Getting used to this new industry I inhabit has been interesting to say the least. There’s no shortage of ‘competition’ for sure, and there’s so many great people.

One person I’ve been friends with since before I came into the industry and who’s actually become a better friends since, is Peter Moore of EA Sports. Peter has his own blog, and his own blemishes. His blog is here. and if you like console sports games he’s the man.

First off unlike many people in this industry he’s honest to a fault. He’s passionate about his company, his products and unlike so many folks that high on the totem pole his customers matter. He’s talks to them through his blog and in talking to him I know he listens.

There’s a good story here though. About a year ago Todd McFarlane and our executive staff were at EA having a meeting about a future potential partnership. Peter made an off handed comment that went something like this.

“Oh I could kick a 50 yard field goal”

Now normally I might let that pass….Well no, I actually would never let that pass. Having known him awhile I responded with “Bullshit, no chance”.

An immediate ‘discussion’ ensued. The best ‘business decision’ might have been to let this all pass, but like many other times in my career when shutting up was the prudent course of action, I didn’t.

Well needless to say the conversation eventually ended up with a ‘put your money where your mouth is” ultimatum.

I should also mention Peter was a damn good soccer player for most of his life, and is a Liverpool fan. Oh and more importantly, Peter is a die hard, dyed in the wool member of Sox Nation. Even ‘commuting’ to Sox games when he worked at Microsoft in Seattle.

Well Todd picked up on this and later in the day, during the meeting, Peter and I were off chatting, Todd got to work and came up with this masterpiece…

That is what's about to happen, in real life!

So Peter comes back, and we all have a good laugh.

The bet becomes somewhat public, not sure how, but as of today peter is (from what I am told by his trusty assistant Tana Billingsley) 7 yards short of his mark.

Normally I’d gloat, but the fact that this guy, at his age, has kicked even a 43 yarder is incredible!

Suffice to say my boys are playing EA games, all of them to date, at a much cheaper price than they otherwise might have been. If Peter does manage to make this happen expect a lengthy and drawn out 38 Pitches blog post about English Futbol at some point…

Keep kicking Pete! And Go MANCHESTER!!

Well, besides being at 38 Studios pretty much every day around 10 a.m. — after visiting with Eric — I’m filling time with the kids homework (never had much of a chance to stay on top of that before), and trying to actually DO something around the house besides just live in it.

Starting to mess around with some old hobbies. Had an affinity for model railroading that my dad gave me when I was young, which has been fun. Also playing a lot of different new, and older games. There are a few I am hooked on right now, but the one eating most of my time is this! which, btw, you can download from Valve. Valve will soon be the way to get every game you want. Why drive to the mall or store, or order online, when you can get it cheaper, and immediately via a download service?

“>Also into this facebook thing. It gets addicting. Getting all my photos up and connecting with family all over the world is pretty cool. For you parents of teenagers, it’s a fantastic way to ’snoop’ and keep abreast of what they are up to.

Two other cool links are Twitter and Flickr.

On Twitter and Flickr I am under gehrig38. Twitter is an instant messaging service you can follow friends on, a mobile instant messenger really, and Flickr is a free photo holding site you can upload photos to store for use around the web. Both of the sites you can control access to who can and cannot view your pages and material. Very cool stuff.

As far as baseball goes, I have taken the reins of the All Time Greats Pittsburgh Pirate Team here.

Off to a 16-6 start riding a hot Willie Stargell to a one-game lead over the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The league is being managed by some diehards and there are some cool blog reports on the league action so far. I only just heard about Musial going down:) Poor Cards …

First things first.

You don’t have the next Johnny Bench in the wings, you do have some prospects that might potentially be catchers of the future, but you want to win a world series in 2009 and your best possible chance to do that is with Jason Varitek catching. I’m happy for Tek. I wish it would have gone differently but as a friend/fan of his I do know that the process, and the salary will have no bearing on his effort or passion to be as good as he can.

