A few weeks after Sam Roberts won the Juno award for Artist of the Year, Nika and I bumped into him at Korova on St-Laurent. When introduced, I asked him what he did for a living.

At the gym this summer, I noticed a man standing near and looking at me expectantly. Thinking it was probably someone I knew but didn’t recognize right away, I said hello in my best can-I-help-you? tone. He then said:

“Hi, you’re my trainer. Are you ready to start?”

“Um, no, sorry, I’m not a trainer. I only said hi because I thought maybe we knew each other.”

“Ah. Well, that’s probably because you recognize me from the television.”

(Looks at me intensely, waiting for my acknowledgement that I know him. I stand there with a blank stare, increasingly embarrassed not to know who this “celebrity” is. Awkward seconds pass, and he takes off his glasses to help me better recognize him. I’m still completely clueless and uncomfortably quiet. He says, “I host the TV show Découverte“. I fake mild recognition, not very successfully. We quietly retire to our respective dumbbells).

Three weeks ago, a film crew came to the office to shoot a developer diary (Making Of) for the game. As they were setting up, the main interviewer and I went out for coffee, and I asked him if he did videogame shoots often. When we returned to the office, an animator informed me that these were the guys from Electric Playground, a well-known videogame show, and my coffee buddy had been none other than Victor Lucas, the creator and star of the show.

This may explain why it astonishes me to get recognized from this little page, which is so much smaller in scope, as happened this week at the Montreal Games Summit. Every time, I feel good knowing that there is someone on the other side of the screen, and guilty that I failed to recognize these guys.