Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

by Jason Schreier

“Sounds like a miracle that this game was even made,” I said. “Oh, Jason,” he said. “It’s a miracle that any game is made.”

Here’s an alternative theory: every single video game is made under abnormal circumstances. Video games straddle the border between art and technology in a way that was barely possible just a few decades ago.

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. That’s a common analogy. Another is that making a game is like constructing a building during an earthquake. Or trying to drive a train while someone else runs in front of you, laying down track as you go.

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. And, most controversially, everyone who makes video games has to crunch, sacrificing personal lives and family time for a job that seems to never end. Yet many of the people who make video games say they can’t imagine doing anything else.

The most important question in video game development has nothing to do with making video games. It’s a simple question that has stymied artists for centuries and put an end to countless creative endeavors: How are we gonna pay for this thing?

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.

For decades, the video game industry’s power balance had been simple: developers made games; publishers paid for them.

Traditionally, independent studios like Obsidian and Double Fine had three ways to stay afloat: (1) finding investors, (2) signing contracts with publishers to make games, or (3) funding their own video games with war chests they’d hoarded via options one and two.

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.

One common theme in video game development is that everything tends to come together at the last minute.

The Legend of Zelda spawned from Shigeru Miyamoto’s memories of childhood spelunking.

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.

When they disagreed on something, they’d each rank how they felt about it, on a scale from one to ten. If Druckmann was at an eight but Straley said he was just a three, Druckmann would get his way.

But that’s a question all developers have to ask: How do you convince fans that your game will be awesome without spoiling the best parts?

“There were a lot of leads meetings at the end where we were just reminding everybody, ‘Perfect is the enemy of good,’” said the writer Josh Scherr. “You’re polishing something that’s at ninety-five percent while this thing over here at sixty percent needs a lot of love. So that was what made crunch hard, because [when] you’d get down into it, you’d have trouble seeing the forest for the trees.”

“We started saying, ‘OK, well, we’re going to have to patch,’” said Wells, referring to the increasingly common practice of releasing a “day one” patch to fix bugs that have made it into the gold master.

‘Art is never finished, it’s just abandoned,’” said Straley. “The game is just shipped. That’s our motto in that last quarter of production; I walk around just saying, ‘Ship it’ to everything I see. ‘Ship it. Ship that.’”

Five years earlier, Barone had been living with his parents, flunking job interviews and trying to figure out what to do with his life. Now the creator of Harvest Moon was chopping trees in his best-selling video game. “Surreal” may have been an understatement.

Mosqueira moved across Canada to work on Far Cry 3 at Ubisoft’s massive office in Montreal, where winter temperatures tended to drop a few degrees lower than they should in any human-inhabited city.

What became apparent to Blizzard in the coming months was that people were more interested in gaming Diablo III than they were in playing it, a problem that would take serious investment to fix.

Anyone who’s spent a great deal of time on a single project knows how relieving it feels to finish—and how when it’s done, you never want to look at it again.

“There’s a person who’s been making the tours promoting her book”—the psychologist Angela Duckworth—“and she used to write about grit. She said grit is this quality that a lot of successful people have. And it’s this persistence, to push forward with something. Anything worth doing, it’s not necessarily day-to-day fun sometimes. Sometimes it is. Great when it is. But grit usually means that somebody sees the long-term goal and they see the long-term vision and they push through any obstacles that they have on a day-to-day basis, with the end in mind.”

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.”

Diablo III was one of the best-selling video games in history, having sold thirty million copies as of August 2015. It also proved a point that would influence numerous game developers in the years to come, including but not limited to the makers of The Division and Destiny (whom we’ll meet in chapter 8): every game can be fixed.

This sort of move isn’t uncommon in the video game industry, where publishers tend to be conservative and risk averse, leaning toward established franchises and sequels whenever possible.

But an orchestra needs only one conductor, and the Halo Wars team spent a great deal of time getting into fights. “Not yelling fights, but loud fights,” Devine said. “It’s funny, it’s always around game things. Should the economy be cheaper or should the economy be more expensive? Should bases be freestanding or bases all be connected together? It’s all good stuff—it’s not, ‘Oh my gosh your T-shirt is terrible.’ It’s all just awesome stuff that makes a game much better. But at the time it’s highly stressful.”

They’d try to envision what designers call the “core gameplay loop”—what does a thirty-minute play session look like?—and then they’d keep prototyping and iterating until that gameplay felt good.

Just a few months before the game shipped they added some features that would turn out to be pivotal, like a “jump” button that would let the Inquisitor hop over fences and gradually scale mountains (through the time-tested video game tradition of leaping against the side of a mountain over and over until you make it up).

