In early 2003, I was an active member of the IL-2 Sturmovik flight sim online community, and also just settling in at the Art Institute of Seattle.  The sim's development team had a standing policy of considering third party aircraft models for inclusion in the sim, provided they were exactingly accurate - historically and technically.  I'd begun modeling the early 'smallmouth' P-40B on my own, hoping to eventually submit it.
     Towards June, a well known (and long absent) individual in the IL-2 community began approaching 3D modelers and texture artists who were in the process of building aircraft models or had done so previously.  While it would not be formally announced until several months later, this was the beginning of the internationally distributed art asset development of 1C:Maddox / Red Rocket Games' Pacific Fighers.
     As can be expected when any development team is spread over several dozen countries (one count was as high as 60) and speaks almost as many languages, communication and coordination between team members and management was new and interesting every day.  This became a secondary challenge, at least for me, when my wife and I discovered in September that we were expecting our son.
     Despite those challenges and others equally and far more serious (of which 'PacFi' had far more than its fair share of), I built the external models for the Flying Tiger's variant of the P-40B, the H-81A-2, plus the US Army Air Corps and RAF variant conversions, the external model for a P-61B Black Widow, and a full cockpit model for the P-40.
     Because of a number of reasons--legal, technical, and communicative, the crazy and convoluted details of which I usually retell in person--my work was accepted, but only the P-40 cockpit was implemented in the simulation which shipped October 2004.  All told, the experience to work on an A-list game while still in college was an eye-opener, and also a stark demonstration of how much I still could learn; I gained more hard knowledge and experience about 3D art in a shorter span of time while working on PacFi than I have during any other project.