TLDR: I love this job, I love this game, and I love you guys (except for those that I don't).
Hi, my name is
Hosun "Black Pebble" Lee, and I've been your soulless marketing guy for the past two and a half years. That's not a joke, either. I like kicking puppies, eating panda bears, and throwing water balloons at cub scouts escorting the elderly across the street.
Then I grab a smoothie and come into work.
In The Beginning.....
I've always loved video games. I had a Nintendo when I was a kid, but we couldn't afford the actual games, so I rarely got to play it, and never enjoyed Zelda. I did, however, have a computer, and I loved every single game I played on it, from King's Quest to Star Control to Wing Commander to Thexder to Curse of the Azure Bonds and more.
Not too long ago (but it was long ago), some friends of mine invited me to join them in this new MMO they were playing called
City of Heroes. I told them no, no way! I've never played an MMO, but I heard about them. They were supposed to be REALLY hard, and VERY time consuming, and oh yeah....you got ganked ALL THE TIME. No thank you! Of course, I heard about this game already.....how? Well when I was taking a GMAT prep course for grad school, my instructor was a guy named
Jack Emmert.....
As you can guess, I changed my mind, and I've never regretted doing so (except for the times I did).
City of Heroes was my first, and favorite MMO ever. This was a game where I could rocket through the skies, fight hand to hand against GIANT ROBOTS (I LOVED Kronos Titan!), and explode in a fiery nuke that tossed 30 bad guys into the air. I have never found any game, MMO or non, that could still give me that awesome sense of being overpowered.
Which was why my first character was a Fire/Rad Controller. Back in the days when they were DPS machines and could summon 12 fire imps at a time. Before ED. Before Travel Suppression. I'd pop all the imps, superspeed and phase shift into mobs and pretty much solo anything in the game. Women, children and robots would all swoon in my presence, as they sensed the awesome presence of....ME.
Which pretty much stopped once Fire Imps got nerfed, and my heart shriveled up as I grew bitter and angry, cursing this cruel world! I haven't played my Fire/Rad since then. 
And what kind of role would an angry, heartless monster follow? Marketing, of course. So
City of Heroes set me on my career path (not really though).
Becoming a Paragon(er)
Many years and nerfs later, I was given the opportunity to join Paragon Studios. I was terrified. After all these years, I would finally get the chance to work on THE MMO.....the game that pretty much defined me as a gamer. Of course I said yes.
I had worked in marketing and entertainment before, but never for a large studio. I remember one of my first projects was working on the
Issue 17 trailer. About 2 weeks into it, I came to a frightening realization.....I was in charge of the trailer. In hindsight, this explained A LOT....such as why people kept asking me what to do, how to set things up and if the storyboard was approved. I just figured they were being nice to me.....
I came up with the name "
Black Pebble" while scouring the forums. One European player (
AmazingMoo) called marketing at Paragon, "
the silent Black Pebble." I sure wasn't silent, but I thought it'd be pretty fun for me to pick BP as my redname.
Then a week later, there was the BP oil spill in the gulf which caused billions and trillions of dollars in damage, and I
really wished I picked a different name instead.
Best Memories
- I think one of the best memories I have of Paragon was getting my name in the Going Rogue manual. I was so excited about it. In my mind, it meant I accomplished something. My mother, however, didn't agree. She was convinced that I was risking my soul by working on something so obviously satanic. (Little did she know that I had no soul to risk!)
- I loved going to conventions. My first San Diego Con was great, running around setting up computers, managing interviews (and watching Matt curse as Jesse beat him out for an interview on G4TV), and getting to meet our players for the first time. My big contribution that year was coming up with the Facepalm t-shirts.
- One conversation during the Going Rogue launch party was particularly memorable.
"Hi, I'm Hosun. I work in marketing. You probably hate me." - Me, as I shake ANONYMOUS PLAYER'S HAND.
"Oh no, we don't hate you. We just hate that Black Pebble Guy." - ANONYMOUS PLAYER WHOSE NAME I ACTUALLY KNOW.
He didn't get a costume code card.
- The Three Wolves Shirt to promote the Animal Pack. The challenge was I had no idea what Three Wolves were or what memes were. But it worked, and people thought I did it on purpose.
- The Flowbee contest for the first Pummit (as well as convincing everyone to call it Pummit instead of FPS like Andy wanted....). That came from a conversation with our PR team, where I was trying to come up with random ideas that could get us press attention, and at one point I suggested, "Why don't we have Matt cut someone's hair with a Flowbee?" That somehow blossomed into a full-fledged costume contest where we ended up flying the winner out to attend the Pummit. Of course, the winner was bald so we did the next best thing....cut Matt's hair instead.
