I, and the rest of Human Code, was sold to Sapient Corporation at the end of August, 2000. Though there was a great deal of trepidation initially, it was generally accepted that it was for the best (HC has been growing rather faster than it could manage and things were starting to slide). After the assimilation and initial shake-up, things returned pretty much to normal. I had been working on the Dinosaur Activity Center localization and this continued. The Dinosaur Activity Center itself consisted of 5 distinct sub-games and so Disney wanted to produce "Hot Shots" consisting of one or two of these sub-games packaged separately. We produced ten languages, where each language needed a full game, two or three Hot Shots, and a demo. This came out to 40+ builds (PC/Mac hybrids) that had to go through the full alpha-beta-gold testing cycle! Luckily we had designed the game from the start to support localization, so updating the game was just a matter of swapping assets and an .ini file. The installers, on the other hand, were an entirely different matter. I was the only programmer on the localization team and was in charge of replacing assets, building new installers, and burning the hybrid CDs, as well as any incidental debugging that came up. It didn't occur to me to take any screen shots of this project but you can look at the US version of the Dinosaur Activity Center and pretend that the voice overs are speaking German if you want :) Once the Dinosaur localization was complete I moved onto another project, already in progress. This one was a set of puzzle games based on the movie "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence". Microsoft was the publisher and the official title of the game ended up being "A.I. Puzzler". My job involved working with 3DStudio MAX scripting to produce a VRML data file that would later be read in by the game. I had completed this task and was moving on to general programming when the Big Layoff came down. If I ever pick up a copy of the game, I'll add a screenshot or two of the parts I worked on.

On March 2nd 2001, Sapient laid off 720 people (20% of it's workforce) worldwide, and the games division of the Austin office took some serious hits. With the market, and our stock prices, going the way they were this was not much of a surprise. And so I found myself once more on the job market. In July of 2001, I heard that the remainder of the Austin office was being closed down as Sapient once more rethought it's long term strategies. By this time I had relocated to Louisville, Kentucky as my wife had at long last finished her PhD and had obtained a faculty position at the University of Louisville.