* In game design, even a question as simple as “How do you know when you can use the grappling hook?” can lead to all sorts of complicated discussions. Although Naughty Dog’s designers were originally averse to putting an icon on the screen to indicate that you could use the rope—they hated user interface (UI) elements that felt too video gamey—they eventually relented. “People just start spamming the button everywhere if there’s no icon,” said Kurt Margenau, a lead designer. “Can I rope to that? Nope, can’t rope to that.”
* During the development of Uncharted 4, as Naughty Dog grew bigger than it had ever been, Christophe Balestra, one of the company’s copresidents, designed a computer program called Tasker that helped the studio organize daily tasks and fixes. “When we were trying to finalize a level, there were these checklists that you need to fix every single one of these problems, and that ended up being crucial,” said Anthony Newman, a lead designer.
* “It’s not fun to debug those kinds of problems,” said Christian Gyrling, a lead programmer. “At the center of all of our networking is the file server, and if you try to inspect what’s going on, it’s like taking a firehose to the face of information. And somewhere in that stream of information you have to deduce which machine is it that’s causing things to go wrong.”
* A “gold master,” or release-to-manufacturing build, is the version of a game that’s sent to the publisher (in Uncharted 4’s case, Sony) to produce discs and distribute the game to store shelves.
* When a game company is fixing bugs, the development team goes through a process called “triage” in which it labels each error based on how significant it is. The highest, “A” or “1” level bugs, are usually the ones that break a game entirely. If you find a bug in a video game, the developers have probably found it too—it’s just a “C” level bug that nobody had the time (or inclination) to fix before launch.
* The publisher Natsume had owned and distributed the Harvest Moon games since the franchise first started, but in 2014, the series’ longtime developer, Marvelous, decided to split off from Natsume and publish its own games. Natsume still owned the Harvest Moon name, so Marvelous released its farming games under the title Story of Seasons. Meanwhile, Natsume developed its own line of new Harvest Moon games. Yes, it’s all very confusing.
* In video game parlance, a sprite is a two-dimensional image representing a character or object on the screen.
* When I first met Eric Barone in September 2016, we’d just seen the launch of one of the most hyped indie games in history, No Man’s Sky. Slurping down pho noodles at a shop near his house, we had a long conversation about how that game had failed to deliver on its developers’ promises. “You can make a bunch of money by creating hype based off just saying stuff, and it works,” Barone said. “But it’s just not my style. I don’t even like hype at all. I don’t want any hype. I would much rather create a great game, and I really truly believe that if you create the right game, and it’s a really good game, it’ll hype itself. It’ll market itself.”
* Barone would later announce ports of Stardew Valley for the PlayStation 4, the Xbox One, and the Nintendo Switch.
* Diablo II, released in 2000, was still receiving new patches in 2016. StarCraft, released in 1998, got a new patch in 2017. No other company has maintained and updated its old games for so long.
* Oddly, Blizzard would not give Jay Wilson permission to be interviewed for this book.
* Randomly generated items didn’t quite mesh with Diablo III’s stat system. Whereas in Diablo II every stat was useful to every character, no matter what class you played, Diablo III took a more focused approach. In Diablo III, an axe of strength would be useful only to a barbarian, so it’d really suck to get one if you were playing a demon hunter. And an arrow quiver that boosted intelligence—the primary stat for wizards—was useless to just about everyone. Wizards couldn’t use arrows.
* One of Mosqueira’s favorite anecdotes was that when he played Diablo III for the first time, as an axe-wielding barbarian, it did take him 104 hours to find a legendary item. (He checked.) When he finally saw that shiny orange item hit the floor, he was elated—until he saw that it was an arrow quiver. Barbarians couldn’t use arrows.
* Ideas from Devil’s Hand would later reemerge in Kanai’s Cube, a versatile magic box that would, among other things, let Diablo III players absorb and collect powers from their legendary gear.
* Ian Fischer, “Blast from the Past: Ensemble Figures Out How to Go from Empires to Kings,” Gamesauce, Spring 2010, www.gamesauce.biz/2010/09/05/ensemble-figures-out-how-to-go-from-empires-to-kings.
