Firezide Chat with Dave Oshry

Basically the principles we founded New Blood on were wanting to make dope shit with your friends. Just making the kind of games we wanted to make and being happy to fail if they didn’t do well. We never thought about making things that would make money. It was always about making the shit we wanted to play.

It wasn’t easy at first.

We started in 2014 but it wasn’t really until 2018 when Dusk came out that we had our first hit. Those first four years were just figuring shit out.

At first we wanted to make VR games because VR was very hot around 2012–2013. We were on the cutting edge with the first Oculus Rift with the duct tape and goggles. I played the first version of Doom 3 BFG in VR with John Carmack at QuakeCon and thought this is the future.

We started making a VR boxing game but it never really panned out. Then we were kind of a publisher for a bit.

Eventually we started working on people’s games and they never left. Before we knew it there were like 40 or 50 people working with us.

Suddenly we were a game studio.

We never really had a plan. The plan was always just make cool shit with your friends. That hasn’t changed. Twelve years later we’re still going strong.

Me and Aaron, my best mate and co-founder, who was also my best man at my wedding – we still hang out and cut trailers together. He still comes over and we work on stuff in my guest bedroom where the PC is.

We started this thing in my apartment 12 years ago and now it’s in a house instead of an apartment. But it’s still the same friends and the same people.

Did those early days in VR help keep the studio funded?

We never had any investment. Whatever money we had was what we worked with.

I sold my apartment and my car and spent all the money I had to make Rise of the Triad happen. That game basically broke even, so I ended up with about the same pile of money I started with.

It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to live. I always worked a second job.

New Blood wasn’t my full time job until 2022. A lot of people forget that.

I worked at Gunnar Optiks for a few years, the gaming glasses company. I was their marketing guy and then VP of business development. Then I got a job at RocketWerkz, Dean Hall’s studio, which made DayZ.

That’s how I ended up in New Zealand.

New Blood was nights and weekends for a long time. It was the side hustle. We kept it going by working other jobs.

When I first started I was still selling used cars.

I never got paid really for game journalism or blogging. I think I got paid by Pat a few times when I wrote articles for VG247 back in the day.

Most of it I did for free just to get my name out there. I worked for exposure, but it helped.

We’ve never had investors. It’s always just been me and the games.

If the games didn’t make enough money to keep us going then we wouldn’t keep going.

I was always happy to move back in with my mom in New York and go back to selling used cars.

I can always get a regular job. If New Blood didn’t happen, it didn’t happen. But it did.

What was the turning point in 2022 then? What made the company self-sufficient? Was it Dusk?

No. So Dusk came out in December of 2018. It did pretty good and that kept us going for a while. That was enough for the core people at New Blood to keep going. Then we did Amid Evil and then Faith, and all of those did good, but not enough to fund a full game studio, right?

Especially because I’m generous with the royalty splits and stuff like that. So it wasn’t like we were making tons of money. But we were popular for sure. New Blood has always been more popular than we are successful. That’s why our slogan is “We hate money.”

It’s like, we don’t actually hate money. It’s just that people think we’re this big, popular studio and publisher, but we’re popular and we don’t make a ton of money. The games we make are cool and everybody knows them, but they haven’t sold bajillions of copies.

Now they’re doing well. Ultrakill has sold millions and millions of copies, but that wasn’t always the case. That’s where the slogan comes from, because we’ve never chased trends. Otherwise we’d be making survival crafting roguelike deck builders, the stuff that sells.

We wouldn’t be making boomer shooters. We certainly wouldn’t be making immersive sims. Those are the kinds of games that historically have sunk studios, even some of the greatest studios.

Honestly, I say this a lot: I think the pandemic is really what made us. Not so much saved us, but made us.

We had always been work-from-home and virtual. We’ve never had an office. We’ve never worked together physically. When there were a dozen of us, and even now that there are three dozen of us, we’ve still never had an office.

We almost did. I was going to get an office in Erie, Pennsylvania. Not the greatest place, but it would have been cool and the rent was cheap. Then the pandemic hit and I was like, well, I guess we’re not getting an office.

Around the same time I moved to New Zealand, and then the pandemic hit about four months after I moved here. I got really lucky because we were the only country that didn’t really get it for a while.

While the rest of the world and game studios were figuring out how to work remotely, we had already been doing it for years. So while everyone else was figuring out how to work, we got to work.

