Jared Huckaby

Jared "Disco Lando" Huckaby is the Creative Content Lead at Cloud Imperium, Los Angeles.^[1] He was previously Associate Creative Producer,^[2] and Content Manager before that.^[3] As of March 2024, he is Traumatized Ornithologist.^[4]

"“We serve at the pleasure of Chris Roberts""
Jared Huckaby on Meet the Devs

Work at CIG

Jared was originally a backer.

He watched early Wingman's Hangar videos and wanted to help out as a way to contribute, making videos which were pretty raunchy and inappropiate at times and were not meant for public consumption but to make the people there laugh. Wingman started putting videos on air which made Jared change his videos and he started making videos where he would be the voice of reason, making ones such as Why I Pledged or the educational series about arguing on the internet. He came by a few times to visit and came to know Ben Lesnick and the team at CIG. He came as Santa Claus for the 2014 Holiday Livestream. He started hanging out with the team and talking about the things he could offer, doing whatever he was asked to do.^[5]

His videos include The Wonderful World of Star Citizen and he used to do fan questions. He got contracted to do a couple of animations and intros, he also made the intro for Around the Verse during a contest to win a spaceship. When the time came to expand the team in February 2015 he joined it as a contract employee and became a full time community manager in April 2015.^[3]^[6] He spent a year as a contractor before becoming an employee.^[7]

When he came on as Community Manager he was helping out with some of the video production and was to take on some of the forum work. He started taking more and more responsibilities in different areas, getting heavily involved in event planning.^[8]

He manages the content that goes out to the community, such as interviews, helping with comm links, forum posts, various events, editing and producing the shows and generally speaking involvement in anything that goes from Cloud Imperium to the community.^[3]

Every week he would produce 10 for the Chairman, Around the Verse, Reverse the Verse, and every other week he would work on Bug Smashers and once a month a special edition of Reverse the Verse for subscribers. He would also work on Meet the Devs and streams such as the one for Wing Commander.^[8] As of July 2023, he has made 1600+ videos with 3000+ interviews within.^[9]

In addition he works with data management, collecting the sentiment of the community, taking questions, concerns, comments from the community and directing them to the appropriate people where that information will inform decision making.^[8]

He worked on designing booths, merchandise, and slogans.^[8]

After Ben Lesnick came with the idea of an airline, Jared created the airline with the dialogue and logo and what the team renamed to Meridian Transit.^[10]

Other Works

Jared Huckaby worked as a Construction Contractor, a Barista, an IT Professional, an actual High School Drama Teacher, an Audio Engineer for both Television and Radio, a Retail Supervisor or Manager several times over, a Professional Baseball Mascot, a Telemarketer, a Stage and Film Actor, a WoW Game Master, a Prosthetics Support Specialist, a Home Improvement Professional, a Director of Operations for a Professional Baseball Team, a DJ for a local AM sports talk radio station, a Cashier, a Mr. Trash, a Theme Park Performer, a Truck Loader, a Published Author of textbooks and magazine articles, a Hospitality Worker and more.^[11]

He starred in instructionals videos explaining how not to get crushed by forklifts in which he ran over many people with forklifts and got crushed by many forklifts. His "what did we learn?" question in Star Citizen videos comes from those intructional videos^[12]

He had over 30 jobs before joining CIG, starting at 14 and following in the footsteps of Jack London, learning what he could from a job before moving on and sometimes working 2 or 3 jobs at the same time.^[3]^[8]

He started working in the video games industry on World of Wacraft at Blizzard Entertainment in 2004 and stayed until about Burning Crusade.^[5]

Trivia

He does a couple hundred different things, and only three of them well. Which three? They're not work related, unfortunately.^[13]
Jared is also known as Red 1.^[14]
He was a Game Master in World of Warcraft during its launch.^[15]
On December 23, 2017, he shaved his iconic beard.^[16] As of 2021, his beard has returned.
His favorite ship is the Anvil Carrack. He is forced to like the ship as he is "legally bounded by his obligation to the community to like the ship".^[17] It is originated from the shipshape segment on 2018-04-12, he asked the community to vote his favorite ship in the comments,^[18] his favorite ship officially became the Carrack on 2018-05-03.^[19]
His actual favorite ship is the Crusader Genesis Starliner.^[20]
He requested this page be updated after his mother found it and said "I thought you did more than this in seven years." The community has a deep respect for Jared's work and contribution to the Star Citizen universe, and trusts that this page now meets his mother's satisfaction.^[21]^[22]
Jared runs a Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition campaign on his Twitch channel called A Fistful Of Twenties: The Dungeons and Disco Show with a cast of several Star Citizen community members. Toast, one of his coworkers, is the Beast Master of the campaign ^[23]
Mr. Huckaby opened an episode of Star Citizen Live in October 2021 as Italian Spiderman.^[24]
Mr. Huckaby has one rule dictated by CIG, forbidding discharge of the "not a flamethrower" displayed behind him.^[25]
Jared is a member of the Fresh Outta Verse cover band, alongside Jeremiah Lee.^[26]
Jared is the singer of the OST for Raftron.^[27]
He taught 12–13 years old in high school which helps him deal with Twitch chat^[28]
NASA Astronaut Victor J. Glover was an upperclassman in Jared's high school^[29]
He first met Chris Roberts at the finale of The Next Great Starship where Jared was an audience member.^[11]
His favorite alcoholic drink is macallan 18^[10]
Jared's paternal grandfather's mother was Welsh and Polish while his father was Cherokee.^[10]
On his orientation at Disney as a new hire, a instructional video about sexual harrasment got played in which Jared turned out to be the actor.^[12]
He used to do tech support for prosthetic legs.^[30]
A day before Area 18 was launched, he suggested adding Greycat buggies.^[31]
Revealed to be the game character wearing the Zeus Exploration Suit Solar on Inside Star Citizen.^[32]