One Year Out

Just last week, the calendar flipped over the one year mark for Robot Entertainment.  I remember our first day very clearly.  It was a Tuesday, I drove up to Plano from my apartment in Dallas, arriving a few minutes early, ready to sit down at my desk and get started.  I came in to the office to find wires laying everywhere, boxes and furniture upside down in the hallways.  Contractors were drilling and hammering a wide variety of things into the walls.  I walked around and realized that I couldn’t find any actual Robot employees.  Finally I found VP Patrick Hudson in an office on the phone.  He sees me, gives me an incredulous look and asks “Didn’t you get the email?”  I had not, in fact, received the email, since in my haste to show up to work early I had not checked.  He had sent out an email hours earlier saying not to come in, since the office wasn’t ready and the first official day was the next day.

So I drove back home and came in on Wednesday, along with the other 40-some employees and we got going.  We got to sort of pick where we sat, in each pod.  The Leads of each Pod nominally were in charge of this process, but really they just let people sit where they wanted.  I got an awesome spot towards the front of the Green programmer Pod; so awesome that a network programmer with 4 computers and 6 Xboxes took it from me because he needed the space.  We had a few meetings and were given our standard issue Robot Entertainment T-Shirts, and had lots of hopes and dreams about how great Robot Entertainment would be as a workplace.

For our one year anniversary, we had a party in the Biergarten and our fearless leader, Tony Goodman had a surprise for us all.  From underneath a big black sheet, he pulled out a Valet Jacket brand new Robot Entertainment jacket.  We were all outfitted in this spiffy new jackets, and celebrated with a delicious birthday cake.

After a year, I can say that it definitely is a great place to work.  We’ve worked hard on our two unannounced projects, had some really awesome parties, and only a couple of late nights.  Those late nights were offset by the completely out-of-character-for-Dallas snow days.  We’ve got another awesome year set in front of us and we can’t wait to show everyone what we’ve been working on.