Purcells on Wheels

Sadly, we had to return to Orlando to attend the memorial service last week for my friend and business partner, Erick, who passed away after a long and courageous battle with cancer at the age of 41.  Erick, Dan and I founded n-Space in 1994 with nothing more than $300 and an idea that if we were going to work 100 hour weeks to get a project done, we could do it for ourselves as easily as for someone else, and have more say in the direction and outcome of a project.  It turns out we were not entirely correct in that assumption, but still, 14 years later n-Space is still going strong.
More than a little of that success is due to the confidence and boundless optimism with which Erick approached not just the business, but everything in life.  I often liken the life of an independent game developer to a roller coaster ride in the dark.  There are many ups and downs due to circumstances beyond your control (business cycles, console lifecycles, competing products, contract cancellations, etc.), and you can’t see the track ahead to brace yourself for the twists and turns.  Although I love riding roller coasters, even in the dark, I prefer my life on a much more stable footing, feet planted firmly on the ground.  Erick, however, thrived on the challenge.  He had the heart and soul of a gambler.
Above and beyond confidence in himself though, Erick was gifted with the ability to sell that confidence to others.  When times were darkest at n-Space, and my own pessimistic call would have been to throw in the towel, Erick was always sure that success was right around the corner and convincing in his arguments that we should just hang in there a little longer.  Invariably he turned out to be right, and the roller coaster started climbing the next hill.
Erick was, in fact, responsible for my giving up on living in Northern Virginia and transplanting myself to Orlando in the first place.  Our boss at Lockheed Martin (nee Martin Marietta, nee GE Aerospace) gave Erick the job of finding a temporary transfer to help with some assembly language and C programming work on the game project that Martin was working on with Sega, which ended up with the highly exciting title “Desert Tank.”  Somehow, despite my total lack of ability to sell myself in a phone interview (which fact Erick alluded to in a conversation years later), Erick chose me to rescue from the “Awaiting Clearance” pool in NoVa, and that 8 week temporary assignment turned into 15 years in Orlando.  But for that happy circumstance I’d probably be still locked in a secure lab in a windowless building, working on something not nearly as interesting as games turned out to be.
Kanpai Erick, you’ll be sorely missed.