Krondor Confidential - Part X

The Cost of the Crunch

“Pray thee, spare, thyself at times: for it becomes a wise man sometimes to relax the high pressure of his attention to work.”

-- Thomas Aquinas

At the beginning of a game project, everything seems possible. You start with notes scribbled on napkins, and sketches, and whiteboard flowcharts, and excited conversations with your co-workers about all the things you can envision it becoming. Sometimes you get lost while driving because you’re so absorbed in designing a system or constructing a narrative that you literally forget that you exist somewhere outside the world of your game. But at some point along the way you begin to confront reality. That great idea you had in the shower can’t be implemented, or at least not in the way you imagined. Things have to be cut not because there’s a logic problem, but because the budget is running out, or a deadline is looming. This bright, brilliant thing that you dreamed at the beginning turns into meetings, and lists, and checkboxes, and spreadsheets, and deadlines, and deliverables. Suddenly it’s 3:00 AM, you’re staring at your Sisyphean bug list, and you want to travel back in time to assassinate that imagination-drunk version of yourself that’s committed you to living in this nightmare. You swear if you survive you’ll never do this to yourself ever again...and yet you somehow always end up right back in the same place. 

I can’t recall any specific point at which John Cutter declared that we were in “crunch.” We were all keenly aware during the last six months of Betrayal’s production that we’d bitten off a project that might have been more ambitious than was entirely sane. We were months behind schedule, and significantly over budget. While the testers seemed to enjoy the beast we’d handed them, the world was far larger, the text more expansive, and the number of combinatorial possibilities of gear and strategic choice more complex than anything Dynamix had thus far handled. Gradually we’d all adjusted our lives to the longer hours, the truncated weekends, the cancelled plans. For most of the rest of the team the sacrifice was higher than my own because they had wives, or girlfriends, or children at home who needed them. For me, the only thing that required my attention was the world of Midkemia, and she was a very, very demanding mistress. 

The first night that I curled up under my desk in my office at Dynamix, it occurred to me that I’d never really had the best example when it came to leaving work at the office. While my mother came home every night, her responsibilities as a teacher didn’t stop at the schoolhouse door. Dinner at home was usually something fast and convenient, a Swanson’s chicken TV dinner with the awesome chocolate brownie in the corner. After that she would be on the couch for hours grading essays and math tests and science quizzes until she drifted off during the ten o’clock news. During the rerun of Gunsmoke or Star Trek on TV, she’d come alive again to help me with my math homework, or to tackle whatever still needed doing around the house, usually not turning in until two or three in the morning. It’s not as if she had a choice not to do the work -- the cruel reality of school teaching is that it’s a thankless fifteen-hour-a-day job -- but I think it impressed on me that it was okay if your work came home, that it could take over your life. Maybe that was the reason why I didn’t think there was anything wrong with my working eighteen-hour days, seven days a week during the last few months of Betrayal at Krondor’s production. The work simply had to be done -- whatever the cost. 

As the crunch wore on, my days became a blur of meetings with Tim McClure, Chris Medinger, and Joeseph Muennich, all assistant designers who’d all come up from QA. Tim tended to the inventory items and spells, making sure that they got placed everywhere they needed to be. Chris & Joseph meanwhile wrangled with the 3Space world editor as they laid down traps, triggers, and inter-party dialogues, doing the level-editing sorcery that translated our graph paper maps into playable realities. Meanwhile I lived with fixing typos, and broken quests, and filling in bits of text in places we hadn’t originally anticipated. I spent afternoons fielding questions and clarifying issues for QA (and being gleefully happy that our testers were reporting that they were learning new words thanks to the game). All the while, I was also chipping in on promotional articles for the official Sierra Online magazine, and co-authoring large chunks of the manual. Every day it seemed like I had a new ball to keep in the air in order to keep Betrayal chugging towards the finish-line, but I kept my head down and kept plugging, ignoring the fact that day by day I was losing more and more of my edge. As I struggled against mounting exhaustion, I downed liters of Mountain Dew and Jolt every day, believing that I could bully myself through, that I was indestructible and capable of achieving anything I needed so long as I willed it hard enough --

The pain began in my stomach. 

At first, I thought it was something I’d eaten, a dull burning nausea sitting in the pit of my gut. Slowly it began to grow like a fire, getting hotter and hotter until the sensation changed, becoming sharp and pulsing. My breath was getting heavier.

Getting out of my chair, I walked next door to John’s office, realizing that on top of everything else that I was slightly dizzy. I clung to his doorframe for support. 

“I’ve got to go to the ER,” I croaked out.

“What?” John turned around, giving me a confused look. I could tell his head was still deep in whatever design issue he’d been wrestling with. “What?!”

“Something’s really wrong. I’ve got to go.”

“Do you need me to...”

“I’ve got to go,” is all I said, then I walked out of the office. 

To this day I don’t really remember the drive over to the hospital, though I do remember being thankful that Eugene was a relatively small town, and that the ER was not far away. 

