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In 2002, Humongous Entertainment was a troubled company still beloved for its catalogue of popular tween-oriented adventure games. But its masterpiece was a turn-based strategy title that broke all of the rules: Moonbase Commander -- the best game you probably never played.

IN THE EARLY SUMMER of 2001, an unexpected email invited all three-hundred-plus Humongous Entertainment employees to a surprise off-site gathering at a hotel a few miles west of their main office in Bothell, Washington. The text was spare, lacking fanfare and context:

June 13th, 2001

Important announcement to all Humongous Employees. We are conducting a mandatory, all day, company meeting off-site tomorrow … All employees except Technical Support are required to attend. The meeting will start at 9 o’clock, please be prompt. Directions to the hotel are below and there will be copies of directions in the lobby.

Delivered early on a Wednesday morning, the invitation came as a surprise to almost everyone — unusual for such a large company with an admirable history of executive-level transparency. Not this time. Today the suits were playing a serious game of obfuscation.

Over the course of that morning, as more and more people parsed the email's vague details, the mood around the office fluctuated between cautiously hopeful and apoplectic. Those holding half-full mugs of burnt complimentary filter-coffee wondered if this wasn't an impromptu celebration for a long winter of arduous work and modest sales. In an industry still reeling in the aftershocks of the Y2K tech-bubble burst, Humongous Entertainment had survived mostly intact by hunkering down, sharpening its tools, and burning the furniture in order to keep doing what it did best: releasing budget PC adventure games for children in a timely and efficient manner. As far as the company's foot soldiers were aware, they had marched bravely through a dozen dire months and pulled through with the bottom-line intact.

The first half of that Wednesday unfolded into the afternoon with no further information. Just after lunch a second email appeared, another company-wide commandment warning employees of an impending network shutdown. Once again the details were hazy — at some point between three and four o’clock all servers would go offline for emergency maintenance. Employees were asked to leave the office and take the rest of the day off.

Few objected to the reprieve, but it was now impossible to ignore the ominous portent of these parallel surprises. By the time the servers quit spinning, the halls of the office were teeming with gossiping employees who had nothing but their guts to go by. But there was nothing more to say. By 4:30 that afternoon the lots fore and aft of Humongous Entertainment were empty.

Around 7pm someone returned. Maybe he was an artist hoping to finish a few more matte paintings before the week’s end, or a programmer struck by a sudden solution to a nagging problem. Or maybe he just preferred the office to home. Whatever the reason for his return, he never made it past the front door. His keycard had been disabled.

Two, three, four times he swiped it across the sensor with a casual, practiced swipe. Nothing happened. He pressed his face against the glass doors and nosed around, eyeing left and right to catch a glimpse of someone inside. The offices beyond stayed dark, inert with a stillness that suggested abandonment.

Nervous, the employee sprinted back to his car and sped away. He made a few phone calls on the way home. Nobody he spoke with knew what to make of his story. He worried.

The following morning on the near side of 9 am, employees began to trickle into the Embassy Suites Hotel in Lynnwood — a boxy lodging north of Seattle couched beside a freeway on an unremarkable stretch of overgrown urban verdure. Passing through the lobby, they made their way to the conference area where a smiling face standing behind a small podium greeted them. That face instructed them to line up single-file and wait. No further information was given.

At that point it’s unclear how many employees had heard the rumors now circulating about this meeting’s true purpose. Perhaps the story of the deactivated access card had gone viral. Certainly the collective mood was darker than the day before. There was no precedent for this cold bureaucratic contrivance.

When the majority of employees had been accounted for, those in the queue were ushered forward past the podium. As each person filed by, he or she gave his or her name to someone from the Human Resources department. That person checked the name given against a printed list and this resulted in a room assignment, one of two options — Mount Baker or Mount Rainier, conference rooms named for prominent Washington State peaks.

