Game Over

Hey, Darius, you there? Sorry, I was muted. Can you hear me? Yeah, perfect. So this morning I went back and listened to the episode you were on just to remember what that was like. I love games. I'm a really hard worker. I can't say that enough because at this point of working all these really bad jobs, that was my whole selling point. And they called me and said I had the job. At that point, that was when everything changed. That was from that world to this world.

It was kind of about how you had worked this series of menial jobs and eventually found your way over into work at a big game studio. you you've moved to seattle and you're feeling really good about things so i guess what we need is uh an update on you know what happened after that okay yeah and well uh After Seattle, I professionally bottomed out. My contract was up and the pay was never that great. I decided to go back to Austin and then did a bunch of various jobs in regular software.

back to back contracts. I had a very brief stint. working on short stocks at Charles Schwab. It was really depressing. It's like when you bet against a stock that's going to fail, you profit. Then I went to go work for a fitness company, which that one was a little bit more exciting in some ways. It was a lot of fun to be around people that enjoy sunlight. It was great for a minute there.

Despite all good advice, I just continue to be, I don't know, obsessed is a little strong, but any free time in my brain, I want to design games. I want to be around the people that are designing them. I want to be with that energy. Anyway, so I had a buddy. He called me up and said, hey, man, they've got a position at Arcane Austin and your resume is weird now. But I was going to tell a story about how this guy threw my resume down in Arcane and was like, what is this?

And then I somehow still got that job. I think every game dev with a little bit of experience was getting a lot of emails at that time. The COVID boom was very real.

You could not keep your LinkedIn open at any point in the day because people were pinging you all the time with the craziest offers, which a lot of it was bullshit, right? It was like... hey do you want to come in like quadruple your bitcoin with an ex-ea founder of something something you know and it just was wild stuff but there was a lot of money flowing into the industry as a worker you could see it it felt great

It was different than most of our careers where we're always trying to scratch just to stay out of place and find something that fits us. There was something really promising. I was a little scared of living in Seattle again just because of the rain, the depression, the angry people, the lack of flavor in the food, the cost. Shots fired. Yeah. Just to pause here, I'm just going to...

We were just saying like the studio, right? Yeah, yeah. Actually, we should talk about this. So throughout this story, when we talk about this game studio in Seattle, we were just going to say the studio. It's just not important what... the studio is or what the game is. It's about the people who were at the studio working on the game and the situation and everything.

Yeah, go ahead. Okay. Yeah, so I got the gig and I was there for almost three years. The game came out. It was one of the best feelings I've ever had in my entire life. And the day after, it was just quiet. I have never felt that quiet after a game release in any capacity. There's always some noise, negative, positive. There's noise, but this one was just quiet. I think we were open for two or three more months.

And then they shut us down. And I have to say, I've been part of layoffs before. And this one was the creepiest because I went to go do my laundry. and I missed the message that it was happening. When they do a layoff, you get a surprise email, and when you get a surprise meeting, it scares every game dev.

so like anytime there's like if it's an innocent one somebody has to be like no no no no it's not bad i promise they will just straight out tell you it's not bad this one uh i missed it and then i went back to my computer after like nine minutes away from it

And the meeting was already over. And I saw on the chat program, everybody just saying like, it was real goodbye. It was moving as fast as like a Twitch chat on a really popular channel. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, is this happening? And then all of a sudden just. Access completely cut. Email, our chat programs, the tools, everything. It was so eerie and strange feeling. I was just doing my laundry and then when I was done...

It was just over. It's a very bad time to be unemployed in the games industry. The statistics, I think I've lost track at this point, but they are crazy how many... people have been laid off since then. I'm Raj Patel. I've worked for the past several years in marketing for video games. Around 2022, I started just feeling really bad about the industry.

A lot of my job as a marketing guy is kind of keeping my finger on the pulse of the industry. So I usually tend to know what's up. I feel like I'm hearing about layoffs like every week all of a sudden. This is crazy. I checked. And checking meant going through all the layoff announcements in the industry I can find. And I just started putting them into a spreadsheet. So I've been tracking the numbers from 2021 and onward, right? So the last few years. And if I look at the headcount.

In 2021, we have 567 people got hit by layoffs. That number is going to sound cute in a second because in 2022, it was almost 8,000. Just that jump is incredible. And then in 2023, 9,000. And then 2024, another insane jump where it doubles it to basically 18,000. I'm tracking just the number of announcements. In 2025, we're just at the start of May when we're recording this, right? And we are at 82 left announcements in 2025. That's about half of what we had in 2024.

And we're not even halfway through the year. So this year could get really bad. We recorded these interviews. in your condo, which you bought when you got this job. And it was a little sad because the studio closed and you were selling it and we were, we were doing the interviews in your bedroom and there was just, you know, a bed, just a bed and still folding. Yeah, the folding chairs. It was almost like we were in the empty office. It had that feel of we're in the aftermath.

This is A Life Well Wasted, an internet radio show about video games and the people who love them. I'm your editor and host, Robert Ashley. Today's episode, Game Over. I flew to Seattle and recorded interviews with 11 people from this studio. Engineers, producers, and artists. People who worked together on a huge project that failed spectacularly.

and disappeared overnight. The game they spent years making no longer exists. This episode is just one story and it's a bit longer than what I usually put up so... get comfy, maybe grab a beverage, or go for a walk, and we'll start from the top.

