Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

by Jason Schreier

Here’s an alternative theory: every single video game is made under abnormal circumstances.

Lots of video games look the same, but no two video games are created the same way, which is a pattern you’ll see throughout this book.

As Feargus Urquhart, the CEO of Obsidian, told me, “We are on the absolute edge of technology. We are always pushing everything all the time.” Urquhart pointed out that making games is sort of like shooting movies, if you had to build an entirely new camera every time you started.

In all the stories in this book, you’ll see several common themes. Every game is delayed at least once. Every game developer must make tough compromises. Every company must sweat over which hardware and technology to use. Every studio must build its schedules around big trade shows like E3, where developers will draw motivation (and even feedback) from throngs of excited fans.

The standard burn rate for a game studio was $10,000 per person per month, a number that included both salaries and overhead costs, like health insurance and office rent. Using that number as a baseline, keeping all fifty Stormlands developers employed would cost the studio at least $500,000 every month.

By the end of the day, the company had been gutted. Obsidian laid off around twenty-six of the people who had worked on Stormlands, including one engineer who had been hired just a day earlier.

Urquhart shut them down. He saw crowdfunding as a desperation move. He thought there was a strong likelihood that they’d flop, that they’d be embarrassed, that nobody would give them a dollar.

One thing became immediately clear to everyone who was left at Obsidian: they needed to make an old-school RPG. Much of the company’s DNA came from Black Isle, the studio that Feargus Urquhart had operated back in the Interplay days, which was best known for developing and publishing RPGs like Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, and Baldur’s Gate.

Around the same time, a separate team at Obsidian was working on a pitch for the Russian publisher Mail.Ru, one of the largest Internet companies in Eastern Europe. Mail.Ru had been watching the success of the game World of Tanks, which brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year primarily from fans in Europe and Asia, and the publisher was eager to make its own online tank game.

At exactly ten o’clock, Brennecke hit the launch button. When the page loaded, the ticker was already at $800. How the hell? Brennecke hit refresh. They were over $2,700. Then $5,000. Within a minute, they had broken five digits.

The next few weeks were a whirlwind of fundraising, updates, and interviews. Project Eternity raised its original goal of $1.1 million a day after the Kickstarter went live, but Urquhart and his crew weren’t content settling for the minimum—they wanted to raise as much as possible. More money wouldn’t directly translate to a better game, but it would mean that they could afford to hire more people and take more time on the project (which would probably lead to a better game).

When the countdown hit zero, they had raised $3,986,794—nearly four times their Kickstarter goal and double what Adam Brennecke, the most optimistic of the bunch, had hoped they could get.

Thanks to crowdfunding, Brennecke had over $4 million in that checkbook, which was a lot of money for a Kickstarter project. But compared with modern major video game budgets, which can cap out at hundreds of millions of dollars, it was minuscule. Using the standard $10,000 per person per month burn rate, the Eternity budget could maybe feed a team of forty working for ten months.

In real life the math was never that clean. A development team would expand and contract based on what it needed every month, and the budget would adjust accordingly. Brennecke would have to build a living schedule—a schedule that could change at any given day based on how they were doing.

There was no big publisher demanding progress reports, but Obsidian did feel obligated to offer regular updates to the 74,000 Kickstarter backers who had funded Eternity. The upside of talking to fans was that they could be open and honest without worrying about a publisher’s iron-tight PR strategy. The downside was that they had to be open and honest all the time.

Eternity’s developers, like most of the people who make games, were used to developing in isolation, getting feedback from the outside world only when they released a new trailer or wandered around a trade show. With the Kickstarter approach, they’d get criticism in real time, which could help make the game better in a way that just hadn’t happened on previous projects.

The biggest problem was Project Eternity’s story, which was coming together far more slowly than anyone on the team had expected. Sawyer and Brennecke had entrusted the main narrative to Eric Fenstermaker, a writer who had been at Obsidian since 2005. What made things complicated was that Fenstermaker was also the lead narrative designer on South Park: The Stick of Truth, a game that was going through a publisher change and its own development hurdles.

In game industry circles, Naughty Dog has two distinct reputations. One is that its staff are the best of the best, not just at telling top-notch stories, but also at making games so eye-poppingly gorgeous, competitors publicly wonder just what kind of dark magic the studio employs. The other is that they embrace crunch.

