Corey

[Darman]

I accidentally made a miss - click and clicked on your name corey, I then noticed when your profile came up that you are 22...This mod is 6-8 years old if I remember correctly. That would place you at around 16 when it was started. Have you always been head modder or was it handed down to you?

[Enceladus]

His ancestors were modders in the war of 1812. They commonly used the sharpen filter on their rifles. Ever since then the tradition of modding has been passed down through his family until he became the leader of Thrawn's Revenge.

[Corey]

Nah, I've always been the mod leader for TR. We started it June 7th, 2006, so I was 14.

[Darman]

Dern. Well. Good job. I'm impressed

[Corey]

Thanks, there's actually still quite a few people on the team who've been here since the beginning, or close to it. Dr. Nick joined within a month of the mod starting (going by Codeuser), and Zer cofounded the mod with me after I contacted him on another forum. Slornie joined our site initially as a fan in 2007, and then a few months later became a tester (testers used to be a permanent in-house position, as opposed to the more ad hoc system we've used lately) before he transitioned into a production role to help me with system design. Enceladus joined right at the end of 2007, too.

And honestly, we were pretty terrible for most of that time and a lot of that can probably be attributed to me. I had no experience prior to starting TR, and we completely overshot what was reasonable to attempt in our initial plans, which we really only rectified in 2010. From there we had to do a lot to get the content we had up to an acceptable standard. 

[Darman]

So you had no prior experience with any type of modding/programming games aside from downloading them to your computer and playing them?

[Corey]

Not even that, really. I only found out about modding at all in Decemberish of 2005 when I was googling around for Empire at War. It hadn't come out yet, but there was a trailer for it on Revenge of the Sith's DVD or something. I'd recently got my first non-shitty computer which could actually run games which were more intensive than Age of Empires II, so I decided to check EaW out. Anwyho, my googling brought me to Legacy of War's website, which was my first ever exposure to modding.

I started out by just trying to add Grand Admiral Thrawn as a hero since FoC wasn't a thing yet and Thrawn wasn't in EaW. I posted about it on LoW's forums, and then got contacted by a guy named Videoteck who suggested I put all of EvilleJedi's Warlords models which he had recently free-released ingame (which is ironic considering we're one of the few mods who insists on never using free release content and always making our own, and decided on that pretty much by the next day). So, we contacted Zer as someone who was more familiar with the lore and then after a 6 hour MSN conversation, the three of us had planned essentially four different mods and had bitten off way, way more than we could chew.

[Darman]

That sounds like a 14 year old to me lol. I bet you never invisioned making all of this

[Corey]

Unfortunately I envisioned making a lot more, then decided to be realistic. Didn't envision the part where I'd still be doing it by the time I finished university.

[Darman]

What did you major in?