Blood, Sweat, and Pixels
Page 19
At WayForward, D’Angelo said, his teams had always released games when they were 90 percent ready. With Shovel Knight, they wanted to hit 100 percent, to be confident that they’d made as good a game as possible. But putting in any extra time would mean working without getting paid. As of March 1, 2014, they’d be out of money.
They delayed the game anyway. “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.’” They all kept working, reaching into their savings accounts to pay for personal bills and whatever Yacht Club expenses might come up.
Nick Wozniak, who now had a newborn baby, had to borrow money from his parents. (“That was a really hard conversation to have.”) At nights, he’d work through dinner and find himself driving home in the waning hours of morning, only for his stomach to remind him that hey, he was starving. The only open restaurant was a twenty-four-hour Jack in the Box, which he started patronizing every night. “You get to know the drive-through guys by name,” Wozniak said. “I knew by voice which guy was going to fuck up my order, and so I wouldn’t order certain things. It was ridiculous. When a new guy came, I almost was tempted to say, ‘Oh, hey, you’re new.’”
The lowest point for Sean Velasco was stopping at a gas station to buy coffee creamer one day toward the end of development. “I hand the guy my [debit] card and it’s like boop. ‘Oh sorry, your card is declined.’ I started reaching in my pocket and grabbed my credit card, handed them that. And he did the same thing, he said, ‘Sorry, this one’s declined too.’ So I had to walk out in shame, with no coffee creamer. That was the most desperate that it got.”
The one thing that kept them going, as excruciating and demoralizing as those last months had become, was the feedback they’d keep getting from friends and family members who were testing Shovel Knight. “We got a lot of encouraging messages,” said Velasco. One of his college friends sent him a kind note after playing an early version of the game, telling Velasco that this was it, that Yacht Club had pulled it off, that Shovel Knight was going to be great. Velasco kept reading, thrilled, until he reached the long list of problems that his friend had with the game. “We had to go back and hack at it and fix it again,” Velasco said.
On June 26, 2014, after nearly four months without salaries, Yacht Club Games released Shovel Knight. They thought it was a good game, but really, there was no way to tell if anyone would care, or if it would be doomed to fall off the Steam charts with the other thousands of games that came out every year and faded away. They thought they’d done enough PR and marketing to get people’s attention, but that was always a crapshoot. They’d been talking about merchandise and lunchboxes, but what if nobody even bought their game? There was a running joke around the office: if everything failed, they’d all just go off and start a bakery.
Then the reviews started coming in. People loved Shovel Knight. It was clever, challenging (but not unfair), and polished to pale blue perfection. It took a few days before the Yacht Club crew could sort out how many copies of the game they’d sold (outside the Kickstarter backers who had already paid), but when they got the numbers, they were stunned. In the first week, they’d sold 75,000 copies. By the first month, they were up to 180,000, exponentially higher than any game they’d developed at WayForward.
Shovel Knight was a critical and commercial success. For Sean Velasco, however, it was hard to relish. “It was really dark times,” he said. After emerging from the hellfire of Shovel Knight crunch, Velasco had reentered the real world and found himself disoriented, like a felon going free after a long prison sentence. “It was emotions cranked up to twelve on every front,” Velasco said. “The elation of putting out a game that people were excited about. The contentedness of actually having finished it and finally being done with it. And the thrill of going to all these different places and talking about the game and having such a good reaction. But then the downside of being so emotionally and physically drained from the whole thing.”
Like many game creators, Velasco found himself dealing with a heavy dose of postproject depression and imposter syndrome. “I [thought], ‘Oh, who even cares, we just ripped off Mega Man,’” he said. “We fooled people into liking this. I’m not even really good at this.”
It would take a while before Velasco found his balance again, but at least now they were done. The crunch was over. Soon they’d be getting nice salaries—due to their flat structure, each of the cofounders would draw the same amount of money—and they’d be able to readjust their work-life balance. There were some bugs to fix, and they still had to wrap up those playable boss knights that they’d promised, but it was over. Shovel Knight was done. Wasn’t it?
One of the first things you can see from the panoramic windows of Yacht Club Games’ swanky twelfth-floor office in Marina Del Ray, California, is a dock full of luxury boats, which makes the company’s name feel significantly less ironic. I went out to visit the studio in October 2016, nearly two and a half years after the release of Shovel Knight. They’d come a long way from the days of clogged drains and Ikea furniture.
By now the company had expanded from five to ten, and they were trying to hire more people, which had been a little difficult thanks to Yacht Club’s unique structure.* They’d been trying to find a good QA tester, but nobody could get past the interview stage. “It’s a little daunting to interview with us,” said Nick Wozniak. “It’s one interview with ten people.” Since everybody at the company had to agree on every decision, they’d decided that prospective employees would have to take questions from everyone. Whenever they brought in a potential QA tester, he or she would have to take a job interview with all ten of them at once, in a single conference room.
