The damages retrial for last year's Apple vs. Samsung legal battle recently wrapped, and new court documents reveal how much Cupertino paid to get its wins: over $60 million. The revelations come as Apple requests that Samsung reimburse a portion of its legal costs. According to recent court filings, Apple wants its rival to pay a third of that, coming out to more than $15.7 million in attorney's fees.

Apple primarily employed two law firms for its case: Morrison & Foerster, LLP handled the offensive side of the battle, while Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, LLP covered the company's defense against Samsung's own claims of patent infringement. According to the documents, WilmerHale billed for around $2 million, where Apple expects to pay Morrison & Foerster $60 million all on its own — and that's with the fee reduced due to the firm's longstanding relationship with Apple. "Apple's in-house attorneys managed this case to a very disciplined budget," attorney Rachel Krevans writes in the filing. "As a result of all of these efforts and reductions, the hours underlying the fees at issue are reasonable."

The filings also detail the various trial-related costs incurred during the process, including transcriptions, discovery expenses, and translators. In order to argue why the costs should be reimbursed, Apple offers a glimpse into where some of that money went. Apple is asking for approximately $100,000 for the expense of setting up a "secure room" where Samsung's team was able to examine unreleased Apple prototypes, while over $1.5 million is earmarked between the two firms for photocopying documents during the discovery process. Judge Lucy Koh has yet to rule on Apple's motion, but given the more than $900 million Samsung already must pay Apple for patent infringement, another $22 million won't likely make much of a difference. Then again, this is Apple and Samsung we're talking about, and with another trial on the horizon for next year there's no telling what could happen next.

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Final Fantasy VIII, Square Enix, Steam.

Last week, cartoonist Rachel Dukes posted some eye-opening statistics to her Tumblr about a comic she made about what life as a cat owner is like. She originally published the comic with a copyright notice and a URL to her website. That version of the comic has been seen about 81,600 times.

Another version, from which someone removed the URL and copyright info, has been seen nearly 600,000 times, mostly on Tumblr and Facebook. This problem of lack of credit is one that lots of artists have dealt with and quite a few have talked about over the past several years, but it continues to persist. It makes me wonder if there could be some kind of fix.

Since the early days of webcomics, one go-to solution for artists who understood people would share their art online, knew things would turn up in image searches and even encouraged spreading around images, was watermarking, or at the very least throwing a copyright notice in there. Of course, those notices are often very easily removed, as Dukes’ was, or just as often they’re ignored altogether.

Here’s a recent example that just happens to involve ComicsAlliance. On Monday, Buzzfeed posted a list titled “50 things that comics imply about Christmas” that was far less of a list of actual implications than a bunch of (mostly Silver Age) comic covers the poster gathered up and reposted from other places.

All the images did have source credits, though none actually included artist credits. Crediting cover artists, especially from the Silver Age, can be tricky, since many of them never got official credits in the comics themselves, so that’s understandable. Plus, I don’t really think sites have an overriding responsibility to credit the artists of mainstream comic book covers–people who are credited and paid for their work in a publication–the way they do for art that is posted to the Internet, often for free.

That said, the credits for the sites the images came from are questionable at best considering this image from a 2010 “Great Comics that Never Happened” piece slipped in with the photo credit “dccomics.com.” Not only is there a ComicsAlliance bug on there where the DC button would be, but the title on the fake comic is “Action Christmas,” and I am 100 percent sure the image couldn’t have come from DC’s website.

Someone eventually pointed this out to Buzzfeed, which moved the image to the bottom of the post and noted it came from ComicsAlliance, though it still doesn’t mention the name of the actual artist, Dean Trippe, who is very prominently credited in the original CA post.

So that’s where we are. If it isn’t actual, malicious removal of credits, it’s a sort of benign ignorance about them.

It certainly seems like there’s not a lot that can be done about this, and a lot of folks would argue that there doesn’t need to be. They’d say that as soon as an image is posted on the Internet, it is officially the property of the community. And let’s be clear: The mechanisms that are in place at the moment support that view. You can search up any image on Tumblr or DeviantArt with relative ease, right-click it, save it, and do whatever you want to it in Photoshop. There’s nothing to stop that.

I’m not sure there should be. I’m just as apt to open up something in Photoshop and make a dumb joke out of it as anybody. But there’s got to be a middle ground, right?

