Erick Wujcik

I found out this morning that one of my friends died over the weekend.

Erick Wujcik was an unbelievable dude. We worked at Outrage Games together in Michigan. It was my first full time gig in the games industry. Outrage was cranking away on two games at the time: Rubu Tribe and Alter Echo. Rubu Tribe was the company's main focus and I was hired on to be the first full time programmer on the other game. The two games shared technology, but when it came to gameplay code I was the only one. And I had no idea what the fuck I was doing.

So I worked a lot of long hours trying to figure shit out. And my direct supervisor was kind of a dick. It was hard.

I remember one day I was kind of having a freak out near the end of a 16 hour day. No one was in the office. We had a milestone coming up on Alter Echo and I had to have a chunk of the combat system ready to go. At that exact moment it was in a state somewhere between Complete Garbage and Absolute Shit.

It was then that Erick came by my office... man he worked some weird hours. :D He just sat down next to me and started talking in that amazingly nonchalant way of his. He told me that I was doing a great job and that I was one of the main reasons that we were actually going to hit the next milestone payment. He thought I was the one that was holding the project together while most of the company was busy working on the other game. When I look back at it, this wasn't just a confidence boost from a co-worker... it was more like an affirmation that I could succeed in this industry. If someone with as much experience as Erick thought that I was doing a good job, then maybe I actually was.

Erick was an amazing person. I kind of lost touch with him after Outrage dissolved, but he was a joy to talk to whenever I saw him over the past 5 years. I really hope that he's sitting at a folding table in the sky, chilling out with Gary Gygax, poring over the new 4th edition of D&D.

Erick - you are missed. :(

-Brad!