The International House of Mojo

September's Flashbacks

Kathy Hsieh - Associate Artist

"When I first started working at LucasArts, I was a pure, innocent and inexperienced little girl. My very first game was Outlaws®. My first week at work, a couple of people took me out for lunch. These very kind people told me that LucasArts was a fun place with events and activities at all times. They told me that one of the events, 'Naked Day,' happened every Thursday and that everyone would come to work fully naked. Since I was new to the company I thought 'no way,' but they spoke in such serious tone I was shocked. Soon they all broke out laughing. From that moment on I knew LucasArts was a great place to be and how lucky I was to be a part of this organization.

Tim Miller - Lead Level Designer

"Way back when I was Lead Multiplayer Tester on Star Wars: Jedi Knight®, we had a crew of about 10 guys playing/testing multiplayer day and night for six months. We had a lot of fun, but there was a lot of testing to be done and getting a bunch of guys to actually find the bugs was pretty tough when we're all standing around with Light Sabers and Stormtrooper Rifles (in the game that is). With 8+ guys in the game there was always a lot of action going on, and of course right when you'd find a bug someone would come along and kill you. That made it really hard to figure out just exactly what had caused the bug in the first place. Our solution was to institute a 'White Flag' policy. Whenever a bug was discovered someone would yell out 'white flag!' which told all the multiplayer guys to stop killing each other. As you can imagine, that didn't always work because we all had itchy trigger fingers, and it was tempting to blast a guy who was standing around waiting for his bug to be documented. There was one guy in particular who would totally freak out if anyone shot him while we were in a white flag situation. So one of the guys came up with 'purple flag' to really get the guy good and mad. Whenever someone yelled 'purple flag' we'd all turn our guns on him and blow him away -- he'd turn red and get all mad and start yelling at us. Ah that was good stuff. :) "

Lisa Star - International Marketing Manager

"Back in 1990 we had a manufacturing deadline to meet with Electronic Arts, our distributor for The Secret of Monkey Island®. The code wasn't ready quite on time, which delayed manufacturing and the regular crew wasn't scheduled for overtime! An email was sent around asking LucasArts employees to volunteer for the night shift. Staff from all levels of the company worked from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. to assemble 10-15K units. We assembled components, shrink wrapped, boxed, and ate a lot of donuts and coffee. Ron Gilbert, the Game Designer, signed some dollar bills and stuck them in some of the boxes!! We made our deadline and really had a great sense of LucasArts camaraderie."