Musicians who use Soundcloud or Bandcamp have something of a way to deal with this. Via creative commons, they can label songs as fully under copyright, free to use and share, or even free to remix commercially. Is it a total safeguard against someone taking a copyrighted track and remixing it? Of course not. But it’s at least something that gives the creator’s intent upfront.

Then again, Flickr has those same Creative Commons categories, and that stuff gets shared all the time. There are always ways around it.

Ultimately, this is a problem that will probably only get solved the hard way, and that means changing attitudes about art on the Internet. That’s going to be hard. Super hard. But there are a few things that could help change the landscape. First, big sites like Buzzfeed, which are run by editors, have to start respecting artists, giving them credit, and paying them, if that’s what it takes. (Cartoonist Matt Bors has been trying to get Buzzfeed to pay an invoice for its reuse of one of his cartoons in a “community” piece since July.)

On Tumblr, which is more of a free-for-all, people can start leading by example. Next time you reblog an art post, make sure there’s an artist’s name on there. Don’t assume the source link at the top is enough. Write the person’s name in the caption box at the bottom.

I’m guilty of assuming doing the least is enough. I need to stop that. We all do.

See CA's Favorite (Credited) Art

Al Jazeera America, the US-based news outlet that just went live a few months ago, is now on more TVs across the country. Starting today, Time Warner Cable is carrying the channel in its major markets of New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas, and Bright House is also including the network in its lineups. Time Warner Cable plans to roll out the channel to the rest of its customers in March. The deals, which were struck back in October, bring Al Jazeera America to 55 million homes around the country, up from the 44 million it was in previously. About 100 million homes subscribe to cable and satellite TV. Both cable operators previously dropped the channel back when it was Al Gore's Current TV, so a new agreement had to be made.

The Qatar-owned network has prided itself on in-depth reporting of important news stories. John Seigenthaler, one of the high-profile TV journalists who's now working for the network, said earlier this year that "they are not interested in ratings, they are interested in delivering the news." To date, Al Jazeera America has struggled to gain any sizable viewership, with roughly 25,000 tuned into the channel depending on the time of day. Now that large parts of New York and Los Angeles can view the channel, however, that might pick up. Notably, both Time Warner Cable and Bright House will have HD versions of the network, unlike Comcast, Verizon FiOS, DirecTV, and Dish.

Q: What do you think about Harley Quinn? –@Gavin4L

I’ll be honest with you, Gavin: Harley Quinn is a tough character to write about. I’ve been struggling for a long time now trying to figure out how to get started, because there’s so much there built around a single character that gets into a lot of tricky, complicated areas, from her almost accidental creation and often mystifying popularity to how much she’s changed and been altered in a relatively short period of time, and how you can almost chart the changing aesthetic of the entire company just by looking at a single character. It’s a lot to get through, even if you’re someone who lived through every bit of it as a fan.

Really, I guess that’s as good a starting point as any. What do I think? Well, I like the character a lot, but when you get right down to it, she’s one of the most misunderstood and misused characters in all of superhero comics.

And when I say she’s misunderstood, I don’t just mean that in my usual grumpy, increasingly bitter old man way, where I’m frustrated with the creators and editors behind how she’s been presented in comics. It’s the fans, too, and that’s where things start to get dicey, but I’ll come back to that in a minute.

It’s almost impossible to really overstate the impact that Paul Dini, Bruce Timm and Batman: The Animated Series have had on Batman (and, by extension, DC as a whole) over of the past two decades. For a while, it was taken pretty much for granted that it was the single best version of that franchise that had ever existed, and even if you think that’s being a bit over the top with the praise, it’s a hell of a lot harder to argue that it didn’t launch DC’s most creatively successful venture into mass media. The movies are nice to have and all, and they probably brought in more financially than the animated series ever did — especially once everyone realized they really like superhero movies and you got a story where the Joker tried to blow up a couple of boats that literally made a billion dollars — but in terms of influencing and shaping the source material and bringing in new fans, BTAS beats ‘em all hands down.

