TheCollective01

Would you consider getting together with the real life versions of Good Guy Greg, Scum Bag Steve, and Annoying Facebook Girl to form some sort of internet super hero crime fighting group?

just be yourself and party

That is some next level Abraham Lincoln caliber quote material right there.

A waifu?

I worked there between 2000 and 2002, right up to the end when they laid off all 250+ employees at the main branch (they did keep the Westwood Irvine branch open a bit longer; I think C&C Generals was the result of this if I'm not mistaken). I had just graduated high school in 1999, and I had no experience in the industry. I remember passing in front of Westwood's offices almost every day (they were right down the street from Cimmarron High School where a lot of my friends went) and thinking to myself "Man, I wish I worked there". Well, I was working at Olive Garden at the time, but I was really sick of it, and almost on a lark, went and applied at Westwood. I somehow got the job and quit Olive Garden that day :P

I came in on the test cycle of Emperor: Battle for Dune. The one thing I remember the most is how hard we worked on it. It was very buggy, and we did 6 months of straight testing, including 3 months of crunch time. At one point, we were working 10-12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week to make sure we didn't release a buggy product to the public. After that, we moved on to C&C Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge (I did a little testing on C&C Red Alert 2 prior to that). It was great fun, playing the hell out of the game, using every unit against every other unit, doing every thing we could to break the game and catch the bugs. Then when Yuri's Revenge released, we moved on to C&C: Renegade. This was also a lot of fun; in fact beta testing an FPS is more fun than RTS because you just play the hell out of the game any which way you can trying to break it, find areas in the walls where you get stuck, use every weapon against every enemy, explore every area, etc (using developers tools so you had God mode, weapons codes, etc.). A few months into the test cycle I actually got promoted to the design team; I worked in a QA capacity directly with the designers and helped out on some multi-player map design.

I do remember the one fateful day I came into work and they gathered the whole QA department up in the office and basically announced that the company had been bought out by EA and we were all getting laid off, with unemployment benefits and a small severance package. I don't know about anybody else, but I had no idea this was going to happen; it was a complete surprise. It felt like the rug had been yanked out from under me. I remember feeling pretty lost and had no idea what I was going to do after that. It was an awesome job.

The offices were really cool. There was Westwood merchandize/posters everywhere, and there was a lot of activity between the departments. We had really cool employee outings; we went and saw movies as a company (Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, movies like that). We would have a big employee lunch/BBQ type thing at least every month or so, and we'd always get catered lunches at least a couple of times a week. Walking the halls, you would always run into someone really cool, like Joe Kucan (Kane), Mike Legg (current president of Petroglyph), Lewis Castle (co-founder) and of course Frank Klepacki. It definitely felt like a family. The studio where they filmed many of the cut-scenes was in a big building off the main offices and that was always cool to visit because there was always something going on there. A lot of my co-workers had bit parts in the cut scenes, and I even did some voice acting (unit death screams) that made it into Emperor: Battle for Dune.

It was definitely the best job I've ever had, and I miss the hell out of it. Feels good to revisit those days in this comment :P

I beta tested Yuri's Revenge (former Westwood employee here) :P