Editing Gregory Fulton/Diaries (section)

== 12/06/98 ==
This weekend I'm taking care of my PR duties (hence this diary). Not the most exciting stuff, so I'll relate a short story from earlier this week.

[[David Mullich]] (producer), [[Mark Caldwell]] (NWC vice president and programmer), [[Jon Van Caneghem]] (NWC president, creator of all things Might and Magic, and company design visionary), and I found ourselves crowded into the sweltering office of [[Scott White]].

Scott did all the town screens in Heroes III except the Rampart, Necropolis, and Fortress. Since he finished his 3D duties, he's turned his skills to the game's interface. Believe it or not, we were in Scott's office arguing about color: interface colors and player colors.

After much arguing about the interface colors, we decided to leave it virtually untouched. Player colors were a different subject.

Originally, we used light blue, dark blue, red, green, purple, brown, black, and white. These colors needed to change. Light blue looked like the blue used in the main menu. Brown clashed with the brown used in the general game interface. Game text disappeared against white. Black and green disappeared with the terrain colors shown on the game mini-map.

OK. We agreed some of the colors needed to change. After this, the agreements stopped. I don't know what is more ridiculous... arguing over what colors to use or the twisted logic behind the arguments. Red, blue, and dark green were safe choices. We still needed five other colors. The conversation went something like this....

 "I don't want yellow. Yellow is the urine color."
 "What about brown?"
 "I don't like brown."
 "Brown is the s**t color."
 "What about pink?"
 "Pink is a sissy color."
 "We won't call it pink. We'll call it 'rose'."
 "Rose?"
 "The rose player?"
 "I don't know. If I saw a pink hero, I'd turn and run away. You know any hero secure enough to use pink as his color is bad ass."
 "What about magenta?"
 "What about cobalt? What about cadmium?"
 "Have we accounted for all the fecal colors?"
 "What about orange?"
 "[[Phelan Sykes|Phelan]] (our art lead) doesn't like orange. It looks bad."
 "So. I don't think it looks bad."
 "Fine. You tell her you want orange."
 "She'll kick your ass."
 "Oh. Fine. We won't use orange."

So it went. Fifteen minutes later everyone agreed to disagree, and Jon was made the final judge. Here are the final colors: red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple, aqua, and rose (pink).