Online. By Sunday night, baring a ground hold, WAR will be in commercial operation. It’s been a three year project and one with more ups and downs than Kings Island in Cincinnati. The team has worked amazingly hard on this game and it shows. We are all a bit strung out either through sheer hours worked and/or because of dealing with all the complications of a three territory simultaneous launch. Next time, I think I’ll dial it down and bit and go for something maybe a little bit simpler, like trying to solve the invariant subspace problem or figure out even who’s been taking one sock from everybody’s dryer for the last few decades.

MMO launches are always an interesting time. Lots of things go as expected, some go better than expected and then there are those things that not only come in from left field they come in from every left field in every ballpark in the USA. Whether it’s programming, content, marketing, pr, hr, etc. the first rule of an MMO launch is not only expect the unexpected but to expect the unexpected and its whole damned family to show up hungry and with their bratty kids. In the last 36 hours that has manifested in things such as Gamestop putting up a whole bunch of Collector’s Editions, that had been floating around their system apparently, for sale and not having keys for them. When asked for comment, Mr. Alfred Bedoya was heard to say “Keys, we ain’t got no keys. We don’t need no keys. I don’t have to give you any stinkin’ keys.” Fortunately, no real treasure was involved, Sierra Madre or not, so we quickly sent them (again) enough extra keys so that everyone was taken care of by them. We also sent the latest build of the game to GOA and for some reason the build, which was working great here, decided it was unhappy so far from home and was going to pout, stomp its virtual feet and refuse to do its job. They shoot servers. Don’t they? I could go on and on and on but after my last few walls of text, I think I’ll cut it short tonight. All that matters in the end is that everything was taken care of and we are still on schedule. Now where did I put those protein pills?