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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.
“When you’re focusing on a publisher, a lot of the times you’ll just do things the wrong way [on purpose],” said Bobby Null, the lead level designer. “It’s smoke and mirrors, hacking stuff in and trying to impress the publisher so they’ll keep paying the bills.”
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.
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.
For decades, extended overtime has been a ubiquitous practice, seen as integral to game development as buttons or computers. It’s also been controversial. 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.
“Part of making a game by yourself, when you have no money and you have a girlfriend who wants to have a life together, is that you just have to get people to accept that you’re going to do this, and not try to dissuade you from it,” said Barone.
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.
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.
“One of the biggest problems with long game development is, when you playtest the game for too long, you invent problems and you add layers to the game that don’t need to be added.”
To some on the Xbox team, it was a surprise to find out that Ensemble had dedicated so many staff to the Halo MMO when the studio should have ostensibly been focusing on Halo Wars. “It was very common for people [from Microsoft] to show up and go, ‘What the fuck is this, why are you working on that?’”
The website Consumerist once held an annual poll for “Worst Company in America,” asking readers to select the country’s most reviled corporation through a March Madness–style elimination tournament. In 2008, as the US economy collapsed, the insurance salesmen at AIG took top honors. In 2011 the award went to BP, whose oil rigs had just spilled 210 million gallons of crude in the Gulf Coast. But in 2012 and 2013, a different type of company won the award, beating out the likes of Comcast and Bank of America, as over 250,000 voters flocked to declare that the United States’ worst company was in
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In the demo, the player-controlled Inquisitor would rush to defend a keep from invading forces, burn down boats to prevent enemy soldiers from escaping, and capture a fortress for the Inquisition. It all looked fantastic. None of it made it into Dragon Age: Inquisition. That demo, like many of the sizzling trailers we see at shows like E3, was almost entirely fake.
“Muscle memory is incredibly influential at this point,” said Cameron Lee. “Through the hellfire which is game development, [we’re] forged into a unit, in that we know what [everyone’s] thinking and we understand everyone’s expectations and we know what needs to get done and just do it.”
“It would be best for us to kill ourselves on this than to fail,” said Nick Wozniak. “The thing we sacrificed for that was ourselves. We knew we’d have to be working weekends. We knew we’d have to be working multiple-hour days. Time is a thing that you just give to the game.”
“We had no choice,” said Sean Velasco. “And this was after we were balls-to-the-wall grinding on this game, didn’t see the sunlight for sixteen months. All friends became strangers. . . . People would ask me how things were going and I was like, ‘Everything is getting worse except for Shovel Knight. That’s getting better.’”
It was, I came back in from going on vacation for a week and everything I had worked on for a year was deleted. Unrecoverably, literally deleted. If I hadn’t had a copy on my laptop, it would’ve been gone forever. With no warning, no discussion, no nothing.”
“We have a huge team of production artists that mostly does sci-fi stuff, and they haven’t done an orc or a sword ever, so maybe we have to do sci-fi,” Griesemer said. “We want to do a third-person game, but we have a bunch of people who specialize in first-person game animations, and all of our code base is written assuming that the crosshair is in the center of the screen. And so now we’re first-person. . . . Before you know it, we’re basically making Halo.”
“There was something about Bungie’s trajectory from small and scrappy to king of the world to over-the-hill dinosaurs,” said Griesemer. “They accumulated the negative traits of all of those stages. So there was the immaturity of being young and scrappy, the arrogance of being on top of everything, and then there was the stubbornness and inability to change from the dinosaurs stage.”
“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.”
Knowing it’d be difficult to persuade their Polish brethren to buy proper copies of the game rather than pirating it online or at the market, Iwiński and Kiciński went all out. In addition to localizing Baldur’s Gate in Polish (complete with authentic Polish voice acting), they stuffed the game’s box with a map, a Dungeons & Dragons guide, and a CD soundtrack, gambling that Polish players would see the package’s value as a justification to buy Baldur’s Gate instead of pirating it.
Other RPGs tended to draw strict lines in the sand when it came to morality—BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy, for example, separated your dialogue decisions based on whether they were good or evil—but in The Witcher, there were very few happy endings, which CD Projekt Red saw as a reflection of Polish culture.
What this meant was that 2014 would be a year full of crunch for the Polish company.
Iwiński liked to say they believed in the carrot, not the stick. 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.
Sometimes, frustrated LucasArts managers would give elaborate presentations to Lucasfilm executives simply to explain to them how games were made. Those Lucasfilm executives also served as gatekeepers to George Lucas, often giving LucasArts developers guidelines for how to talk to the legendary auteur. (One common directive: never say no.)
“One of the problems of working in a film company with somebody like George is that he’s used to being able to change his mind and iterate on things purely on a visual level,” said a person who worked on the game. “[He wasn’t used to] the idea that we were developing [gameplay] mechanics that go along with these concepts, levels, and scenarios.”
Video games get canceled all the time. For every shipped game under a developer’s belt, there are dozens of abandoned concepts and prototypes that never see the light of day. But something about Star Wars 1313 has always felt unique, not just to fans but also to those who worked on it.
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?
It helped that at CD Projekt Red, unlike at most companies in North America, overtime was paid. Polish labor laws required it.
