Paige FTW: Behind The Pixels
I’ve long been eyeing out Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made, by Kotaku news editor Jason Schreier.
I love juicy gossip, and I love video games. I was destined to like this book, really. I blasted through all 304 pages recently, and it’s definitely worth a read.
Schreier looks behind the scenes of 10 recent releases — including Pillars of Eternity, Uncharted 4 and Halo Wars — revealing the positive and negative stories behind their creation via on- and off-record interviews with developers. His writing is jaunty, newsy and easy to digest (if you’ve read his work on Kotaku, you have a good idea of what to expect).
The appeal of the book is simply the juxtaposition between a title you may adore or despise, and seeing what monumental struggle that possibly hundreds of people had to endure to make it happen. The struggle it takes to produce a single video game may well surpass that of any other kind of media. A change in story might force a programmer to discard years of work. A new battle system might alter the art direction. Each cog is irretrievably tied to another.
Stardew Valley, the tedious, patient work of a single man, spread over years, is every developer’s fever dream borne to brilliant, million-dollar fruition. On the other hand, you have something like Destiny, a hailstorm of bad news and poor decision that tore Bungie, one of the most celebrated studios of all time, to veritable pieces even if that, too, went on to sell millions of copies. The tormented struggle of Dragon Age: Inquisition in the face of EA’s Frostbite engine serves as an explanation behind some of the title’s more pronounced flaws (even if I personally loved it). Then again, that pales next to the agonies of Star Wars: 1313, a game that got rewritten twice (once on the insistence of George Lucas himself!) and then canceled by an indifferent Disney.
You’ll never look at your favorite game the same way again.
