Well Pandemic in Los Angeles did offer me a job, which I took [in early 2009]. So I went over there and worked there for a week, but I got the smell of death. So after that week I turned the job down. I was supposed to take over as the creative director on The Saboteur DLC and then on The Saboteur 2. That was what they wanted me to head up.

I have this criteria where the best work is done when the people who make decisions about details are the people closest to details. So you can set a vision from the top, but the details should be done by the person who is working on it. This comes from my experiences working in studios with people who aren’t connected to the details making stupid decisions that waste people’s time. So you set an intention, and then you work with the people who are responsible to establish what the appropriate actions are.

While I was at Pandemic LA I realised that they had been completely gutted by the EA process and nobody could make a decision. There were multiple conversations that ended in “well, I have to take that to a creative director”. But then the creative director has to take that to Andrew [Goldman – CEO] and Greg [Borrud – director of production] and so on. Then the process would turn into them regularly being overruled by forces inside EA that had nothing to do with development. Like marketing people or Frank Gibeau [president of EA Studios] and any other number of useless and dangerous idiots.

So after a week of watching that process happen, or it might have been two weeks, it convinced me that I could not make games that way. My job as a lead [designer] has always been to empower other people and be the “shit umbrella” – that is the term you use for that role in big companies. People who are very far from the details will try and shit on your project from above and your job is to collect all of that shit and make sure it runs off the side and doesn’t get on the team. And I am pretty good at that. But ultimately I need to be able to tell people, “you are in control of this,” for that to be true.” Because that is the only way I know how to get results.