Sharky Extreme: What is the best thing that has ever happened to you as a result of working in the game industry?

Kenn Hoekstra: I have the great fortune to work with 50 men (and one woman) who have become my closest friends on the planet. They're professional, hard working and the best friends a guy could ask for. I owe the closest relationships in my life to my job at Raven Software.

Sharky Extreme: A common term we gamers often hear is 'crunch mode'. Can you describe what the Raven Software office was like during Soldier of Fortune crunch mode?

Kenn Hoekstra: Insane! That's the best way to describe it. Everyone is tired and when you get tired, you get a little loopy. We were visiting weird websites and sending the links around, playing music over the speaker phones throughout the office, making runs to a local grocery store for food at 3am every morning and generally reveling in the wacky realization that we haven't seen the outside world during daylight hours in months. It's a very strange, yet somehow rewarding experience. The nice thing is that so many of us were here, it only served to strengthen our relationship as friends as well as developers. That's not to say that we weren't tired of seeing each other after a while, but that's what vacation is for, after all.

Sharky Extreme: Looking back at Soldier of Fortune, can you pick any specific moment that makes you feel the most proud of being the Project Admin on that game?

Kenn Hoekstra: Soldier of Fortune turned out to be one of the most successful (if not THE most successful) games that Raven has ever done. I look back on the work that I did and every little thing that I contributed, and I'm just proud of the overall experience of seeing the game through from start to finish. The day I went over to Software Etc. and saw it on the shelves, I was happy beyond belief. That could have been because crunch mode was over, but I think it had more than a little to do with sheer pride over the accomplishment and pending success of the title.