We just started pumping stuff out. If you remember those PC Gaming Show segments we did where I did the little skits during 2020, 2021, and 2022, those three years when everyone was trying to figure out how to do things virtually, we were just cranking out updates, new releases, and launches.

Then Ultrakill came out in late 2020. It started off pretty slow but began to steamroll pretty fast.

Now obviously Ultrakill is huge. We recently had 72,000 concurrent users on Steam. We had more people playing our single-player first-person shooter than Hell Divers 2 and Apex Legends. It was insane.

So it got to a point where that, plus our back catalog, made us stable. We’ve got the FPS trilogy, the stealth trilogy, our really popular horror game, and all the stuff we’re working on now.

Plus merchandise has taken off. We sell tons of merch. While a lot of other studios sell nothing or maybe a T-shirt with the game name on it, we actually make cool stuff.

I’ve got friends who worked in the clothing business and the toy business, and we figured out how to make things people actually want. Merch has become a huge part of the business. Probably about a fifth of our business now.

There’s a bit of a Devolver vibe to how you guys operate.

People have always called us “baby Devolver.” Like, “you’re Devolver back when they were cool and edgy.”

They’re still cool, but they’re more of a publisher now.

Yeah, I just meant in terms of presentation.

Yeah, the vibe. It’s very much like we do whatever the fuck we want and say whatever the fuck we want.

We can get away with it because we’re independent.

Around the same time we realized we weren’t really a publisher anymore. We had morphed into a full development studio. We make our own games and do everything in-house.

Most of the studio is artists and programmers. There are a lot of programmers at New Blood, way more than people think. We’ve got artists, animators, all that.

There’s only one business, marketing, and sales person: me.

I recently hired Kelsey, a dear friend who came from League of Geeks and Bethesda, to be our studio manager because I finally realized I needed help running the business, handling events and merch.

But as far as marketing, sales, and business goes, it’s always been just me.

I’m also the community manager. I run all our social media. We did recently hire a guy who makes all the funny shorts and stuff for TikTok because I’m 42 and I’m not doing TikTok.

People still come to you as if you’re a publisher though, right?

Yeah, I get pitched games every day. I was actually looking at a pitch when this call started.

Never say never though. If something is really cool, maybe we’ll publish it.

I like to say a New Blood game is only a New Blood game because it could only ever be a New Blood game. You see it and you go, “yeah, that’s a New Blood game.”

Nobody else was going to make Dusk. Nobody else was going to make Ultrakill. Nobody else was going to do Faith or Fallen Aces.

When something really fits that mold, I’m interested.

For years I kept telling people we don’t publish games anymore. Then we announced we’re publishing Tenebris Somnia.

But I’ve known those developers for years, so it’s not just a publishing deal. They’re basically part of the team now.

But yeah, if there’s a first-person indie shooter out there, I’ve probably been pitched it. I’m the boomer shooter guy.

You called me the granddaddy of boomer shooters in that last interview. I’m more John Romero’s great-great-grandson.

It’s wild though. John Romero is a friend of mine now. I grew up playing Doom and now I’m friends with him. It’s crazy.

I’m just happy to carry on the legacy of the cool stuff those guys made.

What about your marketing approach? A lot of what you do isn’t traditional advertising. Like the billboard in LA, the eulogy one.

That wasn’t really an advertisement. We just had the opportunity.

I looked into the billboard across from the W Hotel and it wasn’t as expensive as I expected. I thought about doing an ad, but my buddy Billy suggested something else.

He joked that I should put up a billboard saying “fuck you Microsoft, fuck you Sony,” because of all the layoffs happening.

I said no, but then I thought about it and came up with the idea of doing a tribute to all the studios that got shut down.

Kelsey loved it. We made a “rest in peace, gone but not forgotten” memorial for those studios.

That’s the kind of thing we can do because nobody can tell us not to.

Nobody can say, “Microsoft might not like that.” It’s fine.

I wasn’t attacking anyone. I didn’t put up a billboard saying “fuck Phil Spencer.” I just said rest in peace to a bunch of cool studios.

A lot of the headlines I make are just me speaking my mind. I’m never trying to be a cunt. I’m just saying what I think and encouraging conversation.

Like recently with GOG. I said in an interview that people need to give a shit about GOG if they want GOG to survive.

GOG actually quoted that and said they appreciated the honesty. That turned into a whole conversation.