I always enjoy being a customer of good businesses run by good people, with employees that seem to enjoy doing what they do. I have to mention two companies I was a customer of that both left a great impression on me this past week.

I flew SF to LA on Virgin America Airlines. Every single person we ran into from the gate ramp to the plane, to landing and off the plane was beyond kind. A few went out of their way to say hello and have a great day. I love that stuff.

We rented a Enterprise Rent-a-Car, and it was as smooth and quick and easy a customer experience as I’ve had in awhile. It was another company with people that truly seemed to be enjoying their jobs.

I am now a customer of both companies and will use their services over others when I have the opportunity. Oh and neither of those companies is or has paid me a dime to talk nice.

So to the team that flew us to Anaheim on Virgin, and the Enterprise folks at LA and SF, thanks for the nice week. You made the trip bearable.

Ok, I will try and summarize the entire week, if that’s possible, at a bit later time. What I want to do is to start Operation Santa. I am posting APO addresses you can send Christmas presents to our troops at. I will also send recommendations for what I know they talked about, are interested in, or definitely can use. Just know that Camp Bucca is a HUGE facility with thousands of soldiers as well as thousands of Iraqi citizens, and ANYTHING sent there will be used.

Before we get to the soldiers I have been made aware of a fantastic program run by Gary Sinese that facilitates sending HUGE quantities of material for Iraqi children. Please check out this website

Al Asad is a HUGE air base, tons of soldiers that are not going to be home for Christmas. TONS and I MEAN TONS of Sox fans, die hard ones!

1LT Solaita was one of the folks that escorted us around in country for the week. A finer man you won’t meet, pretty much a larger version of Major Donahue:) Solly is a guy that likely won’t and never would ask for anything. Oh, and unbeknownst to me the whole week, the guy’s a Giants fan, so GIants stuff might be in order. Also know that anything you might want to send for children in Iraq Solly could help get out there.

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For you World of Warcraft players out there, you now have a chance to win 1 of 4 hand drawn Todd Mcfarlane originals of YOUR World of Warcraft character for signing up at the Azeroth Advisor Website!

Not often you can get an original Todd McFarlane drawing, of something you want him to draw!

I just finished giving what could only be described as the worst presentation in the history of presentations. It was horrid, absolutely horrid. I am incapable of ‘writing’ a presentation, it’s not who I am.

The 5-10 minutes of opening and the 10 minutes of Q&A at the end I thought were cool and fun and good, everything in between was atrocious. It’s impossible to talk about people, passion, leadership, and all that you feel goes into those things from a ’script’, no matter how prepared you are.

All my life I’ve been motivated by people the do this ‘unscripted’, I can’t stand to listen to ’scripted’ presentations, they come off fake and unfeeling and I just spent 45 minutes doing exactly that.

Never again. You only fail if you quit, otherwise you take the losses and learn, and I learned for the last time today that I am not a ’scripted’ presenter, that hard way.

To the 400 people in the room I apologize for the 45 minutes you’ll never get back!

Heading to San Francisco to deliver the opening keynote tomorrow morning. Way out of my ‘comfort zone’ here, but it should be interesting. Shonda will be speaking on a panel on day 2 regarding charitable work and efforts moving forward in this industry.

I was in, and still am, a discussion about MMO’s and particular pieces to them. There was a few questions I was asking of a veteran community and the responses were fantastic. The two questions were:

1) The one core basic feature would you 100% expect to be in, and expect to be perfected at launch, bug free and ‘cool’

2) What one thing that hasn’t been done well, or at all, in any MMO, would you most like to see as a thoroughly fleshed out mechanic/content piece/UI feature?

After back and forth and seeing answers I came up with my own two answers.

