I woke up to an email from Eurogamer’s Bertie Purchese on Sunday morning telling me that I’d made the headlines.

My first reaction was, of course, “Oh no, they found the bodies!”

My second (and probably more reasonable) reaction was to check Google for the headlines in question. Man, Bertie wasn’t kidding. It was a little scary to see myself mentioned so prominently in hundreds of articles, many of which were written by legitimate people and not content farmers.

To keep my ego from swelling too much, I quickly scanned a couple of comments sections and managed to remind myself that not everyone shares an optimistic view of my talents. I find that this keeps me from being too overconfident, and likewise keeps me from taking myself too seriously. I should mention that of the positive comments, my favorite was the one that said the Wasteland 2 team is like the Avengers of RPG design; I call dibs on Nick Fury, because he and I have the same hairstyle.

Obviously, we need to keep the hype in check. There’s no point in jacking up expectations to the point where it’s impossible to meet them. So let’s get this put out front and center: This is a game. Granted, it’s a game written by a lot of people with a long history in the industry, and that means we have definite ideas about should go into games. The flip side of this is that we have definite ideas about what should go into games, and those ideas might not always accord with expectations other people have. You might like what we’re going to do. You might hate it. But remember: it’s just a game. We’re going to work very hard on it, and you might find it really fun. You might not. *I* think it’ll be great.

Okay, back to the jackassery.

I also saw a noticeable uptick in sales of my books (reminder! You can get Book 1 for free on my site, and you can get Book 2 from Amazon), and I hope that you all enjoy the hell out of those words.

I’ve spent several hours working out the design of my area, and had an enjoyable hour on the phone with Matt Findley yesterday while we talked process and philosophy. This is going to be a hell of a lot of fun.

Well, unless you don’t like my work. Then it’s going to suck (for you), and for that, I apologize.