World of Warcraft at Ten Ton Hammer

Ten Ton Hammer: Obviously you’re a big MMO gamer. When and how did you start gaming? Did you start with World of Warcraft, or were you involved with different games before that?

Steve's first MMO was City of Heroes.

Steve: I played a decent number of games, but the first MMO I really tried was City of Heroes. That one didn’t last that long for me because the end-game content is pretty limited, but I started playing WoW pretty much right when it came out, and I’m still playing. That’s obviously a credit to the game design. It’s kept my attention for four years.

Ten Ton Hammer: Were you a Warcraft fan before the MMO came out? Is that how you’d learned about the game?

Steve: I had just heard that it was coming out, and I was actually working at Square in Hawaii on the Final Fantasy movie when I heard that they were making a Warcraft MMO. It was years later that it finally came out, but I had played Warcraft and Warcraft II a little bit. That said, one of my favorite games was Dune II, which was pretty much the original RTS game. When I first played Warcraft, I thought it was done by the same developers because it was almost identical.

I’ve also played a lot of Magic: The Gathering, which isn’t really a video game, but that took up a decent amount of my gaming time.

Ten Ton Hammer: So you’re just a true geek at heart, aren’t you?

Steve: If you saw the Oscars and the post interview, I do wear glasses and my haircut is from the early 80s. I definitely fit in.

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you know of any other celebrities that play MMOs? I mean, Peter Jackson looks like the quintessential gamer…

Steve: I honestly have no idea whether he plays or not. There was an interview with him at one point where he says that he enjoys playing Halo, but I don’t know if that was just because he was working on the Halo movie at that time or not.

There are a lot of people that I work with that play, and every once in awhile you see someone with their laptop open, doing some auction house buying while they’re at work.