You just need to look at the track record: BTAS definitely wouldn’t exist without the success of Burton’s Batman ’89, but while the movies stalled out after Schumacher, there hasn’t been a time since 1992 when Batman hasn’t been a fixture on television with those cartoons. Admittedly, he was never really gone thanks to reruns of Batman ’66 and Superfriends, but BTAS redefined the aesthetic, and provided a foundation that they’ve been building on ever since. All you really have to do to chart it is sit down and think about how many times you’ve heard Kevin Conroy growling about being The Night. We got Superman: The Animated Series because of Batman, and we got Batman Beyond and Justice League because of those. Even when the initial “DC Animated Universe” had run its course, it’s easy to argue that we got Batman: The Brave and the Bold specifically as a reaction to the darker tone that Dini and Timm had taken when they launched BTAS, and in terms of story and approach, we wouldn’t have gotten the Arkham Asylum video game without it.

That’s where the show really had its impact: with its approach. At a time when comics were getting increasingly caught up in continuity, BTAS was spearheading what would eventually become the movement towards focusing on the “iconic” versions of the characters. If you go back and read Dini, Timm and Mitch Brian’s original BTAS Writer’s Guide, which you should because it’s amazing, you’ll see that one of the first things they do is explicitly forbid origin stories in favor of focusing on a version of the character that’s already established and geared towards having adventures right now. They trim away all the baggage and leave just the important stuff — if you watch closely, they even establish everything you need to know right there in the 57 second opening sequence — and the result is that they’re operating with much leaner versions of the characters, where the metaphors and motivations are a lot closer to the surface.

That might be the greatest lasting impact of Batman: The Animated Series. It didn’t just give us a Batman who was stylish and cool and so dark that he was actually drawn on black paper, it gave us a Batman who was easy to understand and relate to. The darkness of his motivations is right there on the surface when he relives his origin after the Scarecrow doses him, but the affection for Alfred and the fatherly partnership with Robin is there too, right on the surface. That’s what really drew people in, even if the red skies, art-deco Batmobiles and blimps were more obviously awesome.

I mention all this because that approach didn’t stop with Batman. It happens with the villains, too — maybe the single best example of which is that the episode that introduces the Riddler is actually called “If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?”, neatly summing up his entire motivation in an eight-word title card. It’s all right there, in a way that makes them accessible without sacrificing the complexity of their characters.

That’s the kind of aesthetic that produced Harley Quinn, and it’s worth noting that she was created almost by accident. When she first appears in “Joker’s Favor,” it’s as a one-note joke, a gag character designed to set up the twist of the episode, that the Joker hounds and stalks and threatens this poor nobody over the course of years so that he can open a door as part of a larger scheme. Keep that in mind, too, because the secret of that episode is that it’s also Harley Quinn’s entire story in miniature.

That’s all Harley was meant for initially, but they’d accidentally hit on this magic combination that made her a keeper instantly. There’s so many great things just in that first appearance, from the incredible Bruce Timm design to Arleen Sorkin’s voice and mannerisms (on which the character was loosely based), but I think the most important thing is that she gave the Joker something he’d never really had. For better or worse, and for as many hack jokes as it invites, she was suddenly Joker’s Robin, in a twisted funhouse mirror way that shows exactly how different from Batman the Joker really is.

The Joker had a couple of short-lived associates before, of course, because when you’re a character that’s been a pretty constant presence in comics since 1940, there’s not a lot of stuff you haven’t done. There was Gaggy Gagsworthy, a truly terrifying one-shot sidekick from 1966 who also dressed like a harlequin (and was later resurrected by Paul Dini and Guillem March as a foe for Harley), and you could argue that Harley’s pretty directly descended from the various molls and henchwenches that palled around with the arch-criminals on the TV show, but there’s something different that sets her apart that was developed when she returned: She was hopelessly in love with the Joker.

When I say “hopeless,” I don’t mean it in the cute “I’m a hopeless romantic” sort of way, either. I mean that what she feels is utterly, tragically devoid of hope. Because she’s a Batman villain, she’s built around a simple metaphor that’s made to contrast with Batman. Since she’s inextricably tied to the Joker, that core metaphor is built around his, too, and because she was developed and honed in that lean animated series aesthetic that put that metaphor right at the forefront, she’s actually a really fascinating character in a lot of ways. At heart, at the core of what she is, she’s the living embodiment of obsession, in a way that contrasts with both Batman being driven to fight crime, and the Joker’s pseudo-romantic obsession with Batman — and only with Batman.

See, that’s the tragedy of Harley Quinn, the thing that makes her so compelling underneath all the bright, poppy cheer. She’s in love with someone who will never, ever love her back. Someone who can never, ever love her back, because he’s thoroughly obsessed with someone else. It’s something that we’ve all been through, and that’s what makes her so easy to identify and sympathize with. But because it’s an obsession, an addiction, it’s phenomenally self destructive (something else we can all probably relate to), and because it’s playing out in the grand metaphorical stage of superheroes, everything about it is taken to its horrifying extreme.

