November 20, 2014: Paul Chapman On The DI

My first Daily Illuminator was in July of 2001, I think. Back then, only SJ and Andrew (wearing his managing editor hat) signed their posts with regularity, so it's entirely possible that a couple of the miniatures division news bits from the winter of 2000 came from me, but it's hard to say.

I didn't start posting regularly for another 4 years, but between 2006 and 2011, I wrote many, many, many Illuminators. I have no idea how many -- more than one thousand, certainly.

My favorites were announcements of cool things we were doing in the office, of course: the playtests, the Halloween gaming sessions, the convention reports. I also got a kick out of the "geek interest" bits I'd use to fill the days when we couldn't quite reveal what we were working on.

Oddly, the aspect I enjoyed the least then is the element I appreciate the most today: the editing process. Steve was an editor before he was a game designer, and his red pen bled over my drafts again and again. At the time, it was incredibly frustrating, but it was also extremely educational.

Looking back at the earliest entries, it's amazing how consistent the core of the Illuminator is. The technology may have changed, but the posts have always had the genuine "hey, this is cool" -- whether we worked on it or not.