When I was coming out of high school, I thought I was gonna go into the military and didn't get a waiver for my eyesight. So I kind of drifted for five years working at restaurants and doing IT. And I was like, well, this is definitely isn't what I wanted to do. My name is Jim. I was on the character tech team. Kind of thought about, like, what do I enjoy? And it was like, you know, reading how games are made, articles and stuff like that. And actually, weirdly enough, the movie Grandma's Boy.

It's a movie about a guy who's a QA tester at a game studio. There's a line in the movie where he goes, look, at the end of the day, you got to do what you're passionate about. And also you can't get high and be an accountant. You make mistakes and lose people millions of dollars. So that was like... I can do that. I can make video games.

I signed up at a private art school that had a video game degree program. For people who might be interested in that in the future, be very, very careful about doing that. I'm 14 years on and I'm still paying for it. So be very, very, very, I still have that for that, yeah.

Yeah, that's actually where we met. We went to the Art Institute of Seattle, which, hey, don't rest in peace, because we're so glad that school is gone at this point. No, I loved it. Okay, fair. But, you know, it did give us cornerstones, and it did give us a... the opportunity to meet. I mean, that's a win in there. Yeah. Did you get in like mega debt on it or something or? Yes. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Their financial side of things was it was criminal, man. I'm Aaron on the art team.

I'm Ashley, and I'm also on the art team. And you guys are married? We're married. Oh, yeah. How long have you guys been married? Eight years? Oh, God, yeah, I think so, yeah. What's the date? Oh, it's September 11th. 9-11. No fucking way. Yeah, baby, never forget. That's right. We're taking it back, terrorists. Yeah, always been a big video game guy. I didn't want to do video games at first. I thought it was like an eight-year-old's dream to make video games.

My name is Travis, and I was a part of the art team. I always tell people that eight-year-olds think I'm really cool because I make video games, but in reality I didn't think it was a real job down the line. I've loved video games since I was a kid. I didn't always know I would end up in video games. I knew I wanted something artistic, but it's very natural how I fell into it. It was the first thing I picked, first thing I saw was available. My name is Odette and I was part of the art team.

I fell in love with VFX my final year in college. I didn't even know it was like a possible path in games for me. And then once I started doing it, I was like, I really, really like this. Visual effects in video games. It's muzzle flashes, it's fire, it's simulation, it's all of the flashy stuff. I always tell people to think of like Star Wars.

In terms of effects, it's on the more technical side of the artistic fields. And so, you know, being somebody that doesn't shy from math, I was finding that I was like one of the few that were really excelling at it. My name's Kevin. And I work on effects. And then the professor, he was like, oh, no, if you want to do that, you've got to be really good. And so I was just like...

Oh, you just determined my whole life goal actually is to spite you and to end up in this industry. So part passion, part spite. That's kind of an interesting story. I actually started college as an electrical engineer and really didn't enjoy it. And then I moved to Seattle, so I retracted computer science. I'm Brad. I was a lead engineer on the game.

Were you much of a gamer? Oh, yeah. Part of the reason I kind of failed out of electrical engineering because I spent too many times playing games and not enough times solving bridge equations and torques. So I was one of the first people who went through the game program at my school as a technical artist. And then that timed out perfectly so that when I graduated it was kind of like right on the market.

collapsed so I did not go directly from school into the industry. I went about two and a half years where I kind of went back into call center IT and working at a restaurant. I was a waiter for several years when I was underage. You know, my first gig, I was a waiter. It's where I actually got a lot of my skills to, like, talk to strangers. My name's Freddie and I was a producer.

Because before then, I was just, you know, a gamer and just, you know, talk to my friends. But I would not describe myself as, like, particularly good at talking to strangers and having, like, a conversation. But, you know, being a waiter, like, really helps with that. It's how you make your money, basically. You got to, like, charm people.

After two and a half years, I did land a job at an indie studio, super small studio, massive hours, you know, 90 to 120 hour work weeks and did that for about seven months and then a bunch of us all kind of fled. So I was targeting more of the film industry. My name is Jen. I was a senior producer on the game. It was actually my husband who steered me more towards the games industry because the film industry was very unstable and the games industry at the time was much more stable than that.

I chose to go into game programming in high school-ish days. My name's Kyle and I was an engineer. I tried initially to break into the games industry, but in Houston, there's one. Company to maybe my choice was go to Austin or move to Colorado or Washington and me and my wife were basically like We want something less hot You know I talked to my family and stuff and it was like...

Do we want to be in Florida or do you know we want to go out west where there's more opportunities and you know just take that chance and then when it happened and I got that opportunity and you know we packed up our cars and you know ended the lease on our house and drove out west.

Thank you. If you guys were going to describe what it's like to work at a video game studio, you know, what's your day like? Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. Literally, yeah. Like, I think for me, making a video game is like, okay, I don't know what I'm doing.

go grab a bunch of people and then we can just do it together and then it turns out they all know what they're doing or they don't but we're all just pretending and then eventually you just make something together and then when you do that enough you find people they're like really good to work with i feel like a lot of people

don't really know how games are created and I feel like a lot of people kind of expect that a lot of things that they see on screen were just instantly made by one person and they don't recognize the fact that a lot of it is just massaging things into becoming something great. They start small and they really just slowly get built into something. I feel like it's very similar to like working with clay.

We start out with just a ball of clay and it just takes time and effort to really push it and create it into something. It's kind of what the day-to-day more looks like is just massaging. Certain values and stuff inside of the engine to make it work a lot of numbers I think something that people probably don't realize is like games is There's so many people doing so many different things on a very tight timeline that...

