“Crunch time kills friendships, ends marriages, and causes the occasional fist fight.” That was Edge in February 2000, introducing a feature in which developers swapped their best stories of the last weeks before a game shipped: a programmer who wore the same clothes for four days, teams falling asleep at their keyboards, testers working 24-hour shifts. The stories were told for laughs and for admiration. Five years later the same hours were the subject of a class action against Electronic Arts, and “crunch” had become the games industry’s best-known labour problem.
Crunch is the industry’s name for a stretch of very long working hours, usually unpaid overtime, to get a game finished by its deadline. It can last weeks or many months.
Why games crunch
Edge’s 2000 feature described the mechanism plainly. “Almost universally, a game goes from just functional to playable in the last month of development. That’s when a lot of late nights are required to debug, tune and finish a game on schedule.” Tuning a game’s difficulty cannot start until it works, and the bugs found while tuning need fixing in turn. The long hours then feed themselves: they “mean that productivity usually goes down, necessitating even longer, less productive hours. It’s a vicious cycle that ends (rarely) when the team decides the game is finally finished — or (much more frequently) when the publisher demands that the game ship no matter what.”
The developers Edge asked named more causes. Shiny’s David Perry argued that hiring extra staff late made things worse: “More people just ask too many questions. They actually decrease the efficiency of the people that were really getting the work done.” Public companies needed games to ship within a financial quarter to show revenue to shareholders, and Perry said developers working for them heard the same thing: “Just ship it!”
Electronic Gaming Monthly added the economics in 2005. A 2003 Gamasutra survey found that a programmer with two to five years’ experience earned an average of $70,000 a year, “the same amount programmers in other industries can earn straight out of college”, and so many people wanted to make games that employers could ask for more. The magazine was careful not to make every cause a villain: the reasons ranged “from potentially exploitative (the ‘shark pool’ mentality) to, in Schafer’s case, a timeline that won’t give, not enough preplanning, and simple passion for making the product the best it can be”.
The hours before the word
Long hours are as old as the industry. In the summer of 1982 Atari gave Howard Scott Warshaw about five weeks to write E.T. for the VCS, so that cartridges could be made in time for Christmas. “A game typically took six to eight months to develop. They wanted this in five weeks,” he told Edge in 2006. He had a development system installed at home to save the drive to the office, and Edge wrote that the weeks passed “in a blur of almost continual coding”. The press of the time recorded such hours as dedication. Amiga Format in 1993 reported that when Archer MacLean “comes head to head with a particularly difficult problem he sometimes spends 18 hours a day working on it and doesn’t step outside his front door for days”, in a profile that moved on to his go-karting and skydiving. MacLean was an independent developer on his own game; nobody had told him to.
The word was in use in studios by the early 1990s. In November 1992 Computer Gaming World, reporting the lessons Chris Crawford had given the Computer Game Developers Conference, noted that “during crunch time, there is always the chance to cut corners and get the product out the door”. In 1994 Sierra’s own customer magazine, InterAction, told readers that its artists and programmers, “who just a few short weeks ago were in ‘crunch mode’ to get their products out for last Christmas, are more rested and ready to get back to work”.
War stories
Edge’s 2000 feature is a snapshot of how the industry saw itself at the turn of the century. Most of its stories are comedy: a developer who slept at the office, locked himself out of it in the small hours and, remembering Die Hard, crawled back to his desk through the ceiling; a debugger hunt at Oddworld that ended when someone wiped something off the disc. The costs were in there too. Colin Gordon of Boss Game Studios spoke up for testers, who “get paid peanuts, are expected to work a 24-hour shift when it comes to finishing product, and they don’t even get any credit”. Kelly Flock, president of 989 Studios, was blunter:
I don’t know anyone who has fond memories of crunch time, when friendships end over whose fault the delays were, marriages end because one of the spouses … spends too much time at work, and co-workers end up in the occasional fist fight. It’s hard to be nostalgic for marathon work sessions created by poor planning, bad management, indecision, insecurity, creative paralysis, and stress.
Edge did not expect change: “Long hours will undoubtedly remain the method to this madness.”
EA Spouse
In November 2004 an anonymous LiveJournal essay, “EA: The Human Story”, described the hours its author’s partner was working at Electronic Arts: 9am to 10pm, seven days a week, an average of 85 hours, without overtime pay. Edge reported that “crunch time has long been accepted as a necessary evil of the games industry, but many are being forced to question that status quo”. The essay arrived alongside overtime lawsuits from EA’s artists and programmers, which EA settled for $15.6 million in 2005 and $14.9 million in 2006, reclassifying junior staff as hourly workers who could claim overtime. The EA Spouse entry tells that story.
The coverage that followed let developers describe what crunch did to them. Tim Schafer, whose Double Fine was then finishing Psychonauts, told Electronic Gaming Monthly: “You don’t do your best work when you’re in crunch mode — your laundry is piling up, your family hasn’t seen you, your friends have deserted you. You’re just this walking shell of a person because you’re at work all the time…a zombie.”
Later reports
The argument did not go away. In January 2010 a letter signed by the “Determined Devoted Wives of Rockstar San Diego employees” complained of the hours at the studio making Red Dead Redemption, as the Rockstar entry describes. In October 2018 Rockstar’s co-founder Dan Houser told New York magazine that “we were working 100-hour weeks” on Red Dead Redemption 2; after criticism he told Kotaku that he had meant the senior writing team, for about three weeks. Kotaku’s own investigation, published days later, drew on interviews with 34 current and 43 former Rockstar employees. In April 2019 Polygon reported that Epic Games staff had worked 70- to 100-hour weeks to keep up with Fortnite; Epic replied that “extreme situations such as 100-hour work weeks are incredibly rare, and in those instances, we seek to immediately remedy them to avoid recurrence”.
Some developers responded by organising. A campaign called Game Workers Unite began in March 2018, and in December 2018 its British members formed Game Workers Unite UK, a branch of the Independent Workers of Great Britain, the country’s first union for game workers. Its chair, the programmer Austin Kelmore, wrote in Wireframe in 2019 that it campaigned “to end the institutionalised practice of excessive/unpaid overtime”.
Sources
- Edge issue 81, February 2000, pp. 44–50, “Crunch time”: the last month of development, the vicious cycle, the war stories, Colin Gordon (Boss Game Studios), Kelly Flock (989 Studios), David Perry (Shiny Entertainment) on adding staff and on public companies, and the closing prediction.
- Computer Gaming World issue 100, November 1992, p. 120: report of Chris Crawford’s lessons at the Computer Game Developers Conference (“during crunch time”).
- InterAction (Sierra On-Line