Rudely cleaved from friends and colleagues, each employee passed down a narrow hall and then through one of two doors into his or her assigned room. Both rooms filled fast, burbling with persistent chatter as people took their seats. Some minutes beyond the meeting’s advertised start time, occupants of the Mount Baker conference room finally got the news many already feared. A recently installed Humongous executive stood up and addressed them frankly.

They had all been fired.

The occupants of Mount Baker erupted in a rumble of resentment. The exec leapt back and the rented security guards stepped forward. But this precaution was unnecessary. The shock of the moment was quickly morphing into irritation, not violence. With one sharp slice, approximately a third of Humongous Entertainment’s workforce had been wiped out. Easy and efficient. So why bother with all this extravagant and wasteful corporate theater? It was an embarrassing way to go, culled from the herd by an efficient sorting scheme and sent packing with a brief speech. These now-former employees looked around the room and roughly counted the number of heads, looking for faces they knew and making note of those they couldn’t find.

A few dozen feet away, the occupants of Mount Rainier — those who had been spared — were learning the fate of their colleagues. It's impossible to judge how lucky any one of them felt, but almost nobody was what anyone would call relieved. The sadism of this spectacle was too cruel to leave anyone feeling safe. When both meetings concluded a short time later, employees and now-former employees poured into the lobby and spilled into the parking lot in a cyclone of disbelief, anger, and resignation. Then everyone went home.

In the days that followed there remained one last pinch of salt for the wounds of the recently chopped. Terminated employees had been told they would need to make individual appointments to return to the office and collect their personal belongings, a process that would be overseen by a personal escort to prevent any looting or theft of company assets. This procedure did not, however, allow for the collection of any work samples that employees had produced for the company — artwork, documents, examples of code to bolster their portfolios — most of which was tucked safely away on the Humongous’s internal network.

Instead, to honor the dozens upon dozens of requests for material, Humongous invited former employees to send an email with a list of their desired data. If properly vetted and approved, the work would be forwarded. On its face, it was a simple scheme. Whether it bore fruit however, is another matter. At least one former employee I talked to was promised everything he asked for. After weeks of queries, waiting, and follow-ups, he got nothing. After a few months, he stopped asking.

***

Founded one day before Halloween in 1992 by producer Shelly Day and Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert — using a name suggested by fellow adventure-game luminary, Tim Schaffer — the original Humongous Entertainment entered the world as a game studio aimed at a thirsty but underserved pre-teen market. Its first titles were graphic-adventure games modeled on titles published by Gilbert’s alma mater, LucasArts — a rapidly disappearing mainstream genre that neverthless proved incredibly fruitful in a market hungry for top-quality content. Within four years of its founding Humongous had produced more than half a dozen games to relatively consistent critical applause, handily setting itself apart as a company dedicated to providing younger audiences with interactive entertainment of genuine worth.

In 1996 publisher and distributor GT Interactive purchased Humongous for a healthy 76 million. Although this acquisition imposed a broader business strategy on the studio, it left Ron and Shelly in the driver’s seat while giving this homespun Seattle start-up wider reach and deeper pockets. Around that same time, a group of motivated Humongous devs who had been quietly toiling under the auspices of Gilbert’s encouragement created an internal offshoot studio called Cavedog Entertainment with the specific aim of pushing a new real-time strategy IP to market. The result, one year later, was the critically acclaimed Total Annihilation. By the end of the 90s, Humongous Entertainment — still largely under Ron and Shelly’s guidance — was a name synonymous with solid content and credibility.

But this torrent of productivity was not to endure. At the tail end of 1999, parent company GT Interactive fell into a financial tailspin after reporting millions of dollars in losses due to poor sales and mounting restructuring costs. By the start of the holiday season, GT — and Humongous by extension — was up for sale. That December a French holding-company called Infogrames snapped up GT Interactive and its subsidiaries for a tidy price. By January, GT had ceased to exist and the men and women of Humongous Entertainment found themselves beholden to an overseas boss with a spring-loaded armadillo as its mascot.