Saying Goodbye to the Best Gig I Ever Had

Written in the first week after his last day at Grab, and unusually gentle for Yegge: jokes where the score-settling would normally go. The running gag is vampirism — Seattle days that began with 1pm meetings and ended with 3am ones, and a boss, Mark Porter, who Steve swears removed the mirrors from his workspace and sleeps in a padded coffin by day, rising with the moon for all-night calls with Asia. Under the jokes sits culture material beyond what the blurb covers: Singapore's British-inherited devotion to process ("the usual paperwork lah"), and the rule that a stakeholder you lack a trust relationship with must never, ever be brought a solution. Bring the problem instead; solutions alarm people. Steve says twice that he could write a book about all this, and the dozen paragraphs here read like that book's compressed trailer.

The second half is an announcement. Steve had a private rule against ever discussing it at Grab, and here the rule expires: Wyvern, the MMORPG he had been building since late 1995, becomes his pandemic startup, with a Steam launch penciled in for the end of 2020. He is candid about the catch — a getting-started experience so rough it loses "well over 99% of new players" — and about betting on a game that looks, in his own words, like it was designed by a third grader. There is also a small-world story connecting Grab's Chief Architect search back to the game, best read in place. Two essays share the page, really: a thank-you note to the best gig he ever had, and the opening of the chapter that followed it.