It's a miracle they ever get made at all. And so, I don't know, you just kind of focus on the people in your space and try to make it as fun and as rewarding as possible. Probably the average person who plays games or knows just a little bit about it imagines a workplace that's like... Well, you get there at 11 o'clock and you play like 45 minutes of Street Fighter II on the arcade machine. What percentage of your day is like actual labor versus kind of goofing around?

Like 95% I would say. Yeah, it's it's full bore all the time. Yeah, I was working at one point I was working 80 hour weeks. Yeah, yeah, I feel like at least with my experience every project has been like Launching a plane before it's finished building and then you build it while it's in the air Yeah, and then you hope as it crash lands to the ship date that you're all gonna survive. Yeah Somebody's like tacking the wheel on right at the last second. We're all just like we're trying

I came in December of 2019, so just shy of five years and lived through the whole pandemic experience there. When I started, the company was pretty small. There was around 30 people. You know, it was very limited. They had the moment-to-moment combat with just some blocked-out characters that looked like mannequins. But... We did daily play tests, and you joined the daily play test, and you immediately saw the full end of the game. So the future was pretty bright.

Yeah, it was very idealistic. Very early on I was showed the concept images and I was surrounded by people who had huge chunks of passion for this game, like incredible visions for this game and it was incredibly infectious and I was very quickly also passionate and moved by this project. It felt like when you came in, everyone was just stoked to be there. And I was astonished by how fast I fell in love with the game. I, from the moment I touched it, was just stoked to work on it.

I don't know, I felt the potential that everyone was talking about the moment I sat down and got into the engine, so I was excited. I know the people around me were excited, and we were all very hopeful that the game was gonna kick ass. Every creative endeavor is a gamble, but from when I first came in four years ago, it was like

It's too big to fail. There's so much behind this. Even if things go poorly on launch, it's going to be okay. And we'll have a year runway, two years runway or something like that to kind of right the ship. I had all the suspicions of... this will not be something that I play and I don't think a lot of the people that I know will be into it but I think I was going into it with it's too big to fail and so I had confidence that we would at least float.

When I first joined, I asked some very hard-hitting questions of like, what are we doing differently than these other situations that are in the market? And I didn't get an answer that I was expecting or satisfied with. So I kind of, from Moment one had a bit of like a Okay, you know, they'll have to prove it to me and it didn't really happen

I think that when the teaser trailer dropped was peak stoke for the studio. I know, I felt like I would run into battle and die for the company that day. I was ecstatic. My chair people were cheering. Only we knew what it was because the trailer didn't show anything. It just showed kind of our aesthetic and that was it. So we were excited locally in the studio, but the public had no idea what it was at first.

I thought people were just harsh during the reveal trailer. I was like, you know what? It's a gaming community. They're not exactly known for being a hyper-positive crowd. There's things we need to work on, but it's okay. Once people touch the game, it's going to change things. And then the beta dropped and... Numbers were not what we were expecting and I think our mindset started shifting to that things could go really bad.

There was red flags throughout the project, but I would say like the biggest red flag of the uh-oh was probably like beta. Yeah, definitely beta. Like those are numbers that some of the information is like public basically.

you can't hide that information like on steam you can see how many people are playing a particular game so the audience was able to see that anybody can see you could see how many people played that weekend and people were like talking about this making it it made news for how Poorly it did like people would go out to new sites to like hear about our game and how negatively it was doing instead of like hearing about what the game was about People heard about our game because of how poorly it did

But people didn't hear about what the game was or even really tried. There's no shortage of news articles and YouTube videos and hate on the internet about how poor the numbers were. So it was pretty apparent. Does that like get to you personally? Because I just feel like that's so...

Typical of the video game world, you know? Everyone's an expert, everybody wants to tell you their opinion, but like you don't think about the fact that there are human beings on the other side of the screen who've been making this thing.

I think the most frustrating part about it to me was people had made up their mind about the game and I felt like it was based off of... i mean this is more our fault than theirs but we did a bad job of communicating what we were trying to do and i felt like there was such a disconnect and i just felt like if i could sit down with any individual that said something bad about this game and plead our case

I could convince them 100% to be on board with the game. It's just we did a terrible job of appealing to the mass of gamers and just didn't go too well. Yeah, I mean, it's certainly unpleasant. It was incredibly frustrating that we didn't do any counter-programming. That started immediately after the reveal of the game, and then it was just total radio silence. So a lot of false narratives around the game got built.

and it was outside of our control, which, yeah. We didn't really have a voice in the noise, and I think that really damaged the game. I don't know if we necessarily knew... to be that voice in a game. It's just a tiny little startup suddenly having these daunting expectations put onto this game with a huge scope that I do not think we could have matched. Yeah, oh my gosh. Sorry, I'm having flashbacks. We noticed there was a shift in expectations and it became less about hope and it meant...

more meeting a deadline. So I think a lot of the fun was taken out of it at that point, but I think people were still very passionate about the game. I know I was. We didn't have any money coming in as a studio, and so... all it is is burn everything we're doing every day is money burning and so you have a date where

business-wise it just does not make sense we can't stretch this any further and so yeah we got some extensions but there was a hard and fast date where she's like we gotta get something out otherwise we're dead in the water for sure to be blunt like You follow the video games industry and you know both from the outside and the inside long enough and you can recognize things for what they are. I ran my team so you know I talked to the team and be like

Look, we all want the best thing to happen, right? But we have to be absolutely realist and we have to be absolutely pragmatic. Start getting ready. Start looking at what's out there. Start getting in touch with people that you know around the industry. hope for the best, prepare for the worst kind of thing.

