

Inside Rockst*r Games - sl_
http://blog.zerodean.com/2010/blog/my-life-at-rockstar-games/

======
mrcharles
Rockstar is well known within the industry as the worst place you could
possibly work. People who've worked with ex-Rockstar employees have always
known. When the EA Spouse thing came out, a lot of us wondered when something
would finally break about Rockstar.

But Rockstar has a secret -- that secret is that they are sued regularly over
working conditions and abuse, and they always settle. The settlement comes
with a gag order, however.

Genius, I guess, in the evil way.

I've been lucky enough to work for a fantastic company for the past six years,
and any overwork has been entirely my own decision, and mismanagement has been
minimal and more conceptual than actual. Someone high up will make a silly
decision about something, and then teams will transparently handle and
incorporate it while minimizing impact on people's work environment.

~~~
trafficlight
I had no idea about Rockstar. I've heard for years about EA's shenanigans and
thought they were the worst.

Why do people allow themselves to be treated that way?

~~~
mrcharles
For the same reason that anyone ever stays in an abusive relationship, because
that is exactly what working for Rockstar is. Some people are strong enough to
realize that they need to break free, others simply buy the statements coming
from abuse and believe that they aren't good at their job, that no one else
will employ them, that the rest of the industry is just as bad, if not worse.

What disturbs me most about Rockstar is more about the physical working
conditions though. I think everyone working at a job will eventually deal with
the kind of poor management and emotional abuse that was described in this
article. But I've heard stories about offices that are in the middle of
nowhere, horrible neighborhoods, musty and poorly ventilated. I heard one
story of mold on the walls, and another about the company not paying to heat
or cool an office space.

I honestly can't explain how rockstar continues to hire people, except for the
appeal of working on a rockstar game. Personally, I have enough good friends
and coworkers who are ex-rockstar that I have boycotted rockstar games. I
cannot in good conscience continue supporting the company.

------
ryan-allen
I worked at a very well known animation studio in a kind of Intern position
for 8 weeks (I worked on a movie that rhymes with 'Fungle Book Three'), and my
short experience sounds very similar to this bloke's. The most prestigious
companies that everyone is happy to brag about working are sometimes the worst
to work for? I've had nearly 10 jobs and this was _the worst_.

What causes it? Talented people continue to work there and middle management
and infighting rips everyone to shreds. I worked during 'crunch time' which
apparently 'happens on every production'.

The most psychotic thing from TFA is where a higher up pulls him in to a
meeting room to accuse him of "questioning their authority" over a private
email saying "I know the schedule is unrealistic, but guys we shouldn't be
watching youtube videos during work hours". Who does that?

------
ovi256
"And this was the sort of place where that sort of thing was the norm — the
building process and the pipeline was inefficient to the extreme, yet no one
who directly managed such things seemed to care — or was competent enough to
recognize it."

Well, I think the last part is universal - nobody could easily diagnose or
evaluate that situation. It took W. Edwards Deming years to create a method to
first convince _himself_ that it could be done, and then more years to
convince others. This is made worse by intellectual work, where standards of
quality are less obvious than "length at 100mm +/- 0.01mm". I'm not saying
that standards do not exist, that is a trope that must disappear, they're just
less obvious.

------
sl_
Google cache version: <http://bit.ly/eLyCoN>

~~~
swah
Also not loading for me.

~~~
Toucan
It loads, it just takes a long while.

~~~
simias
<http://bit.ly/hU5OAr>

This one loads instantly here.

~~~
kmfrk
Here it is formatted in ViewText:
[http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://webcache.googleuserco...](http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ItGMeRgoTp8J:blog.zerodean.com/2010/blog/my-
life-at-rockstar-games/+my-life-at-rockstar-games&hl=de&gl=de&strip=1).

------
stonemetal
_It felt like a very unreal situation — working for a supposed “top-notch”
company only to discover that some of my coworkers (including senior artists
and management) wouldn’t even have been hired as interns at other companies
I’d worked at. I’m not exaggerating._

Is Rockst*r considered a top-notch company? I know their output is quite
respected but like Mel Gibson there is a difference between looking good on TV
and being Good. Mostly it sounds like a bad case of hero worship.

~~~
stuhacking
I guess the articles impact is that it's surprising that a company with a
track record of producing high quality games would have so many alleged issues
on the inside.

Of course, whether or not you find it surprising is down to experience.

