In early February of 2011, the Q4 2010 earnings call was going to be made to shareholders, where the company would disclose its earnings results for that fiscal quarter. The morning of the day of the call, everyone at VV received an e-mail from the head of Human Resources.
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I then drove home to my roomies, one of whom was a QA tester who had been laid off the previous month, and one of whom was a senior designer who had been laid off the previous September in a hush-hush layoff of about seven people. I told them what I suspected was going down.
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We then hopped in my car, drove to a local diner where we had enjoyed numerous lunches before when we all still worked at VV, and tried our best to forget about the fact that soon, the last one of us would be out of a job, too.
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Returning to the office shortly before 15:00, I sat at my desk and simply shuffled code around until the head of HR came and got me. When I saw the Development Director sitting there in her office as I walked in, I pretty much knew that I was right.
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500 people lost their jobs that day across the entire ATVI corporate structure. Eric. Me. 498 other people. About 50 folks at VV itself, a third of the staff at the time.
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Ultimately, there isn't much else to say. We all picked ourselves up, brushed ourselves off, and moved forward.
@1stPlayable Productions, a smaller game studio a few miles north of VV in Troy, NY, hired a number of the ex-VV folks. Other people moved over to Harmonix.Näytä tämä ketju -
Eric got a job at Rockstar North, where he worked on an obscure little title called GTA V. I used it as an opportunity to help start the indie studio my roommates and I talked about for years, Bat Country. It failed hard - none of us had any business sense - but we learned a lot.
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I can conclude this story on a lighter note. After the layoff, my QA friend still had a video on his phone: An upbeat moment, when we had a ton of controllers that were incompatible with the retail game, and needed to be destroyed so the company could write them off on taxes.
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Two codas to the story: First, I must make it ABDUNDANTLY clear that I hold no ill will and have no bad memories whatsoever towards either Vicarious Visions or the Brothers Bala. In particular, Karthik and Guha did their best to shield us from the capricious whims of ATVI execs.
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Two, I'd like all of you to pour one out for my late VV coworker, Ben. He was an amazing artist, was always ready with a joke and a smile, and was taken from us far too soon by the SOB that is cancer. We all miss you, Ben.
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