Move Meant a Lot to Interplay Employees

Before Interplay Productions’ recent move, the only thing more challenging than the Irvine-based company’s computer games was finding a space in its corporate parking lot.

With hundreds of employees fighting over 78 slots, the problem had become so bad that Interplay made a parody of the “Waterworld” movie for its Christmas party last year. “Instead of looking for land, they were looking for parking spaces,” company spokesman Kirk Green said.

Earlier this month, the rapidly growing company moved into more spacious digs on Von Karman Avenue in Irvine. The new campus has 113,000 square feet, instead of 63,000, and most important, about 600 parking spaces.

But the new building boasts more than just a larger piece of asphalt out front. Troy Worrell, vice president of operations at Interplay, said the company spent more than $3 million installing more than 100 miles of high-speed computer lines and redesigning the office layout. There is an entertainment room with arcade-style game machines, and a clay oven and paint booth for the company’s “Claymation” department. Programmers who were previously crammed into cubicles now share two-person offices.

“A lot of research has been done on productivity for programmers, and two people per area is best,” Worrell said. “If you’re all by yourself, you have nobody to bounce ideas off. Any more [than two] and you have too many disturbances.”

Of course, the notoriously messy programmers and artists have already brought to the new location their unique decorative touch (read: slasher movie posters and pizza boxes).

“Everybody gets to decorate their office however they want,” Worrell said. “Everything you saw before in [the old building] is done up here, including a few of the carpet stains.”