I used to work at a White Spot restaurant. I started when I was 15 years old, cleaning tables and wiping seats. It was my very first job. Through the years I learned every role outside the kitchen; seating guests, doing dishes, making desserts and waiting tables. I had a spotless record as an employee; I worked hard, I was well liked, I knew every staff member and most of the customers too.
I used the money from that job to purchase my first PC Game: Duke Nukem 3D, which I’d seen running on a state-of-the-art Pentium 133 at the local electronics store. It was cocky, aggressive, violent, sexual, had realistic set pieces – it was everything my teenage mind could hope for in a game. Little did I know, six years later that game would cost me my job.
In 1997, I got into level design. Despite the finicky nature of the Build engine, I learned quickly and loved every minute of it. I picked up a how-to book and within days was running around my own levels. Random maps didn’t do it for me however, I wanted to build places I knew. I wanted to recreate the real world, fill it with aliens and fight to free it from my own infestations.
Unsurprisingly, my first real-world map was based on the only place I spent more time at than my home: White Spot.
I recreated everything; every booth, painting, rack of dishes, juice machine, beer keg, staff room couch… Everything. All the while, I took high-res (800×600!) screenshots of the map in progress and brought them into work. I’d post them on the wall outside the office for people to see. My manager loved it and everyone thought it was great fun.
I wrapped the map in a cheap narrative about aliens abducting Earth’s good restaurants and called it a day.
In December of 2000 I got my first shared hosting account and posted the map, with screenshots and the story, to my website. At the time, White Spot had very little web presence and my map quickly became one of the first page search results for ‘White Spot’ on Google.
Jump again to September 2002. Enter ‘Randy’, the new head manager of our branch (name changed to protect the sleazy). Randy had the odious task of replacing a very well-liked manager and it didn’t help that Randy was not very confident or talented. He earned no respect from the serving staff due to his habits of shamelessly favouring the attractive girls and stepping on people to make himself look good. As a result he was always trying to prove himself in all the wrong ways, attempting to get respect through all the methods least likely to achieve that result.
Three months later, December 2002. A White Spot executive was made aware of my website with the Duke Nukem map, story and screenshots. It was easy to trace it to me – my name and restaurant branch was all over the site. Why wouldn’t it be? After all, I wanted people to be able to see how closely the map resembled the real place. He decided the violence didn’t fit the White Spot image and that it should be taken down.
At the next manager meeting, the exec in question brought a printout of the site and asked Randy to have me remove it from the web. From my discussion with the Head Office staff who had attended that meeting, “take it off the web” was the extent of the instruction.
When I next arrived for work, there was another server already working my shift. My name had been scratched off the time sheet for that day.
Confused, I was immediately called into the office. Randy was waiting.
“You’re in a bit of trouble, Brandon.”
“I am?” He showed me the printout.
“Do you know what this is?”
“Hey cool! That’s my website!” I was excited, I hadn’t shown it to Randy before and had no idea how he’d found it, but I was excited to see it appear on its own through means other than my own promotion.
“Yes, it’s your website. You have to take it down.”
“What? Why?”
“Head office found it. They are very upset about it. The violence doesn’t fit with the image White Spot wants to portray.”
I was disappointed, but otherwise cooperative. “Ok, fine, I’ll take it down after my shift.”
“No, you’ll go home and take it down now.”
“In the middle of my shift?” I pretended not to have seen the time sheet, as I didn’t understand what he was doing.
“Brandon, there’s something else. I have to let you go.”
The blood drained from my face. Did I just get fired? How would I pay for Christmas? Forget that, how was I going to pay for University?
“I don’t understand. I’ve been here for seven years with nothing worse on my record than sleeping in! Your predecessor knew about this project and supported it. I didn’t even know there was a problem!”
“I agree, it seems like you’ve been a great employee and your record is spotless… but I had to do something.”
That was it. He had to do ‘something’. I was in such shock that I didn’t argue any further, I just left as I was told. As I walked out of the office, pale as a ghost, I vaguely recall the head waitress wipe away a tear and say to me “I’m so sorry, it’s not fair. There’s nothing we could do…”
I just drove home, in stunned silence. This may seem trivial now but I was still fairly young, it was 9 days before Christmas and I’d just been fired from the only job I’d ever had.
Appeals to White Spot head office were fruitless. The response from their representative was that he was sorry how things turned out, that he wouldn’t have made that choice and that he hadn’t expected Randy to fire me. However, as manager Randy “should know best” and therefore head office “had to support his decision”. The head office rep didn’t even try and justify the firing; he just apologized and held his hands up in impotent absolution of responsibility. He was a coward.
Ultimately, it worked out for the better. I got a job in webdesign at a large publishing company and made twice as much as I ever did at the restaurant (and never smelled like ketchup when I got home) but I’ll never forget Duke Nukem and what he took from me…
…but nor will I forget the guilt-free freedoms he gave me. The minute I got home that cold day in December, the first thing I did was restart Windows 95 in DOS Mode and run “duke3d map whitespot.map” from the command prompt. You can bet that after Duke cracked his knuckles and I kicked in the front door of that restaurant, I wasn’t aiming for the aliens anymore.
It’s been a long time, Duke. Welcome back.
–Brando
TrueNuff Trivia: The Creative Director at Gearbox, Mikey “Mikezilla” Neumann” actually co-wrote a few of the early TrueNuff Comic strips!