Ryan North did a great installment of Dinosaur Comics that perfectly captured the feeling of being a kid with a crush and believing that the object of your desire was “objectively the best girl ever,” and Harley follows that to its logical tragic end — the flaws she’s overlooking are that he’s a terrifying mass murderer obsessed with killing the Batman. That is not a solid foundation for a relationship, and when that relationship actually does happen, such as it is, it becomes one of the most genuinely tragic things in comics.

That’s the thing about superheroes: They don’t really do things by half measures. It’s not just that the Joker doesn’t love Harley back, it’s that he doesn’t even see her as anything that could possibly be desired. There’s only one other person in the Joker’s world, and everyone else is just an object that he can use against Batman. And to make things worse, it’s not just that he doesn’t return her love, it’s that he uses it. There’s no “let’s just be friends” with the Joker, there are just things that can be made into deathtraps. He’s every sociopath who broke someone’s heart taken to this huge extreme, manipulative and abusive in a way that’s frightening and disturbing, not because it originates from the shock value of hack writers trying to be mature, but because it operates on the same superheroic, metaphorical level of Batman’s determination and Superman’s kindness. It feels horrifyingly natural in that universe, and it all gets directed at Harley, because she’s the one object that’s always around, because she can’t stop herself from coming back. As far as he cares, she’s just there to open the door.

I thought Arkham Origins was a total snooze, and I thought it was goofy as all hell that they condensed the Joker’s seduction (such as it is) of Harley into a five minute cutscene rather than playing it out over the course of months, but I actually do like the way that it’s presented. It’s done as a conversation between the two characters that you hear while you’re playing from the Joker’s point of view, and he’s talking about his obsession with Batman, using those same terms that cast it as a twisted version of romance, this obsession with his perfect match that he knows he’ll be with forever, while Harley is getting flustered because she thinks he’s confessing his love for her, which she’s more than willing to accept. Again, it’s as hilariously over-the-top as everything else in that game, and falling head-over-heels for the Joker in the span of ten minutes doesn’t really do Harley’s character any favors, but it’s a nice presentation, carried off well by Troy Baker and Tara Strong’s acting.

Dini and Timm’s Mad Love, which tells Harley’s origin story, however, is darn near perfect. It’s a great piece of comics, because it takes those exact feelings that we’ve all had in those self-destructive crushes and plays it right out on the page. It’s the Buzzcocks song translated directly to the page, and one of the things that really makes it work is how easy it is to find yourself in her shoes. She doesn’t just develop a crush on someone, she obsesses over him and tries to make herself more like something she thinks he’d like:

Incidentally, this is a scene that actually made me re-evaluate her godawful redesign for the New 52. I mean, look, it’s still awful, but if you look at it in a certain way, it kind of makes sense. When Harley reinvents herself for the Joker, she dresses herself in a way that’s explicitly designed to be for him, and that fits with the way he presents himself. That classic Bruce Timm costume is great, and part of that is because those vivid, blocked colors look like they fit next to Timm’s Joker. One clearly follows from the other. If, however, Harley was reinventing herself to fit in with a version of the Joker who cuts his own face off and wanders around for a year with no face on and then ties his face skin to his head with a pair of belts, then she’s probably going to end up with something a hell of a lot dumber, which she did. I hate to admit it because neither one of those things is actually very good, but you have to admit they’re equally stupid. It might not look good, but it highlights the obsession, and that’s the key part.

Getting back on track, it’s that obsession that motivates her, just like we’ve all had that intense infatuation that’s made us want to change ourselves to better fit someone’s idea of what we should be like. But because that obsession is operating at a superheroic level, once she reinvents herself like that, there’s no going back. She’s too far gone to ever fully pull herself back. She can’t quit loving the Joker, no more than Batman can stop fighting crime, or Spider-Man can stop helping people who need him. It’s stitched into the fabric of who she is.

That’s what makes the end of Mad Love so tragic and affecting, because we all want there to be hope for her, just like we want there to be hope for ourselves that we can get over our broken hearts and move on, but for Harley, there never is. No matter what the Joker does to her, no matter how blatantly he’s manipulating and abusing her, she just can’t get out.

She’s hopelessly in love.

