A Look Back
There isn’t much to tell about my time working on this game as I only spent less than a month working on it. The development teams for Blades Of Steel were based in Japan and I was by myself working on it with little if any real feedback. I am pretty sure I was selected for this because I was Canadian and they knew I loved hockey.
My first task was compiling the stats of every player in the NHL, their birthplace, age, position, height, weight, etc. This was back in the early days of the internet, so it was an incredibly slow process and I knew of no easy way to pull from a database. Once I had all that data, I had to come up with a formula for ranking every player in a wide variety of stats, such as shot accuracy, likelihood to fight, etc. Again, I had no idea about how this is done and had to figure out Excel on my own and lots of trial and error.
Once I had everything set up, I sent everything off and that was really the end of my involvement. Well, that’s not quite true. Since I was the only person working on the game living in North America, I was the lucky person who got to meet with Jaromir Jagr, and present him with the cover of the game. That was a very surreal experience for a 21 year old: working in games and getting to hang out with a famous hockey player.