The Lunatic Fringe

When I was looking for a job for a long time, I got an interview at Electronic Arts for a job as a manual writer for EA Sports games.  That was like the holy grail of dream jobs for a talented writer sports fan that grew up in the late ’80s and early ’90s as the video game revolution was occurring.

They brought me into a room that was a sports bar filled with decades of EA Sports merchandise signed by sports stars (but no beer) to do the interviews, and one of the interview questions was to explain icing.

One of the non-interview questions that came up, because the interview was happening in late July and I was writing about minor league baseball at the time was about the trade deadline, then morphing into the August 30th waiver-trade deadline and how that was different.  Those guys got so fascinated by it that the other interviewers were told to ask me about it.

They told me I got into the final two.  I didn’t get the job, however.  The amazing part was that, unbeknownst to me, a fellow sports writer on the blog network I wrote for got it.  We randomly ran into each other later that year, and he got me the opportunity to freelance for EA anyway.  So, if you happen to own a copy of Skate 2 (for any console it came out on), you have a copy of my work!  I’ll be happy to sign it for you if we ever do signings.

That said, it’d be awesome if you went and read it now, because you probably never have even if you own the game, which is precisely was EA has cut its manual-writing division to the bare minimum and pretty much doesn’t bother anymore.  If they’d sunk that saved money into making sure debacles like the SimCity servers didn’t happen or ensuring that The Simpsons: Tapped Out crashing on my iPhone happend a little less than every other day, I’d be okay with that, but….  /facepalm.