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Reese and Danny—Brandon’s boyfriend—were Plaid Peanut Butter, a rock band with way more talent than local band implied. They dominated a room with their voices and presence.
I hit Play. This wasn’t one of their stage shows though. The two of them were in the AcesPlayed recording studio, squished closely in the small room. The music started and I recognized it immediately; it was the theme for our game.
They started singing, sounds rather than words, since the song didn’t have lyrics. Mentally, my jaw dropped. Their usual sound was hard and loud. This was a different level of powerful, with her singing stunning soprano, and him coming in with a haunting and complimentary baritone.
I was so captivated, the song ending jarred me. I handed phone and earbuds back to Brandon. “That’s amazing. Are we making a soundtrack change? You have to float this by Dustin, make sure he gets it out there for promo.”
“I wish.” Brandon shook his head. “This completely breaks their contract, but we were fooling around last night and I had to capture it. I couldn’t completely sit on it.”
“Don’t blame you. Fuck, that’s incredible.”
Brandon’s smile when he said, “Isn’t it?” was one-hundred percent smitten.
We continued chatting as we headed back to the office, and went our separate ways when we reached our floor.
The layout was what we called semi-open. In other words, desks went where they fit without having to do additional construction. We were trying to spend smart as a new company, and since several of us had been with other start-ups, we defined that differently than a lot of young companies.
Our spot used to be a satellite campus for the community college, before their business school went largely online. The space was broken into a series of classrooms, complete with the kind of wiring a tech company needed, and each team had claimed one or two of the spots.
There was a tangible tension laced with excitement in the air. We were going into closed beta tomorrow. The game had been announced in professional circles, the public was talking about it, and we’d done closed testing with smaller groups.
But tomorrow, the world would access our game. This thing we’d set off on our own to build, and spent the last few years laboring on in secret.
There was still plenty of work to do. As the art department, our job wouldn’t ease up. We’d be designing bonus content, new characters, outfits, levels, gear, position emotes… Absolutely exciting.
Despite the stop, I was early, leaving me enough time to enjoy the coffee and make sure I was caught up on emails and any outstanding issues before the new person arrived.
I wasn’t surprised to find Dustin already in the office and working. It didn’t matter how many people in the industry painted him as a party boy, he tended toward responsible. He had his shit together and he was good at his job.
The latter bit was partly responsible for the rumors. With such a small company, a lot of us wore different hats, and he’d stepped easily into the secondary role of wining and dining business partners.
Watching Dustin flow seamlessly through our digital history of our artwork, clicking into each place without hesitation, was an experience in skill and beauty. Like most things he did.
I shook the thought aside. I was already too weighed down by people I’d lost, as my wandering thoughts proved this morning, there was no reason to add his name to the list. “You save any of that work for me and the new person?”
He didn’t glance up from what he was doing. “There’s still plenty to, don’t worry. I want this response to be airtight.”
“It will be.” I was as certain of that as I was that he was going to be furious when he found out I was leaving the company.
I wasn’t looking forward to breaking that news, but I had a couple of weeks while I trained the new person to ween myself from Dustin. That was the best I could do.