Okay, so you make a game and it launches and then people don't play it. You know, like what happened? I tried all day just to find a match in a particular part of this game and it just wouldn't happen. It wasn't a bug. Yeah. There just were not people there in this one particular part of this game, and it should have been or would have been the most important part of it. That was the first day. And then...

No one had heard of it. That was the other thing. People close to us, I'm sure you all had people close to you being like, wait, that happened? That was the oddest thing to happen to me out of any of the projects I've worked on. Yeah, close friends and family being like, oh, the game came out? Yeah. That's why you haven't seen me in seven months.

There was even efforts within to keep it pretty hushed. You know, we didn't see numbers. We just knew based off of the same projections that fans were making. You know, it's just like we saw the cute times we were playing. You know, and it's just like we were piecing things together that... People were trying to do damage control and keep it under wraps, but it was clear as day.

Yeah, we're watching on Twitch and it's like, as soon as a sponsored streamer stops, it's down in, you know, the 12th row or something. Yeah, and every stream was sponsored. Yeah. You know, yeah. You'd have these few moments of hope, you know, like there was, I can't remember who it was now, like there was an Overwatch streamer.

his sponsor time went up and he was like, I'm having a good time, I'm gonna keep going. We're like, see, like, there's something there. Like, you know, maybe it'll be a slow burn, but it'll pick up. But, you know, it's just never materialized. The timing of the game falling apart was unfortunate. I found out that we were taking the game offline during my honeymoon right after my wedding.

So I was in Spain when I got an emergency meeting from work to join where we learned that the game had been taken offline due to a lack of players. Kind of put a damper on the dinner, you know? Was it surprising that the game was just removed from the marketplace? It doesn't seem like that happens. I was surprised that that was the first choice. I thought...

okay if we're going this extreme then we're going to make repairs as we need to and start addressing the feedback immediately and then we'll put it back online. But I would have thought that we'd have a little bit more runway before it got to the point where the game was. completely taken down. The news was very surprising because it had just come out and so I wasn't expecting it to be taken down that quickly.

And I don't have specific memories around getting the news, but I do remember the day that it was taken down because it's actually my husband's birthday. And so I had to mentally... separate myself in such a way I'm like okay I'm gonna be sad in the morning and then I'll get all that out and then the afternoon and evening will be birthday happy time.

I remember like I had a Twitch streamer on and I was watching this guy stream the game on Twitch and it was past the time when the game was supposed to be taken down and we're like watching the clock. Is this the last round? And he got like three or four more rounds in. And then the kill switch happened. And then I felt something. I was like, oh.

Ouch that actually really hurts that that's you were watching the twitch streamer as it went down There was a lot of Twitch streamers and co-workers who were grinding to get the achievements in the game, the platinum trophies and all of that stuff, and also just to savor the final moments.

And I kept watching one streamer in particular, they were so sweet. They weren't really focused on the end as much as they were just focused on like, moment to moment, let's be here for this moment because this is going to disappear. And then the day that it went down, I actually turned it off about an hour or two beforehand because I was like, I can't take this. This is where I have to step away. And I just watched the recording later when I was a little bit more like mentally stable.

I couldn't watch the end either. It's so, yeah, it was too hard for me personally. I mean, you watched all the way to the end though when it shut off? I watched all the way until the screen came up that it was disconnected. You're very, very brave for having done that. Thank you. I felt like I needed to be. there for it yeah like hold it in my arms as it got what that's too dark it was almost like a mercy killing where it was like

I'm upset and I'm sad that it's over and I'm freaked out. But now I'm just like, I feel like I can take a breath now. Like it's still a death. It's still you mourn it. But it's like, I'm okay.

Part of me is okay that it's over, but then part of me is like, wow, that really sucks.

There's like a schodenfreude of oh big game fails and like that's awesome we gotta see something crash and burn and like that's that's kind of great that's really cool and to be a part of that process it's really easy to bandwagon on that I think too of like well we're punching up And yeah, not really taking into consideration that like, well, you're punching up at that, but then all of these people that work really hard on it are not those people.

I'm on Twitch a lot and I still watch a lot of different streamers. I have a couple favorites and they still bring it up. And they still compare the game to other newer games that are coming out that are not doing so great. And I'm just like, just let it go. Stop talking about it. It hurts now.

it's just weird that there is this audience who's just constantly like wanting to like be excited that something fails but the reality behind it is we're just looking at our keyboards and then we're like oh no job today For me, one of my first... contracts for one of my first jobs was at League of Legends and so literally everything you do is just there's no positive comments about anything and so that to me my heart is all stonewalled up against the gamers and

I love me some gamers. I am a gamer, but... Please don't hurt me. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I was consuming every bit of media about it. I didn't have as strong of a emotional reaction to the failure as I mean I kind of already had made up my mind that it was gonna Be rough. It was not going to perform how they needed it to. So I consumed everything. Any talking head talking about it, I was there watching their content for it.

I agree with a lot of the criticisms that the players have. They were the same criticisms we had internally. They were the same things we were trying to fight against for sometimes even years.

It's one thing to be like tunnel visioned on a project you've been working on for years and years and then... feel like you know it feel like you have like the correct opinion and then when like the entire internet goes and tells you like this thing sucks you're like I knew it Yeah, it taught me something important that there's something worse than making a bad game and it's making an uncool one.

