Yeah, it wasn't that long of a gap. I was on my my honeymoon at the time, so it was a couple weeks before I was even back in LA to officially meet with Defy, hand in my keys, etc. And even from where I was staying, a lot of time was spent just trying to keep up with the enormous outflow of messages from the community, and listening to Shane air a bunch of behind the scenes stories about why GT went downhill, some that even I didn't know.
In that time, Brandon took care of packing up all the gear, the library, etc. Then we met at his place to basically have a free for all on that stuff, and that's when Brandon first pitched the idea of doing something together and starting a Patreon, which we all said we'd be in for, but didn't really know what it would look like or believe it would be an actual job. One of the reasons group stream night starts when it does is because the whole idea was that we could come to Brandon's after work, stream together, then shoot the podcast. The rest of the goals were all pretty distant, but we could at least do that. Maybe once in a while, we could put together a review, etc.
So while we were putting together things behind the scenes like grabbing URLs for all the channels and social media accounts, we were also looking for work and passing along job opportunities for each other. I applied to Nintendo, Game Informer, CD Projekt Red, and I think a few other places. I drove up to GDC and slept on the floor of a friend's hotel room, largely to connect with people and look for jobs, and there was a lot of warm support from people throughout the industry. We'd already posted the launch date teaser on social media so a few people tried pressuring me into telling them what we were up to, but I kept my mouth shut.
A few days later, we had the launch stream, more money came into the Patreon than we could have possibly imagined, and we blew through goals that we thought were months away, so it was time to get to work.