The first Uncharted was an unusual move for Naughty Dog. Founded in 1984 by two childhood friends, Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin, the studio spent nearly two decades making platformers like Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter, both of which turned into iconic franchises on Sony’s PlayStation.

The directing pair talked often about “feeding the beast,” a term they’d picked up from the Pixar book Creativity, Inc. that referred to a creative team’s insatiable hunger for work. With The Last of Us done, there were now nearly two hundred people working on Uncharted 4, and they all needed things to do.

Naughty Dog, like many experienced studios, bought into the mentality that there was no way to know whether part of a game was fun until you played it. So, like other studios, they would build little “gray box” areas—self-contained spaces where all the 3-D models looked monochromatic and ugly because there was no proper art attached—and test out their design ideas to see which ones felt good to play.

They complemented each other well—Druckmann loved writing dialogue and working with actors, while Straley spent most of his days helping the team hone gameplay mechanics—but they still squabbled as much as you might expect from two ambitious, creative, alpha-type personalities.

Naughty Dog’s staff liked to emphasize that, unlike other game studios, they didn’t have producers. Nobody’s job was simply to manage the schedule or coordinate people’s work, the role a producer would fill at other companies. Instead, everyone at Naughty Dog was expected to manage him- or herself.

Many of them had gone from crunching on The Last of Us to crunching on Uncharted, with few breaks or vacations in between.

Ugh

Some argue that crunch represents failure of leadership and project management—that for employees to spend months working fourteen-hour days, usually for no extra money, is unconscionable. Others wonder how games can be made without it.

One Naughty Dog designer later tweeted that he’d gained fifteen pounds during Uncharted 4’s final crunch. And some worried, during those last few months of 2015, that the game might never be finished. “The crunch at the end was probably the worst we’ve ever had,” said Emilia Schatz. “It was honestly very unhealthy. We’ve done bad crunches before, but I never got the feeling we couldn’t finish this project. Toward the end of Uncharted 4, you’d see other people in the hall and there’d be that look: ‘I don’t know how we’re going to finish this. It just doesn’t seem possible.’”

Most video games are built by teams of dozens of people, each of whom specializes in fields like art, programming, design, or music. Some games, like Uncharted 4, employ staffs in the hundreds and use work from outsourced artists across the world. Even small independent developers usually rely on contractors and third-party game engines. Eric Barone, a self-proclaimed introvert, had a different plan.

Because he was making Stardew Valley by himself, there was nobody to hold him accountable or force him to stick to a schedule. He had no employees or expenses. No producers were hovering behind his computer chair, telling him to stop overscoping and just ship the damn game.

Where he really could’ve used help was scheduling. Some game developers set their project milestones based on what they think will take them the longest to make, while others build schedules around the demos they’ll have to create for public events like E3.

In mid-2012, after nearly a year of working daily on Stardew Valley, Barone launched a website and started posting about the game on Harvest Moon fan forums, where there were plenty of people sharing his belief that the series had gone downhill. Those same people were instantly drawn to Stardew Valley.

By the end of 2013, Barone had hundreds of followers watching and leaving friendly comments on each of his blog posts. Yet his morale had tanked. For two years Barone had been in front of a computer every day by himself, developing and playtesting the same game over and over again. Seeds of anxiety had been germinating inside him, and they would sprout at the worst possible times.

In September 2015, a group of Chucklefish staffers went on Twitch and streamed themselves playing an hour of Stardew Valley. The game still wasn’t finished, but it was close enough. They could show off the basics, guiding along their main character as she cleared debris off her farm and met the friendly residents of Pelican Town. Fans thought it looked great. “Looks and sounds awesome,” wrote one commenter. “You really are a one-man army.”

Barone had originally promised that Stardew Valley would come with both single-and multiplayer modes, but hooking up the multiplayer was taking far longer than he’d anticipated. As 2015 dwindled and winter started approaching in Seattle—where he and Hageman had ditched the cramped studio in favor of a modest house that they now shared with two other friends—it became clear that releasing the “complete” version of Stardew Valley might take another year.

On that Thursday in Seattle, as he climbed across the front passenger’s seat, Stardew Valley had already sold 1.5 million copies. Since he’d launched the game, it had grossed close to $21 million. Eric Barone, who was twenty-eight years old and couldn’t open the front door of his car, had over $12 million in his bank account.