It’s great, but it’s also where the misunderstanding starts. There are fans out there who have what I’d consider to be weird ideas about almost every character that spring from not quite getting what they’re all about — you know, the classics like “Batman should just kill the Joker!” “Superman’s too nice!” and “People care about Aquaman!” — but there’s a strain of Harley Quinn fandom that creeps me right the heck out. Like I said, she’s an easy character to identify with, and the reason she’s so tragic and compelling is precisely because she’s built on a metaphor that’s simultaneously universal and personal. It’s something that resonates with me as much as any other character.

It’s when they start idealizing her relationship with the Joker that things go off the rails. They’re not tragically star-crossed lovers, they’re not two people madly in love and united against the world. She’s obsessively codependent and he’s an abusive sociopath. If you finish those comics and wistfully sigh and hope you can find your own Harley and/or Mistah J someday, then you should probably go back and read them again. But, you know, to be fair, taking any relationship advice from an Ask Chris column is probably not a good idea either.

Either way, this is where you start to see problems from a character standpoint, too. Because she’s so easy to identify with and relate to, and because she rocketed almost immediately to a level of popularity that was pretty evenly split between people who identify with her central tragedy and dudes who just want more sexxxy chixxx in skintight latex, there’s a push to take what looks like a pretty obvious step and recondition her as a protagonist in her own right. The thing is, as obvious as it might seem, it’s not so simple.

It never really works, because it can’t work. Harley orbits around the Joker in the same way that the Joker orbits around Batman. You need to remove him and at least partially resolve that obsession if you’re going to have her as a protagonist, because you can’t really have your protagonist obsessively pining for a character you’ve spent 70 years shaping as a remorseless obsessive and utterly unsympathetic killer. But if you do that, if you remove that obsession, then you’re not only taking away the foundation of the character, you’re also taking away the one thing that makes her so easy to relate to. You’re left with just a standard issue manic pixie dream girl, and that gets real old, real fast.

I think that’s why the original Harley Quinn ongoing series, despite launching with a creative team I really like, ended up being kind of a mess, and got downright unreadable when it got a new team that attempted to make it a dark, gritty crime book starring a lady in a clown costume. And by the same token, I think that’s why people tend to gravitate to those Poison Ivy/Harley Quinn team-up stories — for reasons beyond the obvious slashy sexxxy chixxx action, I mean. Ivy herself is one of the more sympathetic villains, but she’s still rooted (haw haw) firmly enough on the side of the bad guys that it doesn’t pull Harley too far out of her orbit. Even better, Ivy works as a viewpoint character for the reader. She’s eternally frustrated because she sees exactly what we see, and her annoyance with Harley comes from knowing that she’s never going to be able to free herself from the Joker. She cares, but can only express it in that same negative, villainous way that leads her to hold the city hostage until they have ended the tyranny of lawnmowers. But even that can’t last — it only works in short bursts.

Harley just fundamentally isn’t built to be a protagonist, even a damaged and psychologically scarred antihero. And yet there’s this myopic idea that continues, that a character this compelling and popular needs to be a star, and of late it’s created this schizophrenic take where she’s being bounced around from one incarnation to another. I mentioned that her terrible new costume actually does make a certain amount of sense, but that’s about the only thing that does. She’s been bounced around since the reboot, where people are trying to fit her into the roles of a vicious killer on par with the Joker and wacky lovesick rascal at the same time, and the end result is a character that’s now impossible to relate to.

Nothing quite solidifies it more than her atrocious “Villain Month” appearance in Matt Kindt and Neil Googe’s Detective Comics #23.2, which casts her as a Joker-in-absentia in a way so tone-deaf that it tanks the past 20 years of the character. If you missed it, well, lucky you, but the core idea is that having freed herself of the Suicide Squad, Harley decides to murder children on-panel by giving away exploding video games.

There’s no way to come back from that. If Harley’s aiding and abetting the Joker because she’s obsessively in love with him, then she’s a tragic and sympathetic figure. If she’s deciding on her own to commit acts of mass murder and terrorism, that’s a fundamental change that removes that sympathy. Unless you choose to ignore this particular issue, and I can’t imagine a scenario in which this is not the sensible choice, she’s impossible to root for. She killed a bunch of kids. That’s a big deal. And then a month later they launched an ongoing series that promises zany adventures featuring roller derby and puppies.

