I returned to the bay area in August 2012 to join the Dead Space 3 team in their final six months toward ship, and they told me that they’d all gone to see Prometheus as part of research/team bonding for some scifi horror times.

I hadn’t watched the movie yet and by then it was nearly gone from theaters, except for one of those late run $5 theaters down at a shopping plaza in Cupertino. I decided I needed to share this bonding experience, if only to understand a bit more about the scifi horror stuff the teams had been absorbing, so I headed down to that theater, which at the time felt very far away since I lived in mid-peninsula and south bay is like a great journey into the unknown.

So I arrived at one of those weird liminal space shopping plazas that wasn’t doing too well economically and watched Prometheus late on a Friday night. Now I could talk Prometheus with the team, and we chugged along and finished that video game by January, around the time we were all being laid off, except no one had informed me until the last minute that I wasn’t meant to be laid off but assigned to another team. So I took that because employment is good, then I left two weeks later for a better job with a day’s notice because the new job was with Double Fine and I’d burn the bridge for them.

Anyway, since then I moved around a lot more, back to Portland again, back to the bay area again, and I never forgot that small theater in Cupertino, went back several times to the weird lighting and nearly empty giant parking lot, until finally I saw the notice that the changing times forced them to shut down. The remaining businesses at the shopping plaza–stuff like a tax accountant, a dance studio, a political campaign office–well, they all shut down, and then it was leveled to an empty lot, and now it’s condos, and it’s more condos on condos like it is everywhere, and housing is good, but that theater was there and it must’ve given many people the opportunity to watch movies without breaking the budget, but it’s gone, and it was just a business, but it’s gone and I tell you, I know it shouldn’t affect me the way it does, but I saw Prometheus there, do you understand? I didn’t think I’d ever get the chance to watch that movie in a theater because I was so late to the quest and that theater was there when I needed it, but it won’t be there for anyone now, and now there’s nothing else like it.

And I thought you should know.