“Dragon Age 2 was the product of a remarkable time line challenge; Dragon Age: Inquisition was the product of a remarkable technical challenge,” said Mike Laidlaw.

From the beginning, Yacht Club had made the unorthodox decision that nobody would be in charge. Sean Velasco was technically the director of Shovel Knight, and he led most of the meetings, but he wasn’t the boss. They followed a simple, yet radical rule: If anyone said no to something, they all had to stop doing it. Nothing would happen until the entire team agreed on a singular way to proceed. It was the democratization of video game design.

Like many game creators, Velasco found himself dealing with a heavy dose of postproject depression and imposter syndrome.

When Halo launched alongside the Xbox in November 2001, it became an immediate cash cow for Microsoft, selling millions and helping turn the publisher’s fledgling console into a device that could compete with products from the more-established Sony and Nintendo. Edge magazine called it “the most important launch game for any console, ever.”

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” they scribbled in a font straight out of 1776, “that basically, we want to make games and create experiences our way, without any kind of fiscal, creative or political constraints from on high, since we believe that’s the best way to do it. We want to benefit directly from the success of our endeavors and share that success with the people responsible for it.”

At first Griesemer and the other developers had wanted Destiny to be a fantasy game. Over time, however, the castles began to morph into spaceships, the axes and swords

Bungie didn’t know exactly what Destiny was going to be, but they knew they wanted it to be massive, and eventually they reached a whopping ten-year, $500 million, multigame deal with Activision, the publisher of Call of Duty. By all accounts it was the biggest development deal in video game history.

“The biggest differentiator between a studio that creates a really high-quality game and a studio that doesn’t isn’t the quality of the team,” said one person who worked on Destiny. “It’s their dev tools. If you can take fifty shots on goal, and you’re a pretty shitty hockey player, and I can only take three shots on goal and I’m Wayne fucking Gretzky, you’re probably going to do better. That’s what tools are. It’s how fast can you iterate, how stable are they, how robust are they, how easy is it as a nontechnical artist to move a thing.”

During these early design sessions, Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz and other designers enacted a simple rule: don’t make boring quests. “I called them ‘FedEx quests’—the quests that are just fetch quests,” said Tomaszkiewicz. “Someone says bring me the cup, or ten bear skins or whatever. You bring that stuff to them and that’s it. There’s no twist, no nothing. . . . Every quest, no matter how small it should be, should have something memorable in it, some little twist, something you might remember it by. Something unexpected happening.”

they ran into the challenge that oh so many game developers have encountered: How do you determine whether a quest has an impact when you don’t even have a game yet?

People often wondered how CD Projekt Red sharpened the writing in Witcher games so well, especially when there was so much of it. The answer was simple. “I don’t think there is a single quest in The Witcher 3 which was written once, accepted, and then recorded,” Szamałek said. “Everything was rewritten dozens of times.”

CD Projekt Red, which had first found success when Marcin Iwiński got the rights to distribute BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate, had now made something that BioWare wanted to emulate. Who, now, could argue that European RPGs weren’t as good?

Rather than try to make their games impervious to pirates, they wanted to convince potential pirates that a CD Projekt Red game was worth the money, as they had all those years ago during the era of Poland’s computer markets.

Game development is, as BioWare’s Matt Goldman describes it, like being on the “knife’s edge of chaos,” where the sheer number of moving parts makes it impossible for anyone to find predictability. Isn’t that one of the reasons we love video games in the first place? That feeling of surprise when you pick up a controller and know you’re about to experience something totally new?

These days, when I marvel at the incredible vistas of Uncharted 4 or blast my way through Destiny’s addictive raids, or when I wonder how a bad video game turned out the way it did, that’s the image that comes to mind: a room full of developers, setting themselves on fire. Maybe that’s how video games are made.

A “gold master,” or release-to-manufacturing build, is the version of a game that’s sent to the publisher (in Uncharted 4’s case, Sony) to produce discs and distribute the game to store shelves.

Remarkably, Shovel Knight was the first Amiibo from a third-party developer. All of Nintendo’s previous Amiibo toys had been based on the company’s own franchises. To make the toy happen, David D’Angelo told me he had simply bothered Nintendo representatives every month until they said yes.

That Baldur’s Gate was developed by BioWare (Dragon Age: Inquisition), localized by CD Projekt (The Witcher 3), and emulated by Obsidian (Pillars of Eternity) is testament either to the immense influence of that game or to the fact that I really like RPGs and wanted to cover three of them in this book.

It helped that at CD Projekt Red, unlike at most companies in North America, overtime was paid. Polish labor laws required it.