Intern for a Day, Vol. 1: Harmonix Music Systems
"Can I get you a refill for your Goblet of Rock, Ms. McWilliams?"
8/8/2008 6:32 PM | 8 Comments | Page 4 of 7
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
"Scary Helen" Versus "Friendly Helen." Round one: Fight!
11:20 a.m. The refrigerator in the cafeteria/Weely room has inexplicably been moved this morning. Helen instructs me to 1. figure out where it moved to, and 2. guess which drink in said fridge she prefers. I locate the fridge (it's been moved to an out-of-the-way area near the front desk). Out of the drink selections inside -- Vitamin Water, Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, etc. -- I settle on a bottle of lemon-flavored Poland Springs seltzer. "Jackpot!" Helen says when I return to her office. "Finally, you're doing something right."
11:42 a.m. Helen sends me downstairs to the mailbox with today's Harmonix mail, including a wedding RSVP and her Netflix returns (which, she reluctantly admits, consist of several "Battlestar Galactica" DVDs).
11:50 a.m. Returning to the office, I again keep an eye out for signs of Alex. I ask the intern at the cluttered front desk if he's seen him. "You know, he might be here," he says. "Then again, he might not. I honestly don't know. A lot of people are taking comp days just now." He's referring to days off that people earned after "crunching" to ship Rock Band 2 the previous week. I'm beginning to suspect that an Alex sighting is akin to a Himalayan Yeti sighting.
Speaking of crunching: Though some people will admit to late nights at the office, there is no official "sleeping room" in the Harmonix offices. Sleeping rooms, f.y.i., are fairly common in the industry, offering beds and showers to weary, um, crunchers.
12:35 p.m. Lunch. We head downstairs to The Field, one of those ubiquitous Boston-Irish bars that forever smells like bleach and pee and stale Guinness and 500-year-old french fry grease. If you're in Boston, and you want to actually see a real, live Harmonix employee, The Field is without question the place to do so.
Lunch attendees include John Drake (PR coordinator), Dan Teasdale (lead designer), Matt Kelly (producer), Tracy Rosenthal-Newsom (director of production) and, of course, Helen.
The Field: Some refer to this as just another skanky Boston bar. And others refer to this place as the true Harmonix office. You'll have to visit to see for yourself.
Over cheeseburgers and Cokes, I listen to their banter about videogames, music and their favorite (and least favorite) game journalists. (Alas, names shall not be named. Sorry.) Helen, I learn, was tickled by Roger Daltrey backstage at their E3 concert at The Orpheum last month. I also hear a story about the unfortunate problem with newbies inadvertently hitting the Xbox button in the center of the drum kits, which, as you know, stalls out the game. (Their workaround: taping a water bottle cap over the button during demos.)
More than anything else, what I realize in this moment is that I genuinely like these people. Despite the alchemy that making videogames sometimes seems to be, the people that work on them are, after all, merely people. They're smart, funny, passionate people, but really, they're just people.
And despite the success of Rock Band (everyone at Harmonix, truthfully, still seems a bit stunned by the game's popularity and by how quickly the company has grown), there remains a genuine humbleness at the core of the place. Everyone seems incredibly grateful for their success. Though they are growing exponentially -- I was told that the employee roster could breach the 300 mark by the end of the year -- the company still tries like hell to preserve its little-company-that-could roots via things like weekly Weelies.
I decide, in this moment, that I like this place, that I like these people. I decide that I wouldn't mind coming to work here every day. Even if it meant giving everyone piggyback rides and buying them candy and mailing off their Netflix returns.
