My Dad's Work And The Sony Offices Next Door

Occasionally in the 90s, I'd visit my dad's workplace in Foster City, CA. He was a general contractor and the company he worked for occupied around half of a building in a business park. Look at this beauty:

In May 1994, in the run-up to the Western launch of the PlayStation, Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA) moved into that same building, and then in 1995, Sony Interactive Entertainment, previously a distinct branch of the conglomerate, merged with SCEA and Sony's percentage of the building increased to accommodate the transferred employees. A few months after that, the British video game company Psygnosis, purchased by Sony Imagesoft in 1993 after Psygnosis' Lemmings series took off, moved their US headquarters in, too.

These companies were secretive, but their logos were up on their doors, so as Dad or Mom walked me through the building's lobby, I'd see this

and this

and know there were video games being made and marketed and met about in my vicinity. Sony had blackout curtains over their windows, but sometimes they'd open those and I could look up from the parking lot and see a poster or cardboard standee, and I'd feel how Tom Cruise's Eyes Wide Shut character must have when he said "fidelio" and the mansion guards let him in to see all that bonin'.

My dad had an electronic copyboard in his office, which looked something like this

The big whiteboard panel could scroll and print off a black and white copy of whatever you'd drawn, so when I'd visit, I'd spend a fair amount of time shuffling Dad's work away, drawing stick figures, writing my name, writing words like "butt," etc. in the blank space and creating little Xerox-quality prints of the art. I thought this was great, and I also knew there were people a couple hundred feet away playing Spyro the Dragon sequels months before release.

I wasn't disappointed in my dad, I didn't wish he worked for Sony, but I very badly wanted to look around their side of the building. I had the fantasies you have when you're a kid, where you think maybe the Sony people will need a new tester and they'll see me walking around the parking lot and yell "Hey, kid, you know how to work a controller?" and I'd go "Who's asking?" and ten minutes later I'd be playing Crash Bandicoot 3 and telling a developer to tighten up the graphics in level 5.

That fantasy feels especially misguided and selfish now that I know how much my father sacrificed his health, both knowingly and not, working in construction yards before he got the job that allowed him that electronic copyboard. And, like, he put me through college and gave me a good life on that salary. It's probably better he did what he did in that office, even if the Psygnosis people were making a half-broken A Bug's Life game nearby and that seemed way cooler than the general contractor world. I was 8, I would have thought Damaged Playground Equipment Reseller was an awesome job. If my 4-year-old had any idea what I do now, and then I told him some people make their living feeding old books into large language models and then throwing those books into shredders, he'd think that was the way to go. He'd think the people running focus groups to ensure kids get addicted to Cocomelon were cool.

I didn't become a video game tester, but I'd see them hanging around outside the building. They'd smoke cigarettes and play hacky sack. One of the testers, perhaps their leader, would play a digeridoo.

I was never present for any of this, but the Sony people would call in bomb threats every Friday afternoon so they could go home early. If security got a bomb threat, they were required to empty the building out, and then the hacky sack ensemble would celebrate and go home and probably play more PlayStation games while everybody else responded however you'd respond to evacuation orders and the building's other tenants, who didn't have pockets as deep as Sony's, took a hit. I'm not sure how much time passed before authorities to end this routine, but my understanding is this went on for a while. Maybe the regular work closures accounted for Professional Underground League of Pain being delayed or something. Maybe there would have been fewer bugs in Psygnosis' Spice World game if xXdigeridØØmXx hadn't made police search that office every week.

There's the life I have and there's the life I want, where I work less and have more free time, and there're the things I'd have to do to have the second life.

This morning, waiting for the bus, I read a few articles about real estate. There are some forgotten TV actors (yes, one was David Spade, whose awfulness always fascinates me and who I bring up too much) who are doing just fine because they bought property when they were making 90s sitcom money and now they're making most of their living being landlords. And the guy from the band Wavves was in the news last month, which reminded me of when he got roasted for renting out expensive apartments in Silver Lake. This all sounds self-aggrandizing and I don't want you to infer I think I'm doing anything good, or that I'm not bad in other ways. I'm not doing anything good. I am bad in other ways.

But I thought about the freedom of being a landlord and I thought about the people in the Sony offices calling in bomb threats.