That bizarre interview practice wasn’t even the most remarkable thing about Yacht Club in October 2016. The most remarkable thing was that they were still working on Shovel Knight. Two and a half years later, Yacht Club Games still had Kickstarter promises to keep.
Those three boss knight modes that Yacht Club had promised as Kickstarter stretch goals were taking far longer than anyone could have imagined. After shipping Shovel Knight and taking a few weeks to relax, fix bugs, and port the game to several consoles, Yacht Club began developing the first boss campaign, in which you’d get to play as the villainous alchemist Plague Knight. Early on, they decided they wouldn’t just swap out Shovel Knight’s character sprite and call it quits—they wanted Plague Knight to have his own abilities, like bomb hurling and burst jumping. And if he had his own set of abilities, they’d need to redesign all the levels to fit those abilities. What they thought might take a few months turned into a yearlong development cycle. After shipping the Plague Knight campaign in September 2015, they had two more boss campaigns to release: Specter Knight and King Knight. When I visited Yacht Club, both of those were planned for 2017. “If you had told me [in 2014] that I’d still be working on Shovel Knight now, in 2016, doing these other campaigns, I’d be like, ‘Are you frickin’ kidding me?’” said Sean Velasco. “But hey, here we are.”
Years after shipping the game, Velasco was feeling better. He was spending less time at work. He was going to the beach, getting tan. After going through yet another grueling period of crunch in the weeks leading up to Plague Knight, Yacht Club’s cofounders had all vowed not to do it again. “It’s so draining,” said David D’Angelo. “And it’s especially hard because we crunched an insane amount already at WayForward, so we’ve gone through a lot. More than the average game studio.”
Over lunch at a sandwich shop near their office, when D’Angelo mentioned that he never wanted to crunch again, Ian Flood sighed. Yeah, right, he said. Just wait until they had to ship Specter Knight. “I never want to accept that it’s inevitable,” Flood later told me. “I say that with more of a pragmatic a
ttitude, less than an inevitability, like yeah, we’re going to crunch, so get ready for it. Cancel all your plans.”
There’s no way to know whether Yacht Club’s success would have been possible without a barrage of hundred-hour workweeks, but it was tremendous. By 2016, they’d sold well over a million copies of the game. They’d ported Shovel Knight to every gaming console possible, put out a physical version in retail stores (a rarity for indie developers), and even worked with Nintendo to build a collectible Amiibo toy based on their intrepid shovel wielder.* Publishers were approaching Yacht Club about distribution deals and even made offers to buy the company (that Velasco and crew politely declined). You could find Shovel Knight popping up in other indie games, too, making cameo appearances in the racer Runbow, the platformer Yooka-Laylee, and several others. He wasn’t quite as ubiquitous as Mario had been in the 1990s, but Shovel Knight had become an indie icon nonetheless.
Despite this success, nobody at Yacht Club had thought they’d still be working on Shovel Knight. Even the company’s most hard-core fans would send e-mails and comments to Yacht Club, asking them to stop updating Shovel Knight and just make something new already. But the team had committed to those Kickstarter stretch goals: three boss campaigns and a multiplayer mode. “That’s been our biggest mistake, for good and for bad: we promised a lot of game,” said David D’Angelo. “When we promise something, we want to blow it out of the water. So us promising anything is bad, essentially. Because we’re going to go way overboard.”
The other problem was that these boss knight campaigns weren’t making them any money. They were investing cash—upward of $2 million, they estimated—into a bunch of campaigns that they were selling for a whopping zero dollars. After all, Yacht Club had promised in the Kickstarter that Plague Knight, Specter Knight, and King Knight would all be free. Going back on that promise would be a bad look.
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 pessimistic view was that they’d spent millions of dollars—and years of their lives—on a game that should have been finished years earlier. And there was no way to tell whether people had even noticed all the additions. “You have no idea if it’s actually working,” said D’Angelo. “Our game sells well every month, but is it selling well because it’s just Shovel Knight, or is it selling well because we added content to it?”
At first they’d planned to finish all three boss campaigns by the end of 2015. That became 2016. Then 2017. In January 2017, with the end finally in sight, Yacht Club made a bold move: They announced that they would (a) start selling all four campaigns separately and (b) raise the price of the overall Shovel Knight package, since buyers would now essentially get four games in one. After finishing Specter Knight and King Knight, Yacht Club would finally be done—which would be nice, because they’d all gotten sick of looking at Shovel Knight. “We were our own QA department, so we had to play the game hundreds of times,” said Nick Wozniak. “We hired some friends to help out, but for the most part we were just playing constantly.”