I’m never just attacking people. I’m honest.

When developers talk about bringing games to Xbox, they’ll usually say everything is great. I’ll say it’s been a pain in the ass sometimes.

That’s okay to say.

I’ve said plenty of critical things about Xbox in interviews, and I’ve heard from people at the ID@Xbox team that they actually implemented some of that feedback.

If nobody speaks up, nothing changes.

It’s the same thing in game development. You’ll play a game and think, “how did nobody think about this problem?”

Most of the time it’s because nobody brought it up in meetings. People are afraid to rock the boat.

That happens at New Blood too. Sometimes people are nervous to bring things up with me.

I forget sometimes that I’m both their friend and their boss.

But if people don’t speak up, nothing gets better.

There are even features on Steam that exist because I emailed Valve and said, “hey, this could be better.”

What’s the best thing about your job?

The people I work with. Making games with my friends. That’s the dream.

I wish I had more time to play our games. Today I spent most of the day paying bills. Half my job is just paying bills now.

That was going to be my next question. Is that the worst part?

Yeah, paying bills sucks.

Not because we can’t pay them. We have the money. It’s just the process. Wiring everything, doing it one by one, watching money go out.

Nobody likes paying bills.

The best part is definitely the people.

We’ve never hired anyone and we’ve never fired anyone, which sounds insane.

People kind of just show up and never leave.

People ask how to get a job at New Blood and I say you basically just hang around until eventually you work here and I start paying you.

That’s how it’s worked for the last ten years.

What’s the worst job you’ve ever had before games?

I don’t know if I’ve ever really had a job I hated.

I once worked at a record store where the owner was this huge Jabba-the-Hutt looking guy who never wore a shirt and drank pickle juice out of the jar.

It was disgusting.

The store didn’t even really exist as a retail store. It was basically a warehouse where he sold records on eBay. This was in the mid-2000s.

But even that job was kind of interesting because I learned about grading old records.

The guy was basically a hoarder though. We’d list records all day and he never actually wanted to sell them.

But I didn’t hate the job.

Who do you admire the most in the games industry?

Ted Price from Insomniac.

He recently retired. I learned a lot from him and got to hang out with him a bunch of times. If you listen to his old talks they’re great.

Insomniac has had one of the best runs of any studio ever. I can’t think of anything bad they’ve made.

From a CEO standpoint he’s someone I really respect. Everyone who worked under him always had good things to say. He left at the right time too.

I don’t think I could do that, leaving the company I started to someone else. People ask what happens to New Blood when I retire. I always say it dies with me.

I’m not selling it and I’m not handing it over to someone else. It’s always been the Dave show. When the show ends, it ends.

Hopefully people will remember it fondly as a cool little chapter in first-person shooter history.

I want to be done before we get old and cringe and our games somehow start getting bad.

I don’t want to be the 50- or 60-year-old guy on Twitter being weird.

There are a lot of older game developers on Twitter who probably should have left social media a long time ago.

Honestly, I’m starting to feel pretty old on social media myself.

I’m probably going to quit soon.

You don’t want to be Mike Tyson fighting Jake Paul.

Yeah, you don’t want to be Mike Tyson or Jake Paul. You don’t want to be the old man at the club. You don’t want to be the old game dev on Twitter. You don’t want your games to get bad.

Also, I want to spend time with my family. I’ve got a family now. I want to go fishing. I’ve spent the last 15 years doing nothing but working.

Anybody will tell you I work all the time. I’m working now. It’s 11:30 pm. Once I get off this interview I’m going to keep working until I can’t stay awake any longer.

I’ve done that essentially for the last 15 years to make New Blood happen. But the trade-off is that I want to be able to retire when I’m 50 and then do fucking nothing.

People ask what I’m going to do when I’m done. Am I going to consult? Am I going to do something else?

No. I’m going to go fucking fishing. I’m going to do my hobbies. I’m going to rebuild old consoles. I’m going to play with my kids.

I want to do that while I’m still young enough to enjoy it. I don’t want to work until I’m 70. I don’t want to work until I die.

Plus, I think at some point we all get out of touch. You see it a lot with older game developers who try to re-enter the industry or make games again.

Guys who were big in the 90s, people who worked at Ion Storm or Sierra.

People who worked on huge franchises in the 90s or early 2000s try to adapt and ship games on Steam now. Their games come out and get four user reviews.