And I think that was the big thing. Why do you feel like it was uncool? Like what was uncool? The audience that our publisher was catering to did not want this game at all. From the get-go, the game was labeled as uncool, and so everyone that talked about it was like, yeah, but this game's uncool. It's like, well, you haven't looked into it. You haven't played it yet.

Even my family, they were like, oh yeah, I heard about this game. I heard it wasn't cool. And I was like, bro, are you even going to play it, please? My siblings were kind of, they were kind of be polite about it where they were like, oh yeah, this game that you're making, it is a game that we've heard. People have had opinions. Would you like to hear those opinions? Kind of thing.

And they're like, we might play it when it comes out just to support you, but we don't know how long we'll actually be playing this game.

I had my mom text me all the bad news that she would find. And then also when we got laid off, my mom just calls me up and says, are you crying? The internet will and has said many things about how the game failed and it was bad and there was many like bad things about it but the thing that I think is missed on a lot of the public perception of that is if

the team is capable of making a thing as directed, that's valuable. That's valuable. Yes. You can absolutely argue about the direction. I'll be right there with you. to argue about the direction and what is valuable to make but the value of a team that is capable of making something as directed is huge ah it like it would have been it would have been excellent

for our parent company to try to work with us a little bit more. It is so expensive and almost impossible to even get a hundred people together and make something. It's so hard. we could have supported other studios. We could have ramped on to like a different project, just help them finish it, and then like just jump. Because we're all in the same...

Business of trying to make money for a big daddy company And so like we should we should be able to like actually work together and like none of that happened It's just like oh you guys didn't succeed get out of here And it's a shame because it in my opinion is like the real value was not in what the

project could have done is the people could have done something else. That's the hardest thing to build. Everybody always talks about the problems with Game engine or a tool that you're using or something like those are quantifiable problems that we can always solve The thing you can't solve is how people work together and that's where I

That really got to me because I was like, oh, God. People always say it in a more sterile way, like institutional knowledge. Right. What it really is is like you just create these giant vibrating wavelengths of humans together that are all artists. programmers and and you know they can work together and when you find that and when you get in that groove it's magical and then but it is an industry where it just stops

Honestly, I wouldn't give up those four years for the world. It's the first time I've ever worked with people where I've liked all of them and I've literally cried with them over the failure of this game. It's not even just that the game failed, but it's that we didn't get the chance to work together anymore.

And that was the crushing part. It's like when you're graduating high school, except you guys like all failed. No diplomas. Yeah, no diplomas. And now you're like, okay, now we're all going to go try and get jobs out there in the world. I guess I might see you later. It is like a real serious job and it takes up more than eight hours of your day if not actually in front of a computer than in your mind.

What makes that worth it is the people around you oftentimes, and so that's where a lot of investment goes in.

in those relationships and you have to build all this trust up and you have to build up all these collaborative processes and be empathetic and listen to each other and work with each other and it sets up a really like uh yeah the familial and kind of intimate environment in some places um that's hard to give up when it when it closes suddenly yeah i mean it seems like you guys are really tight

group it's kind of cool to have so many people show up at once because i can see that you guys are like all um quite friendly uh have you been missing that i mean for myself i'm missing him immensely in fact all this interviewing and talking to other companies i just i want to like bring my whole old team there they always ask me why did i like working at the company so much and it was like i just really enjoyed the team the people

that's what i miss people were kind to each other if someone had a bad day people would be super supportive and be like take the time if you're not feeling good go home I've worked at a number of studios and that isn't always the case. Sometimes it's like tough that you're not feeling great, but we got our deadlines to meet.

And that sucks. Like, I believe that leads to eventually people just being like, I don't want to work here or even like, I don't want this industry. I will say this is the first studio where I felt. equal and treated right. and um where it was like not only is everyone super talented but also everyone was respectful and nice like it's a green flag when i can go to the women's bathroom and it's not only filled with like feminine hygiene products but also

oh, there's women there. And it's like, oh, I have to share a bathroom with other women now. Like, whoa, that's odd, because you usually get the whole place to yourself. I know that the games industry is rampant with imposter syndrome, which is the feeling that you don't belong there, that you're not as experienced, that you don't actually qualify for the position that you were hired to do.

I've felt this my entire career as I've come from a homeschool background where I basically graduated with like a sixth grade education. taught myself everything I needed before college, went to community college, didn't have any real education given to me there. It was basically just barely enough for me to teach myself code to get into my first job, the studio.

They were very welcoming and the camaraderie was really, really high. And to combat the feelings of imposter syndrome at a studio wide level is pretty impressive. It's hard in an industry where like you can look to your left and the person has like 10 more years experience than you and is like rewriting the engine from scratch and you're over here going

I don't even understand half of the shit that he's talking about. Yeah. So getting past that is a real difficulty and it's hard to do and this team...

They nailed it. You executed on what you were asked to do. And in many cases, went above and beyond what is even your job title as written. You did great, Kyle. Thanks, man. I'm still heartbroken. I am. Like, I would not say I drank the Kool-Aid, but this was a game for me. This was a game that I could have seen myself playing, you know, not hundreds of hours, but like...

log in, play with some friends, like an hour out of the week or whatever. Like, I don't have that option anymore. And like, I'm heartbroken. The game to me was just amazing. Every once in a while I have like almost a withdrawal because I know I'm never gonna get to play the game again. And that just kills me because I loved it. I think the best part about it was being able to play with my coworkers and them just like cutting loose and being silly and like really enjoying what we made together.

as a unit and that experience alone made it worth it. I think gamers missed out. I think it was an awesome game and we did a bad job. We could have done better as a whole as a studio to not have what happened happen, but I am sad that there are people out there who won't get to experience the game, and that is frustrating, and I'm even more sad that I'll never get to experience it again.

