Blood, sweat and buckets of coffee.

Sure, we make it look easy.

I can’t tell you how often we’ve had visitors to the office who, after meeting the modestly-sized magazine team, wonder how the heck we manage to produce a few dozen pages of content every week. Piece o’ cake. By cake I mean triathalon. Yes, piece o’ triathalon (this is why I’m not on the writing staff)…

What I’m trying to say is that it’s a difficult process each week. All rewarding accomplishments are challenging by nature, so I’m happy to say The Escapist falls into this category. Challenging (like a triathalon!). It’s not uncommon for some of us to show up at the office from anywhere between 7:30am and 10:00am, but then we’ll trickle out starting around 7:30pm – some even wrap up at 10:00pm or later. In this industry 10 hour days aren’t uncommon at all, and we’re no exception. Personally, the longest ‘day’ I worked straight was about 18 hours (Even longer at E3). Everyone here consistently runs at 200%. It’s exhilarating, exhausting and extremely satisfying.

Why/How do we do it?

How does anyone accomplish anything difficult? Two ways, really. They hate it, but realize it’s gotta get done and push through anyway, hoping somewhere down the line it’s worth it or proves something poignant. Or they love it, and the rest doesn’t matter. I love what I do. I never get up in the morning and loathe the idea of heading into the office. I believe what we do really matters (And the feedback we get seems to agree). I think the topics we discuss here are the important ones that people are thinking about right now. I think some of the people who read this magazine are the same ones who will be driving gaming (and everything games touch) in the future. I think if I can have some small part of that, some ability to inform or inspire some of the decisions made for our gaming future then – Hell – even deal man.

So here’s your job: Take what you can from this place, and go make a difference.