It’s sad. They just don’t know how to operate in the modern climate.

They’re like, “What do you mean people can review my game? What do you mean it’s getting bad reviews?”

Back in the day you made a game, put it on a CD, put it in a box, it went to stores and sold millions of copies.

That’s not how it works anymore.

I’m very much from the 2010s Steam era. Even now I feel like I’m starting to age out of the industry a bit with everything becoming live service, microtransactions, TikTok shops, and all that stuff.

Friendslop. 

If people play a game they play a game. If it’s slop, it’s slop. If people pay money for it, more power to them. It’s just not the kind of stuff we make.

If we loved money we could crank out so many horror friendslop games. You have no idea. We could make twenty of them if we wanted.

But we don’t want to. We don’t want to play that game.

What’s the best bit of life advice you’ve heard?

I once saw James Cameron give a talk down here.

Oh shit, James Cameron.

Yeah. I love all the movies he made before Avatar. I don’t know anyone who has actually seen Avatar, but each one somehow makes five billion dollars.

I tried to watch the last one with my kid and halfway through we were like, this is shit.

Anyway, James Cameron came down here to give a talk and I went to see it.

He said something that stuck with me. Life isn’t about chasing every opportunity. It’s about recognizing when a door opens and making sure you jump through it.

Opportunities come and go. If you don’t take them when they appear, they pass you by.

He talked about when he was working as a janitor and having all these ideas in his head about robot apocalypses and aliens.

Eventually he got a chance to pitch something and he said, “Hey, I’ve got an idea.”

That idea became Terminator.

Then he had another idea and that became Aliens.

He worked his way up from a PA to assistant director to director, and now he’s James Cameron making these movies nobody sees that somehow make billions of dollars.

That idea about jumping through the door really stuck with me.

When I joined the games industry I was living in New York and I realized I needed to move to California because that’s where the industry was.

I needed to go to PAX. I needed to go to GDC. I needed to get in front of companies like Valve and Epic who could help us make games.

I didn’t think maybe it would work out. I just went for it.

You fly wherever you need to go. You put on the game industry uniform – T-shirt, sport coat, jeans – and you introduce yourself.

“Hi, I’m Dave from New Blood. We’re making a game. Nice to meet you.”

You do that five thousand times and call it networking.

You have to take those opportunities when they appear or they’ll pass you by.

I also got very similar advice from someone else in the industry.

I was at the DICE summit in Las Vegas. It’s more like a CEO conference than a convention.

They had different events you could sign up for, like poker or go-karting.

I forgot to sign up for go-karting and I was really bummed because I wanted to network with some of the big industry CEOs there.

I went to the desk and said I’d missed the sign-up. A guy next to me turned and said, “Do you want to go go-karting?”

I said yeah.

He said, “Then get on the fucking bus.”

I said I didn’t sign up.

He said, “It doesn’t matter. Just get on the fucking bus.”

That guy was Randy Pitchford.

So I got on the bus, went to the go-kart track, and they found a spare kart for me.

I always tell people the same thing now: sometimes you just have to get on the fucking bus.

If you want to do something, do it. No one is stopping you.

And for the record, Randy beat everyone at go-karting.

I can’t believe you got life advice from Randy Pitchford.

Sometimes Randy Pitchford gives good advice. If you take one thing away from this interview, it’s that Randy Pitchford once gave me excellent life advice about go-karting.

What do you dislike most about yourself?

Probably my ADHD. I still talk over people, as you’ve probably noticed in this interview.

It’s something I’ve been trying to work on for twenty or thirty years.

I’m very much someone who likes to be in control. It works because I’m the boss and people want to hear what I have to say.

But I’m very aware of how scatterbrained and inattentive I can be.

I’ll realize halfway through a conversation that I’ve interrupted someone and have to stop and say sorry. I always feel like I need to get my point across.

I’ve gotten better about it though.

My ADHD and OCD are a big part of who I am. They’ve helped me get this far. But they definitely make things harder for the people who work with me.

A lot of people who work with me probably just think, “Dave’s going to Dave.”

I remember when I worked for Dean Hall people used to say the same thing about him: “Dean’s going to Dean.”

But at the end of the day he helped ship a killer survival game.

Everyone I’ve interviewed so far for this series has ADHD.

I think everyone in the games industry has ADHD. You can’t work in games and not have ADHD.

