One of the things that keeps surprising me about this industry is how ready the (big, bad?) media is to credit the vision, creativity, and style behind a game to a single person. To people who actually make games, this is patently ridiculous (and, at times, kinda offensive) - don’t they know, we scoff, how difficult it is to do this craft in a vacuum? Of course Will Wright and Shiggy and Kojima-san and Peter Molyneux have teams of hundreds that add their own sweat and tears and blood into those games! We development professionals have an immediate and intimate knowledge of how necessarily collaborative big-budget game development really is, and, I’m sure, have the same indignant reactions to a USA Today profile of “the force behind Gears of War” as a group of costume designers might have to an IGN feature on J.J. Abrams’ newest movie or TV project.
(There are notable exceptions to the “no man is an island” rule in the indie community - witness the righteous power and furious anger of the man behind The Dishwasher. And in mainstream games, we know a number of great development houses only by their work as a team, and not as a singular face - Bungie is the best example I can think of, although I think it’s also exemplified by Relic, Ensemble, Sucker Punch, Visual Concepts, and IO Interactive, among others. Do these studios intentionally avoid singling out individual gears from their well-oiled development machines, or do they not have anyone working there that the media wants to devour?)
But, inquisitive minds might ask, are they douchebags? More accurately, I guess - does it matter to the people who wait in line to buy their games? To the fans who know better than to buy into the idea that Kazunori Yamauchi is the only guy on the Gran Turismo team who knows how and why cars are awesome? And what happens when those figureheads start to challenge the community’s patience, when they stop worrying about being polite and start (accidentally?) being real?
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Filed by sean at 12:51 am under games