Any chance that I had of getting behind this new version of Harley Quinn as a character in her own right, any hope that I would’ve had about their chances of synthesizing what works about the character and putting in a new form that could be separated from the Joker without losing its foundation, is now completely overshadowed by the fact that a comic with her name on the cover featured her murdering around twenty people on-panel (with more implied), most of whom were children. How fun is that roller derby comic going to be when it’s following that? How am I supposed to reconcile these two ideas that they’re giving to me about the same character at the same time?

And in the end, that’s what we’re left with. A fascinating, compelling character that was created to perfectly fit into a specific role in a larger context that ended up working so well that she outgrew it, and has spent the last few years being hammered into shape to fit a new role. She’s a character I like a lot, but they sure are making that a difficult thing to do.

Ask Chris art by Erica Henderson. If you’ve got a question you’d like to see Chris tackle in a future column, just send it to @theisb on Twitter with the hashtag #AskChris.

There's a joke among Taiwanese nationals, Chang says, that goes like this: If every man, woman and child in China spits in the ocean it will drown Taiwan. It's part of the reason he's a first-generation American, the son of immigrants who came looking for opportunity outside a sphere of influence that practically smothered them.

"For a lot of Taiwanese citizens you either stay there due to pride, or you don't have any other reason to stay there," he says. "It's your hometown, but for a lot of people it's their dream to move to America. So that [was] my parents' dream. They wanted to have a yard and cars and stuff."

Chang helped to build the family business in high school. His parents import easels from China and sell them to artists online in the U.S. using a website he built when he was a teenager, something he laughs about now.

"It's terrible," he says. "It's made in Dreamweaver out of templates. It works, but it still hasn't changed. Like any kid at that time my parents were like, 'Hey you know computers. You can make websites!'"

E-commerce wasn't his passion. He wanted to be an animator at Pixar, to make the kind of movies he grew up watching. His parents convinced him to do something a bit more practical with their stack of easel cash. That's how he ended up at UCLA in the Design Media Arts program. He studied programming like some would study oil painting — as a medium for expression.

"It allowed me to take my artistic skill set, but then to transform it. ... I became this sort of jack of all trades kind of guy, where any problem that presented itself just sort of clicked for me."

His specialty was procedural animation, a way of teaching computers to draw on their own.

"Instead of painting a painting," Chang says, "it's more like I'm teaching an animal to perform. And the animal might do what you want, but it won't do the exact thing every time."

One of his first tastes of success was building a program that made simple drawings come to life. As soon as the user lifted their pen a creature would begin to swim around the screen. It was exactly the kind of work that appealed to Will Wright when he was conceptualizing Spore.

"It was during their prototyping phase," Chang says. "Wright basically had a bunch of people look for hacker programmer types. … I've been a Will Wright fan for my whole life and I'd played SimCity. So I applied instantly, and I got the internship.

"The art director would have us go and print out some random imagery," Chang says. "During lunch … there would be these printouts laying out of fucking ramen noodles and a basketball and the Space Shuttle or whatever. He'd say, 'I want you to take each of these images and shuffle them and sketch out a planet made from those things.'"

Chang went on to design many early versions of the user interface elements that went into Spore's Creature Creator.

After college he joined the new elite of mercenary work-for-hire programmers in Los Angeles. He traded the chance at a steady job and medical benefits for a string of highly paid projects. As a result his work history is certifiably weird.

Chang has done data visualization for Yahoo: "They collect so much data about their users," he says. "They want a way of plotting it. And they want to see it in a cool, Tron-like way."

Chang has worked in the advertising industry: "Instead of hiring a hundred animators to animate all these tiny bits of graphics they hired three programmers," he says.

Chang has worked for the Church of Scientology: "It was in a Disney-like castle in the middle of the desert," he says. "They put all of us non-Scientologists in a separate room with no access to the internet. It was sort of a sweatshop where I was creating propaganda 3D art."

Chang worked from Shanghai for a startup that he cannot name: "I wanted to travel," he says. "It just seemed really cyberpunk, and I already spoke the language. ... Our clients included Sony and Microsoft, the usual guys."

And he did all of that, and much more, before he turned 30.

But the whole time he was also making a game.

"In 2006 a friend and I were sitting in the living room," he says. "Super bored. We're saying to ourselves, 'Look, Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast was a great game. It happened, but people stopped playing it. We really need something to scratch the sword fighting itch that we have.'" And so they began to make a game together.