Anonymous Animation Magic Employee Interview

John dark was one of the last things I worked on there. I started writing a little sorta intro story for that, but got laid off in the grand restructuring before I finished, I think. I remember seeing some of the animation they'd done for that sometime later when I dropped by the office to visit the folks who were still left. I don't really remember even what sort of game it was - I think there were both puzzle and fighting elements to it. I'm still indirectly in touch with some of the other CapDisc folks, so I'll pass the request along.

Actually, the "grand restructuring" is an interesting story, in case you don't already know it. In early '95, CapDisc merged with a company that had most of their staff in St. Petersburg, Russia. The people there got paid a fraction of what we did. Our management figured that we were all pretty interchangeable, and laid off half of us. The first sign that they'd made a mistake was that they had to hire back a bunch of people as contractors to finish the projects they were working on. The second sign was that most of us were immediately hired by their competition. The third was that, a few weeks later, half of the remaining people quit because all of their friends had been fired. They hired a bunch of new people to fill in the gaps, but they had lost a lot of expertise. On top of that, I heard that coordinating with the folks in Russia didn't go quite as smoothly as they had hoped. The company went down the tubes about a year later.