My Time with Cookie
Mar. 28th, 2013 03:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
womzillaThis is a story I've told orally many times, but it appears I've never written it down.
From 1992 until 2001, I worked for Crossover Technologies, a small and never particularly successful games company--well, we did some other projects as well, but our core business was online games. From 1995 to 1997, I was the producer for our first web-based game, REINVENTING AMERICA. ReUS was a massively multiplayer public policy game built around groups of people trying to influence the Congressional budget process. (Remember when America had a Congressional budget process? Truly, the mid-1990s were a lost golden age.)
Reinventing America was funded by a public policy nonprofit called The John and Mary Markle Foundation. They were interested in all sorts of ways to harness emerging information technologies for good government/public good projects--one of their big initiatives in the previous year was a study of universal e-mail access. The president of the Markle Foundation at the time was a man named Lloyd Morrisett, a marvelously smart and charming gentleman in his mid-60s, tall, aristocratic--I've joked for years that he looked more like Julius Caesar than any person I've ever met.
The Markle Foundation wasn't really Lloyd's claim to fame, though. 30 years earlier, he had the insight that his 3-year-old daughter might like to watch a funny, genuinely educational tv show, and he cofounded Children's Television Workshop.
On the set of CTW's first show, one of the things he was legendary for was his unerring instinct for when the dessert cart was going to show up, and making a beeline for the cookies.
During the period I knew him, he had a sizable office in the Time-Warner Building; behind his desk was a mantel with a few of his many awards and honors. And in the absolute center, a 3" tall figurine of the Cookie Monster.
When I moved to New York, it never occurred to me that I would end up working for a muppet. But I did, and it was an honor.
Here's a recent photo of Lloyd and his greatest claim to immortality:
ETA: Lots o' links.
From 1992 until 2001, I worked for Crossover Technologies, a small and never particularly successful games company--well, we did some other projects as well, but our core business was online games. From 1995 to 1997, I was the producer for our first web-based game, REINVENTING AMERICA. ReUS was a massively multiplayer public policy game built around groups of people trying to influence the Congressional budget process. (Remember when America had a Congressional budget process? Truly, the mid-1990s were a lost golden age.)
Reinventing America was funded by a public policy nonprofit called The John and Mary Markle Foundation. They were interested in all sorts of ways to harness emerging information technologies for good government/public good projects--one of their big initiatives in the previous year was a study of universal e-mail access. The president of the Markle Foundation at the time was a man named Lloyd Morrisett, a marvelously smart and charming gentleman in his mid-60s, tall, aristocratic--I've joked for years that he looked more like Julius Caesar than any person I've ever met.
The Markle Foundation wasn't really Lloyd's claim to fame, though. 30 years earlier, he had the insight that his 3-year-old daughter might like to watch a funny, genuinely educational tv show, and he cofounded Children's Television Workshop.
On the set of CTW's first show, one of the things he was legendary for was his unerring instinct for when the dessert cart was going to show up, and making a beeline for the cookies.
During the period I knew him, he had a sizable office in the Time-Warner Building; behind his desk was a mantel with a few of his many awards and honors. And in the absolute center, a 3" tall figurine of the Cookie Monster.
When I moved to New York, it never occurred to me that I would end up working for a muppet. But I did, and it was an honor.
Here's a recent photo of Lloyd and his greatest claim to immortality:
ETA: Lots o' links.