After a decade of turbulent development, Diablo III had finally gone live, but nobody could play it.

A few miles away, at the Irvine Spectrum outdoor mall, the rest of the Diablo III team had no idea that people couldn’t play their game. They were busy partying. Hundreds of hard-core fans, dressed in spiky armor and carrying giant foam battle-axes, had come out for the official Diablo III launch event.

In the weeks to come, however, players would discover that Diablo III had some fundamental flaws. It was satisfying to rip through hordes of monsters, but the difficulty ramped up way too fast. Legendary items dropped too infrequently. The endgame was too challenging. And, perhaps most frustrating of all, the loot system seemed to revolve around the in-game auction house, where Diablo III players could use real-life money to buy and sell powerful equipment.

Blizzard’s designers had originally built Diablo III’s difficulty system to mirror Diablo II. You’d play through the full game once on Normal mode, then play it a second time on the challenging Nightmare mode, and crank through a third time on Hell mode. Diablo III repeated that structure and introduced a fourth difficulty option, Inferno. Designed for players who had already hit the level cap, Inferno was blisteringly tough, to the point where you couldn’t beat it without the game’s best gear. But Diablo III’s best gear dropped only when you played on Inferno mode, creating a nasty, demonic version of the chicken-and-egg dilemma.

The other was that the people who worked on Diablo III—some of whom had been on the game for nearly a decade—wouldn’t get a break.

Diablo III’s longtime director, Jay Wilson, had told the team that he planned to step down, citing burnout after nearly a decade spent working on the same game.

It took a long time before the designers realized that their obsession with random numbers was hurting Diablo III.

wasn’t just that Inferno mode was too tough. Players had lost their appetite for playing through the same campaign multiple times, with nothing changing but monsters’ strength.

To an outside observer this might have seemed like an obvious method—most other games use difficulty modes this way—but for a Diablo game it was revolutionary. “Initially it seemed like this impossible mountain to climb,” Martens said. “You knew you needed to change this major thing, [but] you never thought about the game in that terms, in automatic difficulty before. We’d never considered it in that manner.” They’d never considered it because of Diablo II.

One quote, delivered by the director of StarCraft II, Dustin Browder, has always stuck out as a telling description of how Blizzard makes video games. In June 2012, over a year after Blizzard had hoped to ship StarCraft II’s first expansion, Heart of the Swarm, Browder spoke to me about the game’s progress. “We are ninety-nine percent done,” he said, “but that last one percent’s a bitch.” Heart of the Swarm wouldn’t come out until March 2013. That last one percent took nearly a year.

Back in 2002, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction had become infested with third-party gray markets, in which people would trade real money for powerful items on sketchy, insecure websites. Blizzard’s goal was, as Kevin Martens put it, to provide “a world-class experience” for those players, one that was safe and secure.

Diablo III was proof that, even for one of the most accomplished and talented game studios in the world, with near-limitless resources to make a game, years can pass before that game properly coalesces.

To finish the first Age of Empires, Ensemble’s staff went through what Dave Pottinger, a lead designer, described as “a terrible death march which could never be repeated today,” working one-hundred-hour weeks for nearly a year.

Since Ensemble’s founding in 1995, the company had been made up mostly of young, single men who spent nights and weekends together.

Ensemble would fall into the same pattern every time. The second team would play around with prototypes and early concepts for a while, then the main Age team would invariably run into some sort of catastrophe, such as when they had to redo Age of Empires II’s entire design after a year because it wasn’t fun to play. Ensemble’s management would then ask the second team to put their own project on hold and come help with the latest Age game.

Devine, a Scottish expatriate with long hair and a high-pitched laugh, had one of the most eclectic résumés in gaming. As a teenager in the 1980s, he’d done programming work for Atari, Lucasfilm Games, and Activision. Before he’d turned thirty, Devine had founded his own company, Trilobyte, and designed a smash hit called The 7th Guest that blended tricky puzzles with cinematic storytelling. After falling out with his Trilobyte cofounder and watching the studio collapse, Devine went to id Software to work alongside one of his old friends, the legendary programmer John Carmack. He spent four years helping develop games like Quake III and Doom 3 before leaving for Ensemble in 2003, where he was put in charge of coding pathing algorithms—the mathematical formulas that told units how to move—for Age of Empires III.