Blood, Sweat, and Pixels
The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made
Ratings133
Average rating4
NATIONAL BESTSELLER “The stories in this book make for a fascinating and remarkably complete pantheon of just about every common despair and every joy related to game development.” — Rami Ismail, cofounder of Vlambeer and developer of Nuclear Throne Developing video games—hero's journey or fool's errand? The creative and technical logistics that go into building today's hottest games can be more harrowing and complex than the games themselves, often seeming like an endless maze or a bottomless abyss. In Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, Jason Schreier takes readers on a fascinating odyssey behind the scenes of video game development, where the creator may be a team of 600 overworked underdogs or a solitary geek genius. Exploring the artistic challenges, technical impossibilities, marketplace demands, and Donkey Kong-sized monkey wrenches thrown into the works by corporate, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels reveals how bringing any game to completion is more than Sisyphean—it's nothing short of miraculous. Taking some of the most popular, bestselling recent games, Schreier immerses readers in the hellfire of the development process, whether it's RPG studio Bioware's challenge to beat an impossible schedule and overcome countless technical nightmares to build Dragon Age: Inquisition; indie developer Eric Barone's single-handed efforts to grow country-life RPG Stardew Valley from one man's vision into a multi-million-dollar franchise; or Bungie spinning out from their corporate overlords at Microsoft to create Destiny, a brand new universe that they hoped would become as iconic as Star Wars and Lord of the Rings—even as it nearly ripped their studio apart. Documenting the round-the-clock crunches, buggy-eyed burnout, and last-minute saves, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels is a journey through development hell—and ultimately a tribute to the dedicated diehards and unsung heroes who scale mountains of obstacles in their quests to create the best games imaginable.
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This is an easy book to like. Schreier is a good writer and his access to key figures in the industry is exciting for a behind the scenes on big moments in gaming. Indeed, the first couple chapters he covers are interesting as broad surveys into the perils of game development such as scope creep, marketing and the crunch.
But the longer you go on, the more you get the sense that his attempts to cover the crunch and similar dysfunctions of project and business management in the industry are more an apologia for insiders with survivor bias than a critique of toxic work environments.
In that respect, I found myself getting more irritated as the case studies went on, since every developer's inevitable deadline push and 100hr work week just felt banal and awful rather than a triumph of creative passion. I'm not in game development (thank goodness!) and it's largely because the norms that go relatively unchallenged in this book work really well for select game devs with credibility and power, whereas the common employee is treated like garbage and told that this is for the great good. I doubt this was Schreier's intent, but the sum total of the book reads more like an attempt to spin complete management dysfunction as normal operating parameters.
Cool read. I was familiar with almost all of the games profiled, which was nice, and I liked reading more about the development process. That being said, the chapters got a little “samey” – each one was its own self-contained story, but the stories were often pretty similar.
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