1) A completely thorough and robust ’social’ networking system. I want to be able to communicate, chat, mail, in game out of game, all of it, with anyone anywhere with nothing more than a click or two before entering ‘chat’. Be it a fully integrated VO system or actual in game chat, let me do the thing you want me to, within the framework of an incredibly USER FRIENDLY interaction system. Not only that, but don’t make me ’search’ for the methods and means to do this, make it easy for me and make it as user friendly as anything else you will ever put in your game, more so if you can. I want that one stop one/two click amazon.com experience to be the most I need to do to ever find/talk/interact with my friends, or my potential friends.

2) Make me feel heroic on day 1, minute 1, until I am done playing the game. There are quests, there is gear, there is some semblance of story that can at times make me feel, look, heroic. But damn, I want to be a hero all the time right? By heroic I mean make my actions and choices MATTER in a way other people can see. Not only visually, but damn if I do something ‘heroic’ in a heroic world should people know that beyond the folks in my group? Killing rats with a rusty short sword to get money and experience so I can start to become heroic is not it, not even close. Aren’t you creating a world that needs a hero? Aren’t you creating a world calling for millions of heroes? That doesn’t work if only a few of us can ever get that feeling. Well it does for the few but the rest of us ‘are not worthy’ to the few.

The challenge to me is what people define as ‘Heroic’, and finding the most common ground there. Hey, that’s going to be my next question.

1) Has any game ever made you feel like your character was really heroic?

2) If yes, what game? Why? Was it an acquired thing or was the game designed to make you feel that from start.

3) Does being heroic need to be exclusive to you?

The last question had more to do with thinking about City Of Heroes. I played a small amount of time in that game, but in a ‘city’ or ‘world’ where everyone is a hero, is anyone really a hero?

IPhone user? Want a REALLY cool, fun as hell new app? Check out a game called Fieldrunners!!!! The funnest tower defense game I’ve ever played.

The cool part? Well in addition to the game being cool as hell, it was created by an engineer here at 38 and a small group of his friends. It was ranked #12 on the most downloaded apps as recently as Wednesday! Congrats to Jamie and the guys at Subatomic Studios, LLC!!!! I haven’t read a review below 5 stars yet.

Tampa tied it up last night. Didn’t see much of the game until the last 2 innings due to flying back to Boston from Night to Unite in San Francisco. Had a chance to meet a ton of people across the industry. Congratulations to Miyamoto-san on the recognition of his industry inspiration and lifetime achievement! It was an honor to meet him and talk with him.

Great to meet a bunch of folks from all over the world.

A shout out to Mark Jacobs, the GM of Mythic. I can’t fathom (though I think I will someday soon) the anxiety of the guy leading a company less than 10 days out of launch of what will be the biggest MMO since WoW.

The beta is still fraught with glitches and bugs (though I am pretty sure the big one, a total crash of my computer after lockup, was caused more by my NVIDIA driver being out of date than anything. Though why in the hell is it so hard to get updated drivers for hardware now? I had to search all night to find the latest drivers and then only found them on a eurocom.com website??) but it’s coming along and I think they have done some incredibly new and very innovative things to the gaming space.

Let’s just put it out there now though, Mythic is the cats ass at PvP/RvR…

The system they put in this game has made me a huge PvP fan.

The UI is very clean, very WoW like (not a bad thing) but to me much crisper and cleaner. I’ve played almost every class now through at least 5-6 and enjoyed most all.

Public Quests? Very cool and to me the coolest part. I think they have, and maybe will, introduce much of the WAR world through these. The races and characters not in the launch will make appearances in the PQ imo.

Anyway, we here at 38 are wishing the folks at Mythic the smoothest and biggest launch possible. Every company that raises the bar in the MMO space only adds customers, that’s a good thing. Not to mention the bar for what’s acceptable gets raised a little higher for anyone following, and that’s a great thing.

Oh, and ya, as you might have surmised, I am likely retiring to semi-retiring from WoW when WAR launches. I reserve the right to change my mind, but I think WAR is going to be my game of choice until Copernicus is launched.