Making Games

From AboveTheGarage

I'm going to do my best to tell fun interesting stories without offending too many people.

The fact is that making a game, if you're passionate about it, is intensely frustrating, because you will run into a lot of people who are not passionate about it, and who are clueless. And sometimes these people have a lot of power and really screw things up.

I was spoiled because I worked at Virgin Interactive and that was privately held company that didn't have to deliver quarterly results. Almost every game was late; usually it came out the following quarter, and it was no big deal; some games came out a year late. We had a mandate from Robert Devereux, who was the head honcho in our section ("Publishing") of the Virgin Group, to make every game good. Or as good as humanly possible. Sometimes we (the producers and I) tried to cancel games and he said, "Nope! It's your job to make it good!" We groaned internally and carried on. I had no idea what a great gift it was to be forced to get 100 games over the finish line - because the interesting stuff happens at the end of a project - and so many games are canceled that some people never see the finish line. (That was actually a pretty cool thing about Amaze - hardly any games were canceled.)

Later, after Virgin Interactive, I was constantly astounded at how poorly run nearly every game publisher is in the entire world. (I'm currently impressed with NCsoft and how much support we are getting to make Guild Wars 2 a great product - hence why I love working at ArenaNet!)

Believe me, I don't take ArenaNet for granted.

Anyway, I'm going to try to tell fun, interesting stories about making games without offending too many people, but I'll be honest, that's going to be a challenge. And I'm going to try to take blame for the things I've screwed up. My successes still outweigh my failures, so it's not a big hit to my ego to admit to the errors I've made.