They all liked to fantasize about what they’d do next. The easiest next step might be a Shovel Knight 2, but after four years with their horned hero, Yacht Club’s cofounders were craving something new. They talked a lot about emulating Nintendo. “I would love to have three tentpole brands that are huge,” said Velasco. “And then just iterate on them.” Shovel Knight would be their Mario, but that wasn’t enough. Velasco wanted them to make another franchise that was as iconic as The Legend of Zelda. And a third that was as beloved as Metroid.
Coming from another developer, this might have sounded delusional, like the stoned fantasies of a film school student dreaming about his plans to make the next Star Wars. Yeah, OK, you’ll be the next Nintendo. Good luck with that. But as I walked out of Yacht Club’s beautiful offices, passing Shovel Knight T-shirts and Shovel Knight plushies and a large, ornate statue depicting a horned blue knight with a shovel in one hand, it somehow didn’t seem that absurd.
8
Destiny
One day in late 2007, across the street from their offices in Kirkland, Washington, Bungie’s employees sat in a rented theater, applauding raucously. They’d just won back their independence. After seven years under Microsoft’s umbrella, they were free.
It wasn’t that long ago that embracing corporate ownership had seemed like a good idea. Bungie, founded as an indie game studio in 1991, had achieved moderate success with games like Marathon (a sci-fi shooter) and Myth (a fantastical strategy game) but didn’t really make it big until Halo, a first-person shooter set amid a galactic war between humanity and a theocratic alliance of purple-obsessed aliens called the Covenant. When Bungie unveiled Halo at the Macworld trade show in 1999, hype for the game reached feverish levels.
A year after that, Microsoft bought Bungie, turning Halo from a Mac and PC game to an Xbox exclusive.* 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.”
Over the following years, as they worked on Halo 2 and then Halo 3, the developers at Bungie began yearning for independence. They were tired of having to run decisions up Microsoft’s corporate ladder, and they wanted to make intellectual property that would belong to them rather than to some giant conglomerate. (Many were also frustrated that Halo was no longer theirs alone after Microsoft gave it to a certain RTS studio.) Bungie’s leadership—including the company’s top designer and cofounder, Jason Jones—began threatening to leave and start their own studio. Soon they were talking to Microsoft about a spin-out deal.
After months of negotiation, the two companies came to terms that everyone found satisfying. Bungie would finish Halo 3 and then make two more Halo games. Microsoft would retain the Halo IP, but Bungie could hang on to the technology they’d developed over the past seven years. And, for the first time since 2000, Bungie would be independent.
On that day in 2007, as Bungie’s management announced in the theater that they were breaking away from Microsoft, the whole studio was thrilled. “Everybody was cheering, and my first thought was ‘Jeez, what did we do to you guys?’” said Shane Kim, the Microsoft vice president who had helped coordinate the spin-out. “Because I actually think we were pretty good. But I got it, too. At a real visceral level, I got it. They wanted to be independent.”
High on the buzz of their newfound freedom, the Bungie staff wrote up a piece of parchment that they called the Declaration of Independence. Everyone at the studio signed it, then they hung it up in the common area. “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.”
Even as the Bungie staff celebrated, however, a wave of unease rolled over the studio. With this newfound independence came unprecedented levels of responsibility. There would be nobody else to blame for their mistakes. And nobody at Bungie knew what their first big non-Halo game in a decade, code-named Tiger, was going to look like. They were all confident that they could build something huge without Microsoft’s resources, but there was still that nagging feeling: What if they couldn’t?
“You have to be careful what you wish for,” said Kim. “It’s not everything it’s cracked up to be. Running a big studio like that is complicated.”
“I felt like everything I’d ever wanted to do in Halo, we had done,” Griesemer said. “There’s two categories of features in Halo: the ones that Jaime liked, and the ones that Jaime didn’t like. And we already did all the ones Jaime liked, so now we need to do all the ones I didn’t like, and I’m not down for implementing something I don’t like, so I need to get out of the way.”
After Bungie released Halo 3, the bulk of the studio moved on to the last two games they were contractually obligated to make for Microsoft, spin-offs that would later become known as Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach. Griesemer, meanwhile, convinced Bungie’s leadership to let him start dreaming up new ideas for the studio’s next multimillion-dollar franchise. Squirreled away with a computer, Griesemer came up with a pitch for a multiplayer action game that he called Dragon Tavern. It wasn’t quite an MMO like World of Warcraft, but it would be what he called a “shared-world experience.” Each player would get his or her own tavern, a private area where players could put up decorations, hang out with friends, and congregate between quests. Then, when adventuring throughout the rest of the world, players would be able to cooperate and compete with one another as if they had just joined a big, public MMO.