What time do you usually get up and go to bed?

We’ve got a newborn baby, so the baby is up all the time.

One of my dogs starts barking at exactly 7:15 every morning because he’s hungry. His internal clock says 7:15.

It used to be 8:15 until daylight savings happened. The dog doesn’t understand daylight savings, so now I have to get up an hour earlier.

My sleep schedule is weird. I sleep in shifts.

Usually I sleep about four hours at a time.

Part of the reason is that I live in New Zealand but most of the business is in the US or Europe, so I have to be awake for different time zones.

Typically I sleep from around 3am to 7am, then get up for a few hours to help my wife with the baby.

Then we switch and I sleep for another couple of hours.

After that I’m usually good for the rest of the day, though sometimes I take a nap in the afternoon.

So I don’t really have a proper schedule. I’m never fully awake and I’m never fully asleep.

If I start playing a game I enjoy then my sleep schedule gets completely destroyed.

Luckily there’s something that helps you fall asleep.

Have you heard of alcohol?

Yeah, it’s pretty, pretty good. 

You drink enough and you get sleepy.

The problem is that later the alcohol metabolizes into sugar and you wake up at three in the morning with a sugar rush and can’t get back to sleep.

People don’t tell you that part, especially with wine because wine turns into sugar in your gut.

So yeah, that’s my schedule.

I don’t really have one.

Do you do any physical or mental training?

Yeah, I work out all the time, even though I haven’t been in the gym in a while and I look fucking weak right now. I have a gym in the house. I go to the gym.

Definitely a gym guy. Love me some gym. Love me some weights.

I was watching Arnold the other day, the big meeting with men posing on stage. Love me some big meaty men.

Don’t record that. Or do.

Yeah, that’s the physical.

Mental training? I don’t know. Doing my job is enough mental fucking gymnastics. Reading the Steam forums is enough of a mental workout. Reading Twitter every day is enough of a workout for my brain.

Other than that, nothing special. I just like the gym.

Yeah, I’m one of those.

Do you read books?

I do. I read a lot of nonfiction. I’m not really a fiction guy. I read a lot of biographies and stuff like that.

I’ve read all the game dev ones, like the book about Iwata and the one about Sid Meier. I never quite knew how to pronounce his name – Meier, Meer, Meyer. I say Meyer.

I’ve read all the ones about Sierra.

I read Rob Halford’s biography. Obviously I’m a big Judas Priest fan, who wouldn’t be.

The Dave Grohl one was good. Flea’s autobiography from the Red Hot Chili Peppers was really good. It goes all the way up to when he and Anthony started the Chili Peppers.

I read a lot of people’s life stories.

I’ve got John Romero’s book. Doom Guy was great. Everybody should read Doom Guy. It was very good.

I hate audiobooks because I read faster than the audio. Then you have to speed it up and it sounds ridiculous.

So I got a Kindle Paperwhite. I love that thing.

Recently I tried to start reading some fiction with Warhammer 40K, the Horus Heresy and all that stuff.

I’m on book one of like 752 or something.

I was Googling where to start with Warhammer 40K and Google basically said it couldn’t tell me.

But yeah, I read. I use my Kindle.

When I travel – well, I used to travel more before the baby – I read a lot on planes. A 12-hour flight is normal for me going to or from New Zealand.

People think I’d play games on a plane, but I don’t. On planes I either read or sleep.

I always take my Deck or Switch – I never use them.

I always bring them thinking I might, and then I never do. They stay in my bag the entire trip.

But the one time I don’t bring one I know I’ll want it, so I keep bringing them anyway.

Sometimes I bring one for game testing, but that’s about it.

So yeah, I mostly read autobiographies and stories about game developers and studios.

What’s the best video game you’ve played recently?

Recently? Let me pull up Steam and see what I’ve played.

Dungeons of Dust, Ultrakill, the Starship Troopers demo was good. I really liked that. Under the Blood… it’s all my fucking games.

I finally beat Doom: The Dark Ages. I loved Dark Ages. I think it might be my favorite of the new Doom games.

Really?

Yeah.

I couldn’t get on with it.

Man, I thought it was great. It felt a lot like Doom II. I like collecting everything.

I love the big open levels where you’ve got to collect everything. Big arenas. The shield teleport is great. I love the combat.

