NEW YORK — Local gamer Seth Basharo, who spent his youth creatively murdering the innocent guests of his theme park in RollerCoaster Tycoon, now, decades later, enjoys similar thrills working at the prestigious management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
“My job as a consultant requires me to plan, pitch, and deliver bold ideas within budget that meet the distinct needs of our esteemed business partners,” explained Basharo from his home office, sipping coffee from a Cornell University mug. “It’s so much like my old RollerCoaster Tycoon theme park, ‘Death By Seth,’ where I first fell in love with client-facing roles and creative problem solving.”
In young Basharo’s case, the problem was often that he wanted to kill as many unsuspecting park attendees as possible, in the shortest time possible.
“Through iterative rounds of A/B testing, I found that systematically wrangling up guests, deleting all exits, and building a one-way path leading directly into a collapsible holding area about a small drowning pond was certainly the most efficient way to achieve ROI,” said Basharo. “However, I did diversify my methodology, like building unfinished coasters or setting the speed on drop tower rides to 90 mph so the riders blow off the top of the attraction and explode. What can I say—even at 9 years old I was a jack-of-all-trades who always delivered on his goals.”
Still, Basharo admitted management consulting wasn’t entirely the same as running a murderous theme park, even if they were similar.
“Today I spend a lot more time building PowerPoint decks and financial models in Excel. But thankfully, I do still get to do what I love. In fact, my body count from advising companies on how to best market addictive products like opiates is actually much higher than the virtual outcomes I achieved as a child, according to my estimations,” said Basharo, who hopes to break his own murder record next quarter. “My year-over-year growth in elimination numbers, if normalized, is close to 20 percent!”
At press time, Basharo was busy conducting a quick market-sizing calculation to determine how many people would miss the homeless man who lives outside the firm’s office if he were to suddenly go missing.
