i’ve just been notified that i am the gamasutra geek of the year. this is cool, in that anti-cool industry kind of way. my thanks to all the people who voted for me. (i guess…)

in other news, i have recently spent my time working on the catacombs in paris. if you don’t know the history of that place, it’s this: at a certain point, there were too many corpses buried in paris…the cemetaries were piled so high with graves that the dirt was spilling over the edges of the 8 foot graveyard walls into the cobblestone streets. putrid gasses were leaking up out of the ground and making people sick. so the government executed a plan to move all of the buried dead into the tunnels under the city that were hollowed out earlier by stone miners. (the stone was mined to build the city’s amazing structures, leaving a labyrinth of tunnels and chambers in the rock below.) so workers started digging up the dead and transferring them to the tunnels. it became known as the catacombs. the workers got creative in the way they stacked the skulls and other bones, working patterns into the walls. so now, when you tour or hang out there, you are in a maze of human bones. pretty interesting.

like all of warren’s designers here, when i signed on with deus ex, one of my first priorities was taking ownership of some areas that i could get excited about. one of those was paris, because i’d spent time there (when i lived in germany i used to visit france) and because i thought the catacombs would make a perfect game space. we’ll see…so far, so good.

my other major location remains a closely guarded secret, but it excites me even more.

also, i’ve played more fireteam lately. the game is still addictive and the frame rate seems to have improved dramatically since the first beta test a while back. for more on fireteam, go here: http://www.fireteam.com/