About

Hi! I’m Bryant Durrell; I’m a techie who’s been fortunate enough to spend quite a few years managing operations groups in the online gaming industry. My first job in gaming was at Turbine, where I had the distinct pleasure of running the Technical Operations group for Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online. Not to mention Asheron’s Call, which is still pretty awesome in a dated graphics kind of a way. When people ask me what I’m proud of in my career, I talk about the LOTRO launch, because it was really, really smooth.

Since then I’ve worked at Vivox; ZeniMax Online Studios, where I learned a ton about devops; at Vigil Games, on a project that died way before it should have; and at the Walt Disney Company in the gaming group. Subsequently I spent a while in Big Tech at a range of companies from Amazon to Zillow — literally — and now I’m back in gaming again.

Before I hopped into gaming, I ran various aspects of operations at AltaVista. (“Oh, I used to use them for search!” A lot of people used to search with AltaVista, alas.) Before that I worked at the usual random conglomeration of Silicon Valley companies. Sun was a neat place to work. So was Netcom, actually, although man it was disorganized.

I am also a gamer. I played a lot of World of Warcraft for a long time, because it runs on my Mac and it’s a really good game. I hit level cap in SW:TOR a couple of times. I also spend a lot of time on my old-school pen and paper roleplaying games, because that’s where my roots are and it chews up less time than raiding.

I live in Seattle with one cat and my wife. We miss the other two cats very much.

This is my blog about operating online games. My rationale is here. I do not speak for anyone but myself, and opinions found here are solely mine and do not represent those of my employer.