Earlier this year, KingsIsle Entertainment was honored to help Make-a-Wish in their ongoing mission to grant the wishes of children. Last week we received a phone call from Make-a-Wish, and we jumped at the chance to make another child’s wish come true. Allan is an avid Wizard101 player with a level 92 Fire Wizard who is well on the way to learning Shadow Magic. His wish was to visit KingsIsle in Austin to meet the team that makes his favorite game, and to see how the magic happens in our studio.
Allan’s morning started with an introduction to the entire KingsIsle team, followed by a very special session with our Sound department. Here he listened as several of our voice actors auditioned for a part, and Allan picked the voice he wanted to portray what would be a very special surprise character.
Then Allan was shown how our concept artists paint and draw the very beginnings of a character, and how that character is then modeled and animated by our amazing art team. He also spent a great deal of time with our wonderful writers and designers talking about quests, story and his adventures and challenges with playing the game.
After lunch, Allan and his family signed some very official documents before they were shown a sneak peek of what’s to come to Wizard101. They had a chance to see some super secret stuff that even some of our staff haven’t seen!
All the while Allan and his family were talking to our staff and touring our studio, our designers, programmers, sound folks and production team were busy bringing together what would be a very special reveal for our visitors, and for all our players!
As the day came to a close, we had one last surprise for Allan. We conjured some very powerful magic, and ran his character through a new quest in Khrysalis before it was available in the live game. As his Wizard rounded the corner he encountered himself -- Allan saw his own character, in his full outfit and accompanied by his favorite pet, standing in the game! Allan was truly amazed! When he interacted with that character, the voice Allan had chosen from the auditions boomed loudly in the conference room, much to everyone’s delight.
Now you can see this quest for yourself! If you've completed the quest “Secret Heart” in Khrysalis, talk to Zaltanna the MirrorMask to obtain this NEW quest “Message in a Bottle”. We think you’ll be very happy with the reward and say hi to Allan GhostDust and his pet Lord Snoopie while you’re there.
It was such an honor to be able to make this happen for Allan and his family. Knowing that what we do can make such a difference in the life of a child drives our ongoing commitment to create fun games for the whole family.
Addendum It’s never easy to share sad news, but we wanted to let you all know that Allen Guzman, the young man we hosted on December 6th 2013 as part of Make-a-Wish, passed away January 2nd 2014.
We received the email below from Allen’s brother, Raul: We can't thank you enough for making Allan's wish come true. He had an amazing day at your studios and it's all he ever talked about when we got home. Your kindness has allowed my family and I to visit Allan everyday in Wizard101. As I said we can't thank you enough for allowing him to visit. - Guzman Family It’s rewarding and humbling to know that their visit to our studio brought Allan joy and his family some measure of comfort in extraordinarily difficult times.
