It’s been said that a writer’s life is full of mementos from their past. You do a project, you keep something from it — that issue of a magazine, a copy of the game you wrote about (or wrote), whatever. So imagine how happy I was to come to Activision and find that one of my mementos was hanging on the wall…and it’s the one I wanted to forget.
Like a lot of companies, Activision names its conference rooms after things relevant to its industry or history. There’s a Tony Hawk conference room, Call of Duty, Transformers, Guitar Hero, you get the idea. And since Activision worked with id Software for several years, it’s only natural that you’d have a room called Doom.
Obviously, it’s just some chairs and a place to have big meetings…but if you’re going to call it Doom, you should put some. you know, Doom stuff in there. Like big blowups of, say, GamePro Issue 187, which revealed Doom 3 for Xbox in 2004.
At the time, it was a huge scoop. Security was very high. I got to visit id and do a big batch of interviews. But there was a very strict date we had to protect — the information was not supposed to come out any earlier than the magazine’s on-sale date. I was really excited, wrote up the whole story, got some online-only interviews ready to roll once the magazine had come out, and protected the article’s secrecy all the way through the project. Then I screwed it all up.
I stupidly didn’t mark the files as “do not share” internally. Because, every month, the files from the US version got shipped to Germany, and the German team would translate and put out their own version. But because Germany is so small and the US is so big, it takes a lot longer to print and ship magazines here than it does there. So we shipped first, sent them the files, and they had their edition on stands before ours came out. Embargo date, broken. They stole my scoop…but only in the sense that I gave them the scoop and said “here, steal it.”
Worse, Activision was not happy, because id was not happy — and I don’t blame either of them. It was simple human error, but it was an enormous error. The information got out before the agreed date. I wrote the story and my publication didn’t get credit for it. Activision wanted to kill me.
Six years later, I pass this conference room and its jumbo-sized tribute to my own stupidity every day. It’s next to the kitchen; I can’t avoid it if I want to heat up my lunch. But there it hangs, a daily reminder of my own incompetence.
Let this be a lesson to you: Never fail.
