Star Control 2 shipped with a text file containing a story where Fred Ford and Paul Reiche disappeared for 9 months to hole up in a cabin in Alaska building out the game (including planet surface exploration and hundreds of pages of alien dialogue), in isolation from their publisher, who had to hire a private investigator to find them.

I have no idea if there's any truth to it, but it sounded like my idea of heaven for a long time. When I learned that they were still working together (Toys for Bob) many years later, I harbored a fantasy about going to work for them.