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. Combine technological shifts with the fact that a video game can be just about anything, from a two-dimensional iPhone puzzler to a massive open-world RPG with über-realistic graphics, and it shouldn’t be too shocking to discover that there are no uniform standards for how games are made. 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.

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.

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.

John Epler, the cinematic designer, recalled a bleary-eyed ritual in which every night he’d drive to the same convenience store, pick up a bag of Cheetos, and then go home and zone out in front of the television. “You get to the point where you’ve been at work for twelve or fourteen hours, you get on the road home and you think: all I really want to do is watch a TV show I’ve watched one hundred times and eat junk food I’ve eaten one hundred times, because those things are comfortable, and I know how they’re going to end,” Epler said. “Whereas every day is another something coming to the top of the pile, and, ‘Oh shit, somebody needs to look at this.’” When the store’s clerks started to recognize him, Epler realized he needed a lifestyle adjustment.

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The optimistic view was that they were building a game and committing to updating it for the long haul, like Blizzard had done for Diablo III. “This is how you create a hit now: you make something and add to it,” said D’Angelo. “And it’s not about the day-one sales, it’s about getting more and more people on board and invested in it.”

“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.”