~~~
stonemetal
That is the thing though, the rockstar that is famous for pretty much
everything rockstar is famous for is in Europe ( Edinburgh, Scotland to be
precise.) So it is a little disingenuous to say he is working for a company
with a history of quality. He works for a company that was bought by a company
with a history of releasing quality products not quite the same thing.

~~~
kenjackson
Except Rockstar San Diego has delivered some great content including the game
this article seems to be about. RDR has won multiple 2010 "Game of the Year"
awards (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dead_Redemption#Awards>), had great
reviews, and incredible sales.

It's also the same studio that produced the Midnight Club series, one of the
best racing series and the one that really brought the open terrain racer to
market.

It seems like a relatively small studio, but one that has a very solid track
record -- at least if you just look at the games it produces.

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kevingadd
I keep hearing stories like this from different studios, and most of the time,
they're studios that released games I really enjoyed. I would assume the
stories are exaggerated or untrue, but they always ring true with my personal
experience in game dev as well.

I think stories like this are rooted in the fact that the feedback cycle for
large-budget video game development is completely broken. For small game
projects with small teams and small budgets, you could at least attempt to
assign blame for failures and credit for successes to the team members
responsible for the result of the project. But when a game project runs for
multiple years, with hundreds of developers and tens of millions of dollars
spent on development, it becomes increasingly difficult to assign blame for
any particular detail. This is worsened by the fact that the success of a game
is ultimately up to the whims of the market and other factors outside of the
developer's control (like whether any competing titles are released at the
same time).

The end result is that leads and executives are effectively insulated from the
results of their decisions, which is why they can lead a project that ends up
years behind schedule and burns through employees with 72 hour work weeks and
not get fired. And ultimately, for a large game publisher, it doesn't matter
if a few projects run over budget or fail completely as long as they get
enough hits that bring in massive amounts of revenue.

I'm starting to suspect that 90% of commercial games only ship through an act
of God, when an angel descends from the heavens a week before gold master to
mysteriously fix 50% of open bugs and get the lead designer to stop using
meth. Were this the case, it would definitely explain how certain studios like
Bethesda always seem to get 'unlucky' and have their games ship with crippling
issues and lots of rough edges, despite the fact that people love their work.

The bit about the removal of free sodas and donuts reminds me of:
[http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-
eart...](http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-
earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/)

~~~
tjarratt
You would be surprised how many known bugs an average game has when it ships.
I'm sure the last week before GM is a very hectic week for those individuals
that are determined to increase quality without breaking the game, but there
are only so many hours in a day.

Also, I think you confused Bethesda with Obsidian Studios. They both ship
buggy code, but fans seem to be more forgiving of Obsidian.

------
binaryfinery
Since the site has hit its quota, I'll post my reply here:

I had the same experience, just ten years earlier. I was the lead programmer
of resident evil 2 for the N64. Project was on time, under budget. Client was
so happy it got Angel a little title called "Red Dead Revolver", which R* took
over from Capcom when they bought Angel.

You want to know how we got the RE2 deal? I'll tell you: Chris Fodor and I
noticed that you could spend 5 days a week totally fucking everything up and
not get fired. You could _lose Nintendo_ as a client by utterly failing to hit
any deadline - and not get fired. You could be lead of a project that didnt
ship, and then be lead of another project that didnt ship, rinse, repeat.

So we decided to spend monday working on our job, and the rest of the time
working on a tech demo. We then presented our ideas to the programmers at the
company. Of course, only a few senior programmers voiced their opinion, and
their opinion was "that wont work". So then we ran the demo of it working.

Diego showed up a week later with a choice of two titles, one of which was
porting RE2 to the N64.

I was fired a few weeks after we shipped.

I used to believe that the role of an employee was to maximize the value for
shareholders. I still choose to believe this role, which is basically why I am
only employable at start-ups, where it is still true. At any other company,
the role of the employee is to maximize the value for the employee and the
other employees that think likewise.

So welcome to the world of start-ups. You're now unemployable by most everyone
else.

