Control Alt Delete

I thoroughly enjoyed Jason Schreier's "Press Reset," and have been looking forward to checking out his previous book on video game development, "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels". Both books cover the same industry and have similar structures: every chapter covers the development of a different video game from a different publisher, with reporting and a lot of (sourced!) quotes from programmers, artists, producers, executives and others describing what happened during the project. The overall feel of the two books is pretty different, though. BS&P's games are mostly huge, popular successes, and the stories cover all of the sacrifices and toil behind the scenes that made them possible. Press Reset's games are mostly failures. Their developers worked just as hard, and had ideas that were just as good, but due to forces beyond their control things didn't turn out how they wished and their stories end in mass layoffs, cancellations and studio closures.

 

 

The biggest constant between the two books is probably crunch. As I've noted before, crunch is the single biggest reason why I've never even tried to get into the video game industry, despite an almost life-long passion for making and playing games. I really liked how Schreier presents crunch in this book: never apologizing for it or saying it's good, but complicating some of our knee-jerk assumptions about it. Early in the book he covers the creation of Uncharted 4, a massive game from a AAA studio. A very late reboot in the game's direction puts things severely behind schedule, and the hundreds of people working on the project start working 100-hour weeks to redo everything they did before and make sure everything is fun to play.

Obviously, this is a terrible situation, and you really feel for the people involved. The people crunching aren't doing it because they were slacking off before or had put in poor work. They're responding to events beyond their control, decisions made by higher-ups and executives, but the low-level workers are the ones who need to bear the burden of those decisions. It feels extremely gross and exploitative.

And then, Schreier immediately follows that up with a chapter on the development of Stardew Valley, which is kind of the exact opposite game. It's the creation of a single person, a shy college graduate who coded the engine, drew all the pixel art, composed all the music, did all of the testing, and every single other task that went into making the game. He doesn't have any boss to set milestones or any shareholders to appease. And yet, he crunches hard as well, going for years of very late nights and little sleep, living in his parents' house and making this game.

Later on, we learn about Yacht Club Games, the makers of Shovel Knight. They quit their previous video game employer, which churned out new games every 6 months or so in a crunch-heavy environment. YCG runs a mildly successful Kickstarter that will pay for about 6 months of salaries while they try to finish their game. They decide to squeeze more time out of it, calculating how much they need to draw down to cover their rent and food and utilities, which then gives them an 8 month runway. When they reach the 6 month mark, though, they know that there's just too much left for them to do before they run out of money... so they all start crunching. Missing anniversaries, birthdays, their kids' first steps, so they can make their video game better.

So, reading all of these, you are left with the grudging impression that there is some sort of real connection between video game development and crunch, not merely the exploitative capitalist tendency to extract maximum labor at minimal cost. People may crunch for their own projects out of passion or perfectionism, because they love what they're working on or because they hate it and can't wait to be done with it.

Some of this rings true to my own experience as well. It's been years since I did any serious game-y things, but I still vividly remember working on my Shadowrun campaigns, which had a lot of crunch to them. There were more than a few times I'd be up well past midnight, sipping on hot tea and listening to Invocation Array while building out levels or testing combat triggers or structuring conversation trees. Like the Stardew Valley guy, I didn't have anyone else putting pressure on me, but I would slip into a productive zone and just jam on code until I would force myself to go to bed.

That said, I do love how the penultimate chapter visits CD Projekt Red, working on The Witcher 3. As with most other chapters, they reach a point where they're racing towards their deadline and not sure if the game is of high enough quality, so everyone starts crunching to make sure things pull together. But, as Jason notes, this company is based on Poland, and so everybody is paid overtime for their extra contributions. To me, that's the single most important factor and the thing that's so gross to me about crunch. More broadly, we have a problem in our country with classifying nearly all white-collar workers as "exempt" salaried employees who don't merit overtime pay, which has been ruthlessly exploited for so many decades to extract unpaid labor. So, y'know, we should stop that! Plenty of other countries require all employees to receive overtime for excess labor, we should do that too. That might result in higher paychecks, but I suspect the more common outcome will be the vanishing of crunch.

Overall, BS&P is more triumphant than PR, but there are a lot of good variations in the stories. The most common one is probably "People were working on a project, something happened that disrupted stuff, people had to work way harder and get an extension to finish it, but they did: the game launched to positive reviews and sold more copies than they expected." So it's cool when a curveball comes in. Diablo 3 is one of the most interesting chapters: unlike most stories, which end shortly after launch day, Diablo 3 starts with launch day. The team is enthusiastic and proud of what they've built, and are blindsided by Error 37, hatred of the auction house, and negative reviews. That whole chapter is about the post-launch effort to fix Diablo 3 and rehabilitate Blizzard's reputation. There's a ton of interesting stuff in that chapter, too much to go into here, but one that sticks out to me was how one of the things that hampered D3's development was the team's awe and veneration of Diablo 2. As their (new) director points out, though, what they were thinking of was what Diablo 2 became, after the Lord of Destruction expansion, which was quite different from what D2 originally launched as. Likewise, they had to be courageous to reexamine their assumptions about D3, and really the series as a whole. This led to some really drastic reworkings, which ultimately paid off. Today Diablo 3 is well regarded, thanks to the game it has become, not the game it launched as.

The very last chapter tells the tragic tale of Start Wars 1313, a very compelling and highly anticipated game that was killed off: at first due to the whims of a mercurial owner, and ultimately due to conglomerate corporate maneuverings. It's a sobering tale to end on, and serves as a good bridge to the later Press Reset, which has plenty more examples of games that never launched, or were disowned by their creators, or emerged in a form unrecognizable to anyone who had worked on them. It's also a helpful reminder that for every fun and beloved game that gets released, there are a lot more terrible games that get released... and vastly more games that never see the light of day. As with most examples of "business success" or celebrity in our culture, the cheery optimism that "anyone can make it!" hides the terrible odds facing anyone who tries.

Overall, I think my recommendation would be for people to read Blood Sweat and Pixels first: it's more fun to read about successes than failures, and odds are you've played and enjoyed at least a few of the games in these pages. You should also check out Jason's many long-form journalism pieces floating around the Internet, he's almost certainly the best person on the video game beat at the moment.