Where do I begin!? Jamba Juice 101, office pranks, food trucks, friendly bets (NATTO!), from being on a normal schedule to turning into vampires, and of course the most important thing: TITANFALL! These are points I will discuss and share with you all as they all led to an incredible experience.
There is no better way to start your day than with Jamba Juice! A tradition of ours, the group decided to hit up Jamba Juice every morning and order, for the most part, what are possibly the most difficult smoothies to make. My “go to” smoothie was the Acai Super-Antioxidant. Additions: natural peanut butter, raw steel cut oatmeal, chocolate, daily vitamin boost, C & zinc, and two scoops of whey protein. “Would that be all?” No, lets actually add kale to that and then a side shot of wheat grass. Of course I order the largest size as well and, luckily for us, we had the same two girls to usually make our shakes. When they weren’t there, I would play it safe and go with the Peanut Butter Chocolate Love.
Once we had our daily morning energy boost in, it was time to head to the office and get to work. A quick side note, when you’ve been around the gaming industry for as long as I have, you quickly realize that everyone is a prankster/troll in some way and the folks at Prima Games are no exception. Rule #1: NEVER leave your computer unlocked. If you do, you are asking to be taken advantage of. Various things can happen: mass emails are sent to your entire contact list or your homepage can lead to an unexpected website (and I mean unexpected!). StrongSide would usually leave his Mac open, but I was nice so all I did was just tweet out that “Flamesword was here” or “Hacked by Flamesword.” Next, you can find Nerf guns located throughout the entire office and one day we ended up ambushing one of the Prima Games streamers. The audio playback of that day is hysterical. Aaron, aka “the Professor,” could be caught with a Borderlands gas mask on walking around with a Shake Weight (something I must purchase shortly). The most common pranks came at night when the lights would go out. We usually made Walshy head to the front of the office to turn the lights back on. As he returned, StrongSide and I (mostly StrongSide) would lay in wait and scare him as he walked by. His reactions were priceless! I do need to give StrongSide credit because he got me really good one time. Also, the bathroom of the building had a shower and one day he stood in there for I don’t know how long and got me as I approached the urinal, but of course I tagged him back later on!
Moving forward we got some friendly bets in throughout the project. Basically anything we did on this trip had a bet attached to it and it first started with pushups and then toward the end of the trip to something called natto that can be found at any sushi restaurant. Pushups were usually attached to who would win a Titanfall game and the losing team had a chance for redemption by escaping on the Evac ship. For each person that escaped 5 pushups were deducted and added to the winning team. These bets were pretty easy to accomplish even though some people ended up with having to finish 300 pushups in a day! The real challenge was eating natto, this was a bet you would never want to lose. StrongSide lost the first ever bet on natto and had to go in solo; Paul our Product Manager and I played him so well into losing this bet, I almost felt bad, but not really. Later in the week StrongSide and I both lost a bet to Paul, the bet was if we could finish recording all the video content for the eGuide in one day and we just barely missed it. The penalty that followed was two spoonfuls of natto, something I never want to experience again in my life!
Thursday might have been the best day of the every week! Every Thursday food trucks would come to the parking lot and there were usually 3-4 different trucks. Now these were not normal food trucks, these were top of the line! The food was incredible and one in particular that I will never forget is Krush Burger! These mini sliders were possibly the best burgers that I have ever had. I mean they were just out of this world and you could order Sweet Potato Tots on the side! As I write this, my mind drifts to the day when I will return to California to enjoy these mini sliders of gold . . .
Finally, the reason we were all brought together, and that is Titanfall! Working on this project in the Prima Games office was incredible and gave us a little more freedom since we were able to stay and play as long as we wanted to. We started on a good schedule leaving at 1am for the first 2 weeks, but shortly after the days would go to 6-7am! The lady at the front desk of our hotel would always go: “Really!? You are just finishing now?” It was so funny to see everyone in the hotel dressed up ready for business meetings and we just roll in ready to go to sleep. Luckily gamers can adapt to the vampire sleep schedule and that is just what we did for a week. After a month of hard work and coming up with incredible content for the guide the team was rewarded with a invite to an EA private Titanfall event were we got to meet Respawn members and game against some big YouTubers!
The Duo! Flamesword and StrongSide putting in work!
Flamesword, the man himself Vince Zampella, and StrongSide
StrongSide, Joel Emslie, and Flamesword
StrongSide, Mathew Everett (thanks for the invite!), and Flamesword
I would like to personally thank everyone at Prima Games, for the entire month that I was at the office it felt like home. Such a great group of people to work with and be around. I can honestly say that everyone at the office treats each other like family and it was great to finally meet everyone in person.
Going take Walshy’s line to end this one! Would love to talk about more, but I currently have a plane to catch to Chicago for my next gaming adventure! Be sure to keep up to date with the team on Twitter as we are always tweeting! Also, this will be the greatest multiplayer guide ever created!
Flamesword: @FlamesworDsQ
Walshy: @Walshy304
StrongSide: @mcstrongside
Be sure to also check out the Prima Titanfall hub for more game news, strategy, guides, videos, and more!
Published: Feb 21, 2014 05:00 pm