Joe Gillum sits directly across from me in the blue pod. He’s an easy-going guy and a talented designer, and he’s been my friend for over seven years. But what he said to me on that particular Monday morning sent a cold shiver down my spine.

“I reinstalled Eve this weekend.”

Robot’s designers are a quirky bunch. We’ve got an ex-Navy man, an ex-rock singer, and an ex-molecular biologist. We’ve all been working together for a long time and know each other’s temperments, quirks, and skills.

One of Joe’s best qualities is that he’s an excellent “fun farmer.”  He can find any game’s redeeming features and learn valuable design lessons in the process. He’s skilled at the soft sell; a casual mention of what he played over the weekend often gets other Robots purchasing a game they might never have bought on their own.

Joe’s not alone. Almost all of Robot's employees are evangelists for the games we love. Because we’re weak and peer pressure works all too well, our relentless promotion of those games infects those around us.

Like addicts no longer satisfied by gateway drugs, some of us have developed extreme tastes. How else to explain the internal Robot “Grognards” mailing list, where Rob Fermier and Mike McGlumphy discuss the latest obscure hex-based World War 2 wargame and Harter Ryan waxes enthusiastically about the 300 page manual included in the “Admiral’s Edition” of War in the Pacific? Where else could a game like Dwarf Fortress – a frighteningly deep and complex city builder that uses ASCII characters instead of graphics, like an old-school Roguelike – slowly make its way from Ian Fischer’s laptop onto a dozen other machines?

But firing up Eve again? That was just wrong - so very, very wrong.

We’d all gone down the Eve road years before. A bunch of us had played together when the game first launched in 2003. Many of us were veterans of Ultima Online and Everquest, excited by a fresh setting for an MMO. The game swept through the office like wildfire. For a couple of months, all anyone talked about were the best places to mine Kernite and how to survive in low-sec space.

Our herd of developers is easily led to the gaming trough, but we also have short attention spans. Ian Fischer, who had set up our original Eve corporation, played constantly. Whenever I’d log in, I’d immediately get a chat - “COME MINE, CORP NEEDS MEGACYTE.”  Since Ian’s my boss, Eve started to feel like a second job. I was ready to move on to the next game.

Eventually we all caught the World of Warcraft bug and everyone stopped playing Eve. But with our gang, it doesn’t take much to relight an old flame. Within a month of Joe’s casual mention of Eve, all the old players crawled out of the woodwork. I hopped back on first, enthusiastically discussing the new features with Joe every day at lunch. Before long, Mike Coker and Rob Fermier joined in. Then Ian confessed he’d never actually cancelled - in fact, he still had multiple active accounts with several high-end characters.

I don’t know how long this fresh bout of “Eve fever” will last. Ian’s already taking things to extremes; he wants to get all of us in a PvP gang some day at lunch and camp a warp gate. Mike Coker’s got a second account now. My poor pregnant wife is due next month, and we’ve got a game of our own to create – do I really have time to devote to an MMO?

Then again...

Just last week, Tim Deen and Jerome Jones were playing that free Battlefield Heroes game from EA. I’ve been in the mood for a shooter. And while I don’t like anime at all, that BlazBlue game sounds pretty cool. I could even get some tips from Justin Rouse, our resident fighting game expert.

At this very moment, Joe’s sitting right across the blue pod from me, working away. Time to show him a few screenshots from War in the Pacific.

- Dave "Learguy" Leary