Matt Piersall just wrote an incredibly touching post on his blog. It took me a bit by surprise so it's hard to come up a response that does it justice, especially in the public eye. But I'll give it a shot, and talk a bit about the value of having friends to work with as an independent contractor.

It's not easy being out on your own. It's hard to stay motivated when times get tough, and without a kindred spirit to chat with, bounce ideas off of, and help me pull through with great audio at the last minute, it's going to get painful. In fact that's how things were for the first couple years I was in this biz, before I really started meeting other people who do what I do. I only wish I had gotten out there sooner.

Another thing is accountability. When you are working on a project with a friend, you want to pull through and make it happen. Having a teammate can really help you to do good work and be inspired about the project.

For example, I was out visiting Matt in Texas two months ago, and the two weeks I spent there were the most productive I've had...ever. Despite being away from the comforts of my home studio (all I brought was a laptop and headphones!), the sheer energy of the Okratron office kept me going and going. What, it's 8:30 already? Let's grab some dinner.

Another vital part of friendship in collaboration is that game projects are so amorphous. The game you ship is never the game you envisioned when you read the design doc and chatted with the producer the year before. Unexpected things happen and if every contract had to be enforced to the letter, and drawn up ahead of time in detail, the relationship won't work out. Having someone you trust is crucial.

Beyond the trust issue, there is a purely economic benefit to working with friends. It's the human, emotional connection that needs to take place in the "high context" talk of game audio folks. Here's what I mean:

Think about how you talk with your close friends. You can convey a whole emotion in a single gesture, a single sentence, that would take a paragraph to convey to a stranger. It's like a cultural connection, but only shared between two people. There's also the connection of game developers: words you have to experience to understand: Beta. Crunch. QA.

Now game audio pros have an extra level of high context communication at their disposal: Tagged to video. Reference. Placeholder. Slammed. Clipped. Spotting. Zimmer. Textural.

Basically, you can communicate whole concepts through single words. Knowing someone personally takes this to a new level. With Matt, we can cover a whole project milestone in a brief phone call because we've done this together so many times.

When you work on your own, motivation upkeep is the vital. You can visit fan sites, play games, read reviews, revisit classic game soundtracks that got you interested in this line of work, but ultimately you're going to need someone to help you out when times get tough.

It's never a question of whether Matt can handle the work on a new project (he always can). I just hope he always has time to work considering all the AAA titles he's doing lately and will be doing in the future. Nevertheless, even if we weren't collaborating on any titles, we would still have our fireside chats and so forth.

I know this got pretty philosophical and got a bit away from its original point, which is that Matt, you're an awesome friend. Strong bow. Exploding high five.