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    Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made
    Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made
    Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made
    Audiobook7 hours

    Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made

    Written by Jason Schreier

    Narrated by Ray Chase

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    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 listeners 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 listeners 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.

    Editor's Note

    Behind your favorite game franchise…

    This revealing bestseller goes behind-the-scenes to expose the daunting artistic, technical, and corporate challenges facing video game developers, and reveals the inside stories behind the dedicated creators of “Destiny,” “Uncharted 4,” “Shovel Knight,” “Dragon Age: Inquisition,” and more.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateSep 5, 2017
    ISBN9780062790903
    Author

    Jason Schreier

    Jason Schreier is the news editor at Kotaku, a leading website covering the industry and culture of video games. He has also covered the video game world for Wired, and has contributed to a wide range of outlets including The New York Times, Edge, Paste, Kill Screen, and The Onion News Network. Blood, Sweat, and Pixels is his first book.

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    Reviews for Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

    4.5/5

    334 ratings22 reviews

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    • 5/5
      It’s really insightful and the personal stories are great! I’m really glad I read this book, it is worth it.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Excellently written and super informative. I haven't read a better behind the scenes book.
    • 5/5
      really informative and a fun listen. was kinda surprised at how much winging it goes into the process.
    • 5/5
      Loved it, recommended it to some of my friends interested in game dev. Nice to see some of the behind the scenes of these massive games.
    • 5/5
      It was a bunch of decent stories from game dev world, good stuff.
    • 4/5
      Excellent! This book is a great peek behind the digital
      curtain. I walked away having learned so much!
    • 5/5
      I liked getting the background to the different game products we see on the market. We take it for granted what happens in the "kitchen" so to speak. This book gives a general overview of the various dynamics involved the production of games. I recommend this to anyone interested in the gaming industry, this is a simple primer.
    • 4/5
      It’s a fun collection of stories, but not very cohesive.
    • 5/5
      An must read for newcomers and veterans of the industry.
    • 5/5
      What an incredible book with perfect narration. Listen to the whole thing, now, don't wait. If you've ever wondered about video game development and how it happens, or if you've ever enjoyed a post-mortem article in Game Developer Magazine or PM video from GDC on YouTube, this book will enthrall you.
    • 4/5
      Juicy high level detail without any of the technical details that I desired (but that would probably make it awful for any no-programmers)
    • 4/5
      The Uncharted 4 section is the best. Does a good job of covering indie games too.
    • 5/5
      It's a great book that tells how some games were made.
    • 5/5
      Great stories, fun to read, even more so if you like vidya.
    • 5/5
      Top notch writing and narration, for an incredibly angering reality. Being an indie game developer, it was eye opening to get this glimpse into some of AAA's practices. Very pleasant to listen through, and gut wrenching to think about.
    • 5/5
      Book is so insightful.
      Narrator is so alive and awesome.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      This is focused on BTS of video game development and games made between 2015-2017.[Diablo 3, Stardew Valley, Uncharted 4, Star Wars 1313 for example]This is not an expose or terribly scathing about the development time it takes but rather reads like the author took some of his blog posts, polished them and had them bound in a book.I was expecting some juicy intel that I hadn't already gotten off of IGN or any other video game website, but alas, that's not what this book is.Listen, this is a fun book to read but it isn't something that you need to have to call yourself a gamer or even mildly interested in gaming. What's in the book isn't anything you couldn't already look up yourself in public interviews or other blog sites.The author does acknowledge that the industry is a sausage fest and most of the people interviewed on record are men. This isn't to say that he deliberately did this, it's simply stating a fact of his writing.Do I recommend this book? Only if you're someone who really has not a single clue about video games or who doesn't know how to work the interwebs.I gave this 4 stacks because it's clear, simple, and really easy to read.**All thoughts and opinions are my own.**
    • 4/5
      This book offers a really good insight into what it's like to make a video game. I liked how it included both big studios and indie stories. It made me sad about a couple of things: the lack of women's voices in this industry (something that the author recognizes in the beginning) and the mental health and burnout issues that appear to be an inevitable consequence of every good game out there.
    • 2/5
      Made my blood boil. The author takes everything managers tell him uncritically. This is an extremely sympathetic (sycophantic) account of game development. It paints this ridiculous picture of people doing what they love and killing themselves and ruining their lives for the players. What a load of bollocks. Uncharted isn't some labour of love, it's a number in a spreadsheet and the developers aren't heros, they are expenses. And they don't do unpaid overtime because they love it, they do it because there is an infinite supply of idiots who are eager to take their place and the studio will not hesitate for a second to replace them. Welcome to the world of game development.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This was super interesting and a really fun read. I wasn't familiar with all the games mentioned, but it didn't really matter. If you're even remotely curious about this topic, I highly recommend this.
    • 3/5
      A collection of stories about video games and how they got made. It doesn't take for them to get samey. Company wants to make a game. It takes longer than they think. It costs more than they think. They work ninety hour weeks, beg for deadline extensions, and then release it. Game is a hit. Then they all go and do it again. I'm reminded of a George Carlin bit my dad liked: "You know when you've been eating ice cream too fast and you get that frozen spot in the back of your throat but you can't do anything about it because you can't reach it to rub it? You just have to kinda wait for it to go away? And it does… then what do you do? EAT MORE ICE CREAM!"At times it almost sounds like propaganda for the video game industry. There are no tales of when it all fell apart or everything was cancelled and dreams were destroyed (except one). He glosses over the lay-offs and misses those times when they just lock the doors and fire everyone. I bet he lifted from stories he's written on Kotaku, so he didn't have much work after that. I don't think it's a well-balanced look at the crunch video games are famous for. And really, I don't think it's telling us anything we don't already know--that working conditions for video game makers are horrible. I think you're better off subscribing to a video game news feed.