A lot of people who read these posts don’t know me. This post comes from my blog site (http://draginol.joeuser.com) but gets syndicated out through Stardock’s various forums too.
I’m the President & CEO of Stardock. My day job handle on the forums is “Frogboy” (I post occasionally on WinCustomize.com and the other Stardock sites). But I never intended Stardock to be my career. I started this company to help pay for college at Western Michigan University, which was the cheapest university in the state at the time that offered engineering classes.
At the time, I had multiple jobs at once. I taught Assembly language labs for the EE department (micro controller stuff), substituted for professors in freshman lecture classes for the EE department, was the assistant to a Geography professor, worked at Babbage’s (game store). This was all until I could get a real job. And when I finally graduated, it turned out Stardock was the best opportunity, so I stuck to it.
Most of the things I’ve worked on have been extremely cool but not necessarily commercially successful. If we had patented our stuff, I suspect we’d be having a different discussion. 
The thing about the technology industry, whether it be game related, enterprise related or non-game related it is that it’s always changing. You hear that a lot but I mean seriously, it changes fast.
There’s been a lot of highs and lows over the years. The biggest professional heart breaks of my career were small projects (relative to the rest of Stardock) that mattered a lot to me personally. The most recent was a PC game called Elemental: War of Magic.
I wasn’t that involved with that game until the end and at that point, my job was to salvage what I could. It was that project that I discovered cognitive dissonance (technically, there was an incident with an Impulse released title called Warlords: Battlecry that gave me a taste of that). I thought the game was really good at the time we released it. But it wasn’t. I lost a lot of confidence in my judgment on such things. I was fortunate enough to be able to bring on incredibly talented people who I am proud to say have become good friends to direct these endeavors going forward.
Right now, the games group is concentrating on a new game, Fallen Enchantress. I think the new beta is pretty awesome. But then I remember War of Magic. I’m a lot more distanced from FE than I was War of Magic so I feel a bit more confident. But I also wonder whether I’m just becoming part of an increasingly smaller generation. That is, gamers now expect to be hand-held. Put a “!” above everything. Walk them through it all. I really hate that. I liked Ultima IV where I had to question people in town, take notes, and put together the next steps myself. I seem to be a minority.
I don’t really have a theme to this blog post. I just really hope people like what Derek and his team have done with Fallen Enchantress. This week will be Beta 2 of that game. I hope people like it. I know I do.