So that, I mean, the thing that attracted me to this story is just the basic idea of like, here are people who worked at this job. It's a creative job. They spend... you know years of their life working on something and it came out and didn't do well and was just taken off everything and no longer exists.

You know, that's kind of what drew me to it was like in most things that you make in this world, if you were building houses or something, your company could close down and you could still drive down the street and be like, I built that one and that one and that one. But like what a strange. modern predicament to build something that just doesn't even exist anymore. You cannot buy it, you cannot play it, you cannot, it did not exist. It's gone. It's gone. Like, you cannot access it.

Another that is like the most brutal thing is that like I spent years Blood tears and sweat on this thing. I cannot access it as a person who made it It sucks. It sucks. It's heartbreaking. It was very demoralizing, yes. And yeah, it did. It felt like going through the stages of grief, right? Like there's kind of the sadness, there's the anger, there's the hopelessness, you know, all of it. Yeah. I'm waiting for them to just dump it all into a giant dump.

that people can dig up like 20 years later exactly yes oh my god did we make 18. yeah we did i'm way more proud of this now okay this is amazing yeah for someone who doesn't understand this story what is that like

um atari didn't sell enough cartridges of the et game this is like way back in the 1980s they just went to some random place in new mexico some plot of land that they didn't own and they just dumped a bunch of like atari cartridges on the earth yeah but we have the digital version of that game So you can't even dig it up. There's no soil to dig into to find our game. It is what it is. Sometimes things succeed, sometimes they don't. It is a shame that a lot of the...

creative energy that we put in the game is sort of lost. Like a lot of the things like the

really beautiful animations that went in there or the hard surface, the gun modeling, things like that, like all of that stuff, we will likely not see again. How do you even... use it professionally as a portfolio piece if you can i lost some stuff for sure yeah you just take pictures and then hope pictures are enough yeah there's yeah there's whole elements of that project that i just will never be able to show because i didn't take videos quick enough or

it was on our SharePoint or Confluence page that I can't get to anymore. It's all gone. I love that it doesn't exist. It's mine. That special little thing I'll hold in my heart that I don't have to share with anybody. I'm kind of used to it.

you're kind of used to it yeah that's been my whole career oh man what's not captured on mic is like the look on your face It's strange when you're creating a team product and there's like a failure. Do you take that failure personally or are you like, well, it was just, you know, I was just part of this. It's not me.

How do you deal with the feelings of like your own personal responsibility? Do you take that failure to heart? That's an interesting question. From the engineering side, we focused a lot on like how technically competent.

the product was. You could get into a game, you could launch a game, match with other players. The crash rate was something like 0.01%. But I think a lot of that is just... I don't know maybe justification on our part you know like we're proud of the product we made but also it feels almost like a defensive posturing by pointing some of that stuff out right like it still feels like a failure so yeah

When the game started going off to me, it was just like, okay, like I'm really happy with how we've handled things and what we did. I love my team. I love like what we've built up here. And if this thing just shits the bed completely. Which it might. I'm happy with that. The thing is, is we're just doing what they asked us to do. Yeah. You know.

That's what we were hired to do. So now we're fired for getting, for doing what they hired us to do, for doing a great job. Shit, I never thought about it that way. Just remember who came up with those plans. It wasn't like us, who was like, you know what, we're going to make it like this.

I know we've talked about that a few times. Yeah, I'm just like, these are not the promises I made. In fact, we fought against these promises. Even if we were all just handed a turd, we did a damn good job polishing that turd. That was a shiny piece of crap. So I worked in a very bad game once, and I'm very, very, very proud of everything that happened there. It was awesome. I will not give it to somebody that they cannot take the happiness that I experienced and the relationships that I formed.

People always want the controversy. Even other devs would be like, are you okay? You had to do that for a living. And it's like, I'm doing great. You know, I'm happy. Sometimes you're just gonna work at something really big in life and it's just not gonna work out the same, but it doesn't mean that you need to quit working. It doesn't mean you need to collapse and sit on the ground. You need to get up when you're ready.

at a responsible pace not too fast you get lightheaded right but like i'm trying to say it in like a more like mental health focused way i don't want to sound like i'm like hard-ass worker you know

It's just that is learning to fail, even on a mass scale like this, is one of the most important things that you can ever learn in life. I believe so, because if you are only succeeding for the rest of your life, when you stub your toe on a rock, you will just die. Like, you won't know how to handle it. And going forward, that's what I always, like, will retain about this. I wouldn't trade these four years for the world.

I met people that like are incredible. I grew so much as an artist. Yeah, I think exactly what you said, Darius. I kind of want to just take that recording and just play it for me on like a weekly basis as a reminder. Yeah, we made something awesome and like no one can take that away. But they did take it away. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But metaphorically. Yeah, yeah.

It won't be long before you're talking to friends that just never played it and don't even know it existed. Do you want people to know you worked on it? Yeah, yeah. And I want them to be surprised when I'm happy about it. That's what I want. I won't give it to them. Like, it's mine. We were proud regardless of how it went. Yeah. We put out a good game. Yeah, we did a good job. This was a mechanically well-constructed game that just didn't hit and like, you know.

greatest flop of all time like I don't feel like it deserves that but I mean I you know I'm not I'm also like I'm a realist like it is what it is like and that's also have fun to have on the resume a little bit yeah yeah Even if it wasn't super well marketable, even if it didn't strike a chord with like the zeitgeist right now, it was still exceptionally made.

