James Mielke wrote:

But it was John Davison who –in the two weeks he spent in San Francisco a month– saw how much work I was doing — and getting no credit for. He set the record straight about my contribution, and shortly after the entire Ziff Davis Game Group were moved out to San Francisco. It didn’t get easier for me once they moved out, though. Sam and I were used to being the only console guys in the office, along with the CGW crew, who enjoyed our loud music and good natured ways. The EGM guys were used to much quieter working conditions, which I totally didn’t get, since we were in the entertainment business. People would holler at me to turn down my music, and they would play games with headphones on. I distinctly remember John Davison asking me to turn my music up. The EGM staff needed to loosen up, was his (and my) opinion. Games are using surround sound, or 5.1, live a little, guys. We’re lucky enough to work in the entertainment industry. I thought “How can we make a fun product if we’re not having fun?”

Greg Sewart wrote:

The part of this blog that’s really upsetting, though, is the insinuation that the relocated EGM crew wouldn’t put up with his loud, obnoxious ways because they were somehow out of touch with the entertainment business – apparently too uptight to have fun while working in a fun industry.

Now, let’s have a little perspective here, before we swallow what James is shoveling during this part of his story. At the Chicago offices of EGM, we had pretty much daily game nights; we had the cone of violence; we flushed GBAs down the toilet in the name of research; we had pantsless NFL Blitz tournaments; we set up Big Mouth Billy Bass on top of urinals just to scare the shit out of whichever poor, unfortunate soul simply wanted to go pee; we chucked Frisbees at each other down dark corridors in the hope hitting our prey in the neck; we set Crispin belly down on a motorized skateboard and used him as a battering ram on a pile of whatever we could find around the office that night; we did untold amounts of property damage with our antics; we had regular scooter races around the cubicles until “the man” confiscated our wheels; I came in one day to find a plushy beaver wearing a maple leaf hat hanging from a VGA-cord noose above my cubicle; we blasted some of the most obscene songs we could find at 1 in the morning just to keep the mood light during deadlines; we watched Crispin paint a wall with soy sauce after succumbing one too many times to Jon Dudlak’s ridiculous skill with a sniper rifle in Halo; we all laughed when an overly-affectionate Jeanne Kim fan sent nude photos of himself to her attention. And so on.