Doom Eternal was awesome, but those levels were intense. You finish one and you need a smoke break. With Dark Ages I felt like it had a good rhythm.

The whole trilogy has been awesome though.

The story has kind of disappeared up its own ass, but I don’t really care about the story in Doom. Man kills demons. That’s all I need.

But since you’re from the UK, my game of the year last year was Atomfall.

Yeah, it’s a good game.

I thought it had everything I want in a game.

I wasn’t surprised that the reaction was kind of mid but good – like sevens and eights from critics and users.

But for me it was perfect. It had that Fallout feel but also a lot of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Cool characters, good looking world, unique story.

Even the structure was different.

Yeah, the open structure reminded me of Fallout: New Vegas with factions and multiple paths.

And at the end it was kind of like Deus Ex where you choose which ending you want. I saw every ending just by reloading my save a few times.

I got the phone ending.

Yeah, the phone.

The cool thing about that is it’s the fail-safe ending. If you kill everyone you can still finish the game by talking to the voice on the phone.

I really hope Rebellion makes a sequel.

They could keep making Sniper Elite forever and make money, but this felt like someone’s passion project.

I interviewed Jason Kingsley years ago and he said he was working on his dream game. I think that was it.

I hope it did well for them. The numbers are weird because of Game Pass, but hopefully Microsoft paid them well.

It’s such a cool, original game. It’s also only about 20 hours long. You can finish it in a weekend. If you tell me your game is 60 to 80 hours long, I’m not playing it.

I’ve got kids. I don’t have time for that. I’ve got time for maybe one Elden Ring or Ghost of Tsushima per year. Twelve to fifteen hours is perfect.

You’re not playing Crimson Desert then?

Absolutely not.

I love the Yakuza games but even those are too long now.

I picked up Like a Dragon 8 and thought there’s no way I’m finishing this.

The last one I finished was 7 and that took me months.

They take like 20 hours just to get going.

Exactly. I was like, I’m not even in Hawaii yet. What the hell is going on?

So yeah, I like shorter games made by people who are paid more to work less. I’m not kidding.

People attribute that quote to me sometimes, but I didn’t say that.

You’re the every-seven-minute guy.

Yeah, that one too.

I’ve had a bunch of jokes over the years that people attribute to me.

Like “where’s the save data stored? In the balls.”

That one came back around recently.

That’s how I know I’ve been on social media too long. Jokes I made ten years ago keep resurfacing.

If you could travel back to an important part of history, where would you go?

The easy answer is kill baby Hitler. Everyone says that.

I’d wait until he was like thirteen so he could put up a bit of a fight.

Important parts of history are usually terrible though. Wars and stuff.

So maybe something more fun. I’d go to Woodstock.

I’m wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt right now. My mom and my aunt were at Woodstock. I’d love to go back and see it.

Or I’d go to Studio 54 in the 70s and do cocaine. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

What about if you could go back and tell your younger self something?

Invest in Bitcoin.

I should have been investing in Bitcoin when I was in school. Honestly though, I wouldn’t change much.

I got teased a lot in middle school. I didn’t have many friends. So I went home and played video games. Now I run a video game studio.

So thanks to everyone who called me a loser.

Maybe I’d tell my younger self that John Romero is still doing it.

And he’s still got all his hair.

His hair is incredible. You could make a rope out of John Romero’s hair and bungee jump off it.

When was the last time you cried?

I’m not a big crier.

Did you cry when your baby was born?

No.

I was filming and playing Pink Pony Club on my phone. My wife was giving birth and I was standing there like, come on.

I was excited when the baby arrived, but I didn’t cry. The last time I really cried was when my dad died, about twenty years ago.

I’ve probably cried a couple times since then during breakups. You know when you get a bit choked up.

But I can’t remember the last time I full-on cried.

How do you want to be remembered?

Honestly, most people don’t get remembered when they die. But I’d hope people would say I was a good friend. A generous friend.

One of my buddies died in a plane crash last year. Everyone said such nice things about him afterwards. He really was an awesome guy.

It wasn’t a passenger jet. It was a small private plane. He was the drummer in a band and they were flying back late at night in fog. Everyone on the plane died. It was tragic.

But hearing everyone talk about how great he was made me think about what I’d want people to say about me.

I’d hope my friends would say I was a good friend, that I showed up for them, that I was generous, that I was cool to have around.

What would you put on your gravestone?

Want some? Get some!