On our side, it went awesome. I think full success. Yeah, everyone did the impossible. We were asked to do things that were beyond reason, and everyone pulled through. Usually when you say that in games, it's like, well, that's because we stayed up all night for three weeks straight, right? That's how we did the impossible.

There were just highly talented people there who were like, how can we do this in a short amount of time? And what's the most efficient way? And what's the compromise, compromise, compromise? And you would get to the end. So there was no, I guess it's called crunch. You were sleeping.

and and like eating foods uh food was had and sleeps was had for me not so much sometimes but that was self-imposed yeah there was definitely points where i was like no you are stopping because we are eating dinner together at 6 p.m I've come to a point where it's fine to crunch to an extent.

like if you feel personally passionate i'm like i'm not saying like long term but like if you feel like oh i want to work a couple extra hours in order to like get this through maybe that's not crunch maybe that's a different kind of i think that's different over time yeah very different yeah I had never been on a project where there was so much under the table over timer crunching. Like silent over time. Like I don't know if there were many people that didn't crunch. At least like quietly.

That happens on a project it does but never like so long and so quiet about like everyone in the room is like How long did he work? It's like, I don't know, a little over 40 hours, a little less than 80. What maintains the silence? Is it people's desire not to be seen as the person who has to crunch to get their job done? A little bit of that. A little bit of personal, in some cases, just...

personal like attachment to the thing because they know that they were given a week to work on this and if at the end of the week whatever state it's in that's what it's gonna be like basically and they're not satisfied whether you're an artist an engineer a designer you're like i can see this isn't good enough

this is not good enough and and they through sheer force of will like get it done or to a bet at least to a better state i've been in situations across my entire career where i've been given like a a goal, a feature and then a time allotment of like we need to try in this amount of time and if it doesn't come out good enough it's just not going to make it into the game.

And oftentimes that feature is something I strongly believe in is going to be a necessary component to our identity as a game or a feature in the market that makes us actually float. the concept of like just give it a shot and and and see where we are at the end of these like four weeks or whatever there's like a undertone there of like it's on you

you have this responsibility of making this feature good enough to make it into the game. And while the production director, whoever will say like, if it's not fine, we'll just cut it. To a passionate developer like like myself many others on the teams and stuff like that's a looming threat There is no fail here. I need to succeed I need to go make this thing a reality so that the product just survives

Shipping this game was probably the biggest crunch I've ever had in my career. So, yeah. Towards the end, I was working seven days a week, 12 hours a day. Well, yeah, we know, I mean, multiple people who have slept. under their desk three four days in a row during like crunch time and and you're not really eating and and then we know somebody who's like family fell apart because of that stuff also like severely hospitalized too we know quite a few people yeah

Because people don't know how to stop, how to balance that kind of stuff. To them, it's like, yeah, I have to produce something or else something bad's gonna happen. But nothing bad's gonna happen. Yeah, no, no, it's all good. We're making video games. You find out about new, like...

autoimmune disorders and things that you would never heard about until you work in games because after somebody's been doing it for so long they're just like hey it turns out if you don't see the sunlight for a decade things just start to creep in your your autoimmune system and you're like oh okay

If we were in the office or if we all were around each other all the time, I'd be able to process these feelings and maybe talk about them more. but then you get into a place where jen is where she's like okay compartmentalizing this is when i grieve this is when husband has birthday and these are the you know that's how you have to like compose yourself in order to like find a job act normal

be friendly and can continue on you know. The way that they announced the studio closure like they need to do this for big companies but basically they just cut communication. It was like Hey, heads up, you're all getting laid off. And then like two minutes later, our entire communication to each other was cut off. People didn't even get to say goodbye. Like people you spent more time with in your own family didn't even get to say farewell.

Couldn't, like in many cases, couldn't give each other even contact information because you're like, I don't know how to contact this person. As soon as we were out of the meeting, they killed Slack. um so what i did was i started a discord server and i had a message involved through linkedin to get them onto the server and that's been pretty useful because you know there's so much uncertainty and you don't know like

I've got to file for COBRA. I don't know how to do that. How do you file for unemployment? And so the team came together and helped each other through that time, which was pretty awesome. Is everyone on the Discord? Yes. It is one of the most incredibly helpful things that anybody's ever done in a layoff. Anytime I'm stuck or scared or feeling it, even if I'm not talking in there that much, I can just go look and see.

everybody helping each other out and it's just been so great so thank you for maintaining that it's yeah i mean i just started the server and got people there you know there's people like brandy who really just done the work of like another producer documented the hell out of like all of this stuff around and health insurance and all of the things that we needed to do. If you had a question about, hey, I got laid off, what are our benefits? Like whatever your question was.

Oh my god. It's a big support group. It was so much more helpful than the professional emails we got, like, from our big company. Like, ignore all that. Here, if you go to this Discord, whatever question you got, it's probably there. Or, you know what? Ask it. You don't even need to read it, even though it's... clearly there, ask a question, someone's going to respond to you like instantly. And that is what our studio was like working there. Like it really was supportive.

You work on a game, you go to the next studio, you work on a game, you go to the next studio, you get laid off. All these things happen. Like, what's the future of that kind of career? And does that worry you? Do you have exit strategies or do you... the industry, the one thing we were told was that the burnout rate for video games was five years. And I think every job I've had since then has been a question of like, is this what I want to do for the rest of my life?

