California
Nope. No luck in getting an offer from Cryptic Studios in California. But after licking my wounds for a couple of days I feel a lot better. My wife still has nightmares in which she is googling like an insane maniac for apartment and schools in the Bay Area, where this company is located. She wakes up in a sweat and can now be comforted by the fact that it was only a dream and it is all over. She did nothing but research that extremely expensive area every waking hour of her day for weeks. The relocation would have been a complete nightmare and I had only sent the resume there for practice anyway. Still, they ruined it for me. The company is top-notch. They work in incredibly interesting multi-player games, their people are really nice, their interviews fair and extremely challenging and their culture is great. When it comes to hiring, they do not care whether you come from the game industry or not. I can not complain. I simply lost fair and square. It is by far the best software company I have ever been in touch with. And yet, they are still a big company. After doing a lot of thinking following the experience, suddenly I could see with clarity that this is not what I want. Being part of a big company is just not me. All of a sudden my dream becomes bigger and way harder to achieve: I need to work in a place where my contribution matters, and where I can do many different types of interesting things and not be confined to a single area for ever and ever. How the heck am I going to do that? Oh man...

In two days I will be interviewing with 2KBoston. At this point it is very hard to know what to expect. I can not seem to spend any time thinking or worrying about it. It will be what it will be. Meanwhile, I will start working part-time at my old company helping with a few tasks for at least a few weeks. The idea of finding enough part-time work to be able to spend the rest of the time working on games independently is extremely appealing right now. Working on my open source project and working with Jonathan in his game, Aztaka, was so much fun. I almost resent having to spend so much time sending resumes, doing coding assignments, phone interviews and all the preparation. But, it is not supposed to be easy. I have to try, though. For as long as I have the strength for the fight, I am shooting for the stars, damn it! :)