Geeks Gone Wild

The standout event this weekend was Saturday night. I won't recap the rest of the weekend except to say I did all the normal things and did some editing.

Anyway, I had been invited to the house some friends from work were housesitting. It's the house of their good friends. Both of whom were involved in the founding of Wizards of the Coast. They have money. They're geeks. So, I went to their house to join my friends and about a dozen other people to get a tour of the place and spend the evening hanging out.

I drove out of Bellevue about 30 miles to a subdivision so full of money that you can't see any of the houses when you're driving down the streets because they're so far back from it. I drove up to the gate, buzzed the house so my friends could let me in. The automated gate opened and I drove down a half-mile long driveway to the house.

The house itself didn't appear all that unreasonable. It's a nice, big mansiony house, but not totally ridiculous. I mean, it was only 11,000 square feet, right? So, I walked in and the first thing I see is two more double doors (closed) with movie posters on either side of the doors and running down the hallways. All of them Star Wars posters. All of them originals.

The right-hand wing, called the Y-Wing, is where the couple lives. It contains the kitchen, wine cellar, dining room, cabana with shower and changing room for the hot tub and pool. It also contains their two-floor library, which alone apparently cost $500,000. It contains their collections of comics, roleplaying games, and fantasy novels. I just wish I had that much shelf space -- and the spiral staircase.

The other wing, you guessed it, the X-Wing, contains their gaming room (all set up for their Tuesday night D&D game), their arcade (which contains a pool table and one of every Star Wars video and pinpall game ever made, plus a couple others just for fun along with a free soda machine and some full-size statues of Star Wars characters), and last, but not least, their Star Wars museum. We didn't get to go in the museum, but it's packed with everything Star Wars that you can imagine. Everything. It looked quite nice, actually.

One of the things that really impressed me was how organized everything was. The books were arranged by author, the roleplaying stuff was arranged by game and world, the comics were all alphabetized and by number in labeled drawers. The various figure displays were all clean and put together. The movie vault was organized quite neatly. And apparantly they do all the assembly and organizing themselves, which is pretty cool.

The movie vault reminds me of the big doors when you first walk in. Well, you open those up and step into a home theatre designed by the same fella who designed the Star Wars sets, complete with Han Solo in carbonite (actually a secret door leading to the movie vault), sliding doors just like in the movies, three rows of stadium-seating leather chairs, and a huge-screen t.v. that you can watch movies (THX sound, of course) or play X-Box on. And you can do all of this while statues of C-3PO and Boba Fett watch over you. It's pretty impressive.

The house also contains a not-quite complete recording studio, two offices (one of which is only used to display all of their Simpson's playsets and Star Wars Legos), and a couple other rooms that are a bit more mundane than what I mentioned above.

Okay, so now the geeky part. Just kidding, that was the geeky part. Now I know what happens when geeks aren't limited by money.

The group of us had a good time snacking on food everyone brought, playing pool and arcade games, watching Star Wars: Clone Wars in the theatre, and playing poker until midnight. It was a good time.

I'd write more, but I really have to go to bed.