For me, I don't think it changes my career path in any way. I feel like this isn't the first time this has happened. It won't be the last time that this happens. I'm in the camp of we can always learn from our mistakes and always be better. you know sports teams fail all the time they just fire their coach but their coach goes to another program and comes back and does well at another program so sometimes it's just kind of natural to move around a little bit

That throws a bunch of questions in it for me in terms of just like the staying power and the viability of it kind of a thing. I think with any job, even if it's a dream job, it is going to end up being work. And I think my favorite thing about this industry is just who you do it with.

of just like every desk neighbor you're going to have something common with. You're going to be able to talk with everybody about the nerdy shit you guys do on the weekends and you're all gonna say oh let's do a hike but you know like a medium one you know you know it's all very like soul kind of people

You just become instant friends with people because you immediately have something that you all bond over like everyone plays video games Everyone loves video games like there's the baseline of like we can all connect because of video games and then like add a little pinch of trauma bonding on there and then you're like you know you think about a video game employee like imagine if you wanted to get out of this industry now you get to go hang out with normies all day

Like, how are you going to get along with the people at all? You know, like, what would you talk to them about? That's the best thing. I get really anxious about it all the time. I'm trying to think about like normal things to talk about instead of like Street Fighter. It's the opposite for me. I'm like. What's it like to have a real life?

Also, if you went back to a normie job, there's no way you could just like headshot your coworkers every day. And it would be like normal conversation. Yeah. It was Freddie's incredibly good at games. Okay. Yeah. Our team, they loved playing the game and they talked a lot about how much they enjoyed playing the game. They brought you up and they love Freddy. Freddy was mentioned. Everybody loves Freddy.

Aw, we love Freddy. I want to hear Freddy's interview. Aw, Freddy. Speaking of people who are incredibly good at this game, Freddy. Where else can I find what I'm talking about? Because if I could find that doing something else

while watching people make these beautiful, beautiful things around me and getting just to be a part of all that, like, I don't know what else I would do. Yeah. Like, it's... Have you already transitioned to other projects? What's going on with that? What have you all been doing since the studio closed?

Well, we've been doing a lot of vacations and a lot of interviews over the last couple of months. Smoking a lot of weed, I'll tell you what. But now we officially started a new gig, so back into the fold. Are you also staying in video games? Yeah. Yeah, I'm staying in games. Okay. And this is out of like passion, not necessarily like a career. It's not financially intelligent. Back to your first plan, does any of us have a backup plan? No. You have to write it until it's over.

Did the failure of the game or the closing of the studio have an effect on your prospects in the industry does it not at all so Yeah, I start a new job tomorrow actually, which is kind of cool. But yeah in my interview loops It was like, no, we know what you just came from. Here's how it changed development in our game. I think a lot of people are more almost like car crash on the road, kind of fascinated a little bit and like, tell me more. How'd that happen? What's going on?

it was the most beautiful car that we crashed yeah it was like an apple car there's people talk want to talk craft when they talk about this game like they wouldn't other game devs like they know what it was and what it is what it was going to be potentially yeah and it works well in an interview my team was joking that we might get more interviews because people will want the tea it is really easy to not have dead space in an interview for any of us right now because you can

fill that time up really yeah yeah is there anything you would have done differently uh-huh one of the things that a lot of people wonder in the comments section is like, what are they thinking? Don't these devs know? We know. We know full well. We know what's happening. We agree with it half the time. And more often than not, it's just not. possible given the circumstances, given the stakes, given the sunk cost into these things and any and all compassion that gets shared.

and comments and support like we see all of it we really take it to heart and it means a lot when fans really show up for us like that and we wish it could be better and if we were in charge it would be. But unfortunately, it's a messy, messy biz with a lot of money. We do our best, but we'll get it right next time. And I'll just throw out to...

gamers and any fellow devs who gave it a chance and enjoyed and appreciated for what it was. All the love to you guys. I'm sad that it didn't find its gamer base, but... I understand the way the world is. And so the people who did love it and care about it and have fun, I'm glad we were able to have that time. It was so special. I wouldn't trade the experience for anything. I make the joke that I got to speedrun the entire experience of the game dev industry.

from being hired, doing contract work, jumping to his studio, working at a startup, then getting acquired, then getting the game launched, and then getting the game shut down. And then being laid on. I wouldn't trade it for anything and like so excited for the next adventure though I do hope it's a bit more mellow.

That was a life well wasted with music by I Come to Shanghai. Special thanks to Willis for web help, Sarah for editing advice, and Darius, who used his incredible organization and scheduling powers to set up all the interviews in this story, and even tried to help me keep this thing on a schedule. As usual, Olly Moss designed a very cool limited edition poster for this episode, screen printed by a very good printer of his choosing and signed by the artist himself.

The edition is limited to whoever buys one during the week of this episode's release. If you want to support the ad-free, independent work of this show, please visit my extremely old-school A Life Well Wasted website and pick one up. We've made nine of these posters now over the years, and I love that something from this show exists in physical space, unlike certain digital things that can disappear overnight. That's it for now.

As always, here's a clip I couldn't fit into the show. Same day, and this just goes to show you how terrible I am at home. I'm sorry, Ashley. But I went to the bathroom and I realized I'm in the hallway just putting my hands onto the bathroom door to get into the bathroom. I already had my pants and my underwear all the way around my knees, like full on naked.

in the hallway. Anyone could have turned a corner. And I was just like, oh, fuck! And it's like, if that doesn't show you how COVID has warped my brain, but I remembered I'm a human in a human place now. Don't crunch, ever.