- There was also the time that Keetsie "Tunnel bRat" La Bamba Dazunga Lagrange Mazinga de Oobeoobe assaulted me. Which I think was actually every day.
Coolest Things I Got To Do
- I love generating assets (screenshots and trailers). Most people don't know this, but I am a pretty hardcore demorecord user. With Tim "Black Scorpion" Sweeney and Ryan "No Redname" Roth's help, we even figured out how to do awesome stuff like Depth of Field. I even had a python script that stripped out most VFX so I could make the screenshots cleaner. Most of my screenshots were layers where I outputted the characters, backgrounds and effects separately. That's why you'll notice that in any screenshot I personally made, you see almost no buffs or debuffs on the characters (those really made my life a pain). In fact, most of the large group shots were done by me editing the demorecord file on one computer to make it look like we had 6+ characters interacting at the same time. I was even able to sneak in a major improvement (actually two) to demorecord for Issue 24.....
- My favorite trailers I worked on were the Freedom launch trailer, as well as the Issue 22 trailer. The former because I got to do my dream shot, which is of 30+ heroes flying up into the air. The latter because it was the action-packed story-driven trailer I always wanted to do. When I say I worked on a trailer I mean I actually worked on them. In most of the trailers, I'm either the camera or one of the many "actor characters." It was pretty crazy and stressful, but totally worth it. I remember freaking out some beta testers during the Freedom beta testing, because I spawned a bunch of NPC's and a Goliath Warwalker in the middle of Praetoria. That's right Makofan, that was me!!!
- WST's. That was my idea, which Tim figured out how to implement.
- The Rocket Board (with Colin's help).
- Killing Statesman (It seemed like a good idea at the time).
- My Wall of Hate Mail/Posts. Whenever I got a message or forum post going on about how much I suck or demanding that I be fired (and there were A LOT), I'd print it out and stick it onto my wall. It was a good reminder to always have a sense of humor.
The Friendships
Matt and
Melissa were my heroes from the moment I started playing this game. For a very long time, I was too scared to even talk to them at work. But it wasn't long before they became two of my greatest friends and mentors. Melissa was quick to realize that I was having some difficulty fitting in with the dev team, and she took me under her wing to help me understand how to be a better team player. Matt took a lot of crud from me, but he also saved my life (literally). One time, I passed out at work, and Matt quickly dragged me to his car, drove me to the Emergency Room, and stayed with me all day until I was stable. You cannot find friends or co-workers like Matt or Melissa ANYWHERE but at Paragon.
- There are too many other people to thank. Ross and Brian, who took a chance on a seemingly spastic guy, seeing the potential that others didn't, having the patience to work with me, and having the humor to listen to my wild ideas.
- Colin "No Red Name Again" Brown and I were notorious at coming up with crazy things to do in the game, from the Facepalm emote, to the Rocket Board to SOMETHING WHICH I CAN'T TALK ABOUT.
- Tim "Black Scorpion" Sweeney, aside from being the smartest guy I know whose only ever made one mistake (in his words!), was my partner in crime in getting Woofers into the game.
- Keetsie and the "cough cough" "leaked" auras.....We had a great war going on every day of the week, always trying to 1-up each other. (Though I won....ask her what her screen saver says!)
- Matt "Television" Stults and Rob "Where's Me Lucky Charms" Anderberg, both COH tech leads who dealt with my harassment far too gentlemanly.
- The entire QA team, including Alpha Wolf, Arbiter Curry, FireMan, TheNut and more (including my "son"...who is actually older than me). I like to think I was pretty good at finding and documenting bugs, and I was an honorary member of the QA team. They tend to think otherwise.
- The art team, from David to Bill to Cheryl to Eric to Don to Leo to Gilbert to Ray to Nelson to Aaron and so on. All of whom listened to me more than they should have.
- And the rest of the dev team such as Protean, who liked my idea for having a story arc called "50 Shades of Crey." Or Sean, who did the impossible on a daily basis. Or Ryan, who was like Sean but sane.
I Gotta Wrap This Up
I wrote about 3x what I planned.... I just wanted to tell you guys that I love every minute of working on this game. I'm sure I'll come up with other things to share, so I'll talk about them at a later point. We've got some time to kill.
Thanks for being there, guys.
WELL THANKS FOR NOTHING.