* This may have been the wrong call. Too Human, released by the developer Silicon Knights in 2008, was poorly received by fans and critics. In 2012, following a long legal battle, a jury ruled that Silicon Knights had breached its licensing agreement with the maker of the Unreal Engine, Epic Games, while working on games like Too Human. In addition to paying hefty damages, Silicon Knights had to recall unsold copies of Too Human and even pull the game from the Xbox 360’s digital store.
* Not to be confused with the other video game studio named Bonfire, which Blizzard’s Josh Mosqueira cofounded in 2016.
* Microtransactions, which rose to popularity in the mid-2000s thanks to publishers like EA, are in-game items (like weapons or costumes) that players can buy with real money. Few things inspire more anger from video game fans.
* Thanks to network issues, SimCity was essentially unplayable for days after it launched in March 2013. Even when the servers settled down and the game started working, players discovered flaws in the simulation: for example, cars would always take the shortest routes between destinations, even if those routes were full of traffic. Cops wouldn’t cross intersections. Trading didn’t function properly. At Kotaku, we created a special tag for the occasion: “SimCity Disaster Watch.”
* BioWare later released free downloadable content that expanded and added more choices to Mass Effect 3’s ending. EA’s labels president, Frank Gibeau, endorsed the decision. Recalled BioWare studio head Aaryn Flynn: “Frank once said to [Mass Effect 3 lead] Casey [Hudson] and I, ‘Are you sure you guys even want to do this? Are you just going to feed the trolls up there?’ We’re like, ‘No, we want to do this, we really want to get this right, do this thing.’ He said, ‘OK if you want to.’”
* At most video game studios, the title “creative director” refers to the lead of a project, but EA used different nomenclature.
* Some fans have warmed to Dragon Age 2 in the years since it was released, and many at BioWare say they’re still very proud of the game. “Dragon Age 2 is a project where I think everybody who worked on it, we were all in this together, we all grew closer,” said John Epler, a cinematic designer.
* One idea that BioWare never quite took seriously: rideable dragons. “[EA’s CEO] John Riccitiello told us we should have the ability to ride dragons,” said Mark Darrah. “That would make it sell ten million copies.” (Dragon Age: Inquisition did not have rideable dragons.)
* Ever wondered why so many big video games come out in March? There’s an easy answer for that: the fiscal year, used for reporting financial performance to stockholders, which dominates the decision making of every publicly traded company. Most game publishers end their fiscal years on March 31, so if they’re looking to delay a game but still fit it in the current fiscal year, March makes for the perfect window.
* For years, video game developers have struggled with the question of what to put in demos. Is it lying to fans if an E3 feature never makes it into the final game? It’s a nuanced topic. “When people get really mad—‘Well, you showed this, and the final game wasn’t like this,’” said Mark Darrah, “[we think,] well, it was supposed to be, or we thought it was going to be.”
* Confusingly, we also refer to the amount of space on a hard drive as “memory,” because computers like to make everything more complicated than it needs to be.
* A white box is an outline of a g
ame’s level without any art assets attached, used for quick testing and prototypes. At some studios, it’s called a gray box. At others, it’s called a black box. That even a concept as simple as this has no standardized name says a great deal about the youth of the video game industry.
* Recalled Ian Flood of their creative process: “It’s like, ‘That’s really cool that you think that’s what Batman should do, but you know what Batman really needs to do? Be out by Christmas.’”
* Although the departure wasn’t exactly amicable for some of them, the crew maintained a good relationship with WayForward over the years. “WayForward was so good to us,” said Sean Velasco. “They lent us their tech, and they helped us with references, and we see them all the time at all the trade shows and industry events. I worked with them for seven years. They’re great friends and they’re good people, and there’s no way Yacht Club could’ve existed or that I would exist as a designer without all the things I’ve learned at that place.”
* Before launching the Kickstarter, they contacted a writer at IGN, Colin Moriarty, who they figured would be a fan of Shovel Knight because he had started his career writing GameFAQs guides for games like Mega Man and Castlevania. Moriarty was indeed a fan, and he became a big supporter of Shovel Knight over the years.
* A sixth partner, Lee McDole, departed Yacht Club early after a dispute over the idea of a flat structure. He’d believed, based on earlier conversations and work he’d done in the previous months and years, that he and Sean Velasco would be 50/50 partners on the business. “I wrestled with the idea of continuing in this new arrangement for several days, but ultimately it didn’t feel right moving forward,” McDole said.
