Blood, Sweat and Pixels - Jason Schrier

⭐ 9.0/10

(Originally written by Joseph)

This book is subtitled The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made. It's by Jason Schrier who I have followed for a while. I love his podcast, and he is basically the Woj of video games, breaking all the news and having all the connections. He's a great follow but man! An even better writer.

So this book is ten chapters, each one discussing how a different game was made. It helped that I had played some of them including Uncharted 4, Shovel Knight, Stardew, and my latest, The Witcher 3. It's a bunch of stories about the insane hours and wild effort that these teams had to commit. The author basically says that it's a miracle that any game is ever made, let alone good. It's a new medium, and combines everything, from character and world design, voice acting, motion capture, music, and writing. Not only that, but it includes coding and programming with ever evolving technology. It's all new, but utilzes budgets in the hundreds of millions, with teams of hundreds of people working for several years. It really is crazy.

It was a great time for me to read this. Maybe I took the wrong message from it, but in a time where I'm staying up late trying to write along with other things, it was cool to hear success stories where the message is simply that if you want to succeed, you need to put the hours in. The author really doesn't endorse crunch, but it's very clear that excellence sometimes demands it.

But I know you're asking: Joe, you haven't slandered Sanderson yet, how do you think you'll manage it when reviewing a book about video games? Easy, I respond... It was crazy in this book to hear about the number of rewrites and redos these teams committed to when pursuing perfection. They didn't want to ship something mediocre, so instead of just sending off something they weren't happy with, they crunched a rewrite in before the deadline. It was interesting to hear about that in an age of first drafts and certain authors publishing multiple 500k word novels in a year. It made me want to be a more meticulous writer, or at least take more pride in my art.

I still had tiny issues with this book. First, I would have loved to hear a story about one of these teams that committed all this time and money, but the game released to mixed reception or poor sales. We don't hear enough stories about those, and I'm sure there would have been some great insight. This whole book was basically success stories, bar one chapter on a promising game that got cancelled due to corporate bureaucracy. I also thought some chapters flew a little too quickly, and that took away from the mindless toil. But there are some great documentaries on YouTube that cover that better.

But altogether, this book was fantastic. The chapter on Stardew will blow your mind - a true rags to riches story. Terrific book, and I'm looking forward to reading his others.