The triage folks got to me fast, though likely a little faster because of the symptoms I’d reported at the desk. They remarked that I looked very pale, and I could tell because of my mother’s visits with doctors that they were treating me as a potential cardiac case. I felt pretty certain that aside from the breathing I didn’t really have all the right symptoms, but if they chose to jump me in the line for it, I wasn’t going to object to being seen earlier rather than later. 

In just a few minutes I was on a cold ER bed in a hospital gown, trying to calm myself down. Blades of red-hot pain were jabbing into my stomach at random intervals with no signs of letting up, and I was attempting to revive my long-neglected Zen practice, but the environment was not conducive to relaxation. Screams were coming from behind a curtain just a few feet away. Three police officers and the ER personnel were attending to someone having a psychotic episode as they ran through the same deranged litany over and over and over. 

“Louise! Help! I’m too fucking smart! I’m too fucking strong! Get me off of this planet!”

Intermittently he’d spice things up with references to George Bush and the New World Order, but he’d always come back around to the same chain of invocations to Louise and his own despair of being on planet Earth. With each one of his shouts, I grew increasingly supportive of his quest to get himself offworld. 

In time I heard someone call for Seroquel from behind the curtain, and I recognized the name of the heavy-duty anti-psychotic thanks to long discussions with my neuropsychologist brother Gene. Within moments of the drug’s administration, the disturbed patient continued with his same litany, but the words grew steadily softer and slower until he finally drifted off to sleep. 

With the shouting man conked out, the ER seemed eerily quiet, and I suddenly realized that it had distracted me from my own distress. Desperately I just wanted to take a nap, but my stomach wasn’t about to let that happen. 

After a bit longer, the curtain to my bay was thrown back and a young doctor stepped in, giving me a quick look over. 

“How are you doing?”

“I’m guessing better than him,” I said, nodding over towards the Louise shouter.

Quickly the doctor examined me as I went over my symptoms, and he posed a series of questions. He asked if I was under a lot of stress. I replied that I was working on a million-dollar project that was four months late. Check. He asked how much I was sleeping. I told him about two to three hours a night. Check. He asked me what I’d been eating, to which I replied that I’d been living pretty much on company-supplied pizza and Mountain Dew for three months. Check. 

He looked down at a pad and started writing a note, then handed it to me. 

“You’re not going back to work for a week.”

I blinked. “I...what? I gotta go back to work. I’m...”

“You aren’t going back to work for a week. Your vitals are terrible. I’d hospitalize you, but the hospital is full, and I don’t think that’s necessary in this case providing you get some rest and eat something proper. No pizza. No soft drinks.”

“I can’t miss work!”

“It’s either this or the next time you leave work, it’ll be in a hearse.” He tore off the prescription he’d been writing. “Valium. This might help you sleep. I’ll write you a note for your boss too.”

The call to John had been easy, though it was no surprise to me given the man that he was. Any other boss might have fought my doctor’s orders given our deadlines, but John’s only concern was my well-being. “You just get better, and we’ll take the slack while you’re out,” was all he said. “We can get along without you for a few days.”

I’d been running at a full burn for two years while eating, breathing, and sleeping Betrayal at Krondor. I’d made Midkemia my world, and almost wiped my out my own existence in the process. Walking away for even a week was going to be tough for me, and I’d have to remember who I was outside the context of Dynamix. 

For the next five days, my co-worker and best friend Chris Medinger and his girlfriend Risa took extravagant care of me. Dropping by my apartment several times a day to clear up, make me dinner, and attend to my every whim, they made sure I was following the orders I had been given. When they found me illicitly using my Mac to try and work from home, Chris confiscated the power cord and refused to return it to me until my doctor-imposed vacation was over. I do not exaggerate when I say that I believe that Chris and Risa saved my life. Sometimes you need to let your friends help you when you don’t know how to help yourself. 

The day after my return to Dynamix, things got back to normal fairly quickly, though everyone around me was concerned. John took it easy on me. I found that several things that had backlogged as I’d spiraled into my stress crash had been taken care of in my absence, and John had even taken over writing some of the non-mission-critical messages when players explored empty houses. He had written some truly funny stuff, and it was a pleasure to actually experience story in the game that hadn’t run directly through my hands.

Towards the end of the day, a knock at my office door announced the arrival of our company CEO Tony Reyneke. In the whole time I’d been at Dynamix, I’d never been in a one-on-one conversation with him, and was surprised that he was here making time for a personal visit with lowly ole me.  

“I just want you to know that we were all really concerned for you,” he said. “You’ve got a really important role here. The game play is great, and so is the art, but I think this game is going to succeed or fail based on your story. You’ve done a great job.”

And with that, as he walked out of my office and down the hall, I remember turning back to my computer and muttering to myself. 

“I know you just recovered from exhaustion and an anxiety attack, but this whole game’s success is on you, Neal. No pressure.”

No pressure.

CRUNCHED - The sensation that took me to the ER during Betrayal at Krondor’s “crunch” wasn’t entirely dissimilar to how I felt when my friend David snapped this staged “disaster” photo of me when we were both kids.

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