* Erin Pellon, the concept artist, left Yacht Club in 2015 after a falling-out with the other cofounders.
* Remarkably, Shovel Knight was the first Amiibo from a third-party developer. All of Nintendo’s previous Amiibo toys had been based on the company’s own franchises. To make the toy happen, David D’Angelo told me he had simply bothered Nintendo representatives every month until they said yes.
* Halo would wind up coming to Mac and PC in 2003, two years after the Xbox release.
* Bungie (and Jason Jones) declined to be interviewed for this book.
* Ryan McCaffrey, “Bungie Cofounder, Destiny Creator on ‘Halo’s Greatest Tragedy,’” IGN, July 9, 2013, www.ign.com/articles/2013/07/09/bungie-co-founder-destiny-creator-on-halos-greatest-tragedy.
* One early incarnation of Destiny looked a lot like Overwatch, according to Jaime Griesemer. “I went to Blizzard for a while, and played Titan,” he said—Titan was the canceled MMO that was later reworked into Overwatch—“and I was like, ‘Holy shit, you guys are working on the same game, down to character classes.’” The version of Destiny that shipped, of course, looked nothing like Overwatch.
* Not coincidentally, both Chris Barrett and Luke Smith went on to become the creative directors of future Destiny DLC and sequels.
* On September 24, 2013, Staten announced the news on Bungie’s website with a gracious note: “After fifteen great years at Bungie, from the battlefields of Myth to the mysteries of Halo and beyond, I’m leaving to tackle new creative challenges. While this may come as a surprise, fear not. It’s been my pleasure building Destiny these past four years, and after the big reveal this Summer, our hugely talented team is on track for greatness. I’ll be cheering all of them, with all of you, when the game launches next year. Thank you for your support of me, and your continued support of Bungie. We couldn’t have done it without you.”
* In the months to come, O’Donnell filed lawsuits against Bungie for failing to pay his wages and for confiscating his stock. An arbitrator ruled in O’Donnell’s favor, giving him a nice payday.
* One of the most inexplicable early Destiny decisions revolved around “engrams,” the decahedral treasure chests that players could pop open for new loot. In the endgame, the only worthwhile gear was the rarest “legendary”-caliber weapons and armor, which were purple. You’d get a little rush of endorphins whenever you discovered a purple engram that might lead to a legendary piece of gear. But nearly 50 percent of the time, cracking open a purple engram would get you an inferior blue piece of loot—a bizarre decision that did nothing but infuriate players until it was changed in October 2014.
* At most tech companies, it’d take three or four years for an employee’s stock to “vest” and fully belong to him or her; at Bungie, where the stock vesting schedule was tied to Destiny releases, it might take nearly a decade.
* That Baldur’s Gate was developed by BioWare (Dragon Age: Inquisition), localized by CD Projekt (The Witcher 3), and emulated by Obsidian (Pillars of Eternity) is testament either to the immense influence of that game or to the fact that I really like RPGs and wanted to cover three of them in this book.
* Chris Suellentrop, “‘Witcher’ Studio Boss Marcin Iwinski: ‘We Had No Clue How to Make Games,’ Glixel, March 2017, www.glixel.com/interviews/witcher-studio-boss-we-had-no-clue-how-to-make-games-w472316.
* It helped that at CD Projekt Red, unlike at most companies in North America, overtime was paid. Polish labor laws required it.
* Fans tend to hate “retail-exclusive” downloadable content, a practice used by publishers like Square Enix and Ubisoft that spreads preorder bonuses across different stores. Buying Final Fantasy XV at Amazon, for example, would get you a set of special weapons. Preordering it at GameStop would get you a bonus minigame.
* Released by Atari in 1982, E.T. is widely considered one of the worst games of all time. Its disastrous launch helped trigger the video game crash of 1983 and eventually led Atari to bury a truckload of unsold cartridges in the New Mexico desert. Thirty years later, in April 2014, excavators unearthed the cartridges. The game was still terrible.
* Michael French, “Interview: Paul Meegan, MCV, June 6, 2011, www.mcvuk.com/news/read/interview-paul-meegan/02023.
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