‘Bloody Sox’ Schilling Teams Up With The Man Who KILLED CHEWBACCA

So, while doing research for the QuesTec post, I ended up trawling around on the ol’ web for Curt Schilling information, since it was Schilling who actually took a bat to a QuesTec camera. One of his many interests, which his current lengthy DL stint is probably giving him time to pursue, is a videogame development company that he founded, whose goal is to create games to compete with World of Warcraft. Schilling himself is an avid fan of Everquest, which is an older World of Warcraft-esqu game: you can read forums where he posts about the game, under the name “Ngruk.”

Schilling’s game company was initially called “Green Monster Games” but he changed it to “38 Studios,” because he couldn’t get anyone to believe that his choice of name had nothing at all to do with the out field wall at Fenway—he claims that it was proposed to him by a foreigner who had never even heard of baseball.

And, one of the minds enlisted to create the new company’s first game is R.A. Salvatore. Salvatore normally makes his living turning out fantasy dreck by the pound, but he once took some time off to write “Vector Prime,” a Star Wars novel set after the events of the movies, in which Chewbacca dies—which death caused a predictable controversy amongst Star Wars fans. (I actually think that the reports of the Wookie’s death were exaggerated—I thought I heard him providing color commentary during Saturday’s game on Fox)

On some level, it makes sense that a man who plays a game for a living should be interested in games where you actually play at ‘life,’ since part of the appeal of the massive online multi-player genre seems to be that you control a character’s entire development and activities. On the other hand, it flies in the face of stereotypes and contradicts common sense: you play those games because you want to be a hero, someone mythical or larger than life. Curt Schilling is a hero: he helped break the most famous curse in baseball, while blood leaked out of his foot on national television. Why does he feel the need to supplant this by killing digital dragons? And since when do jocks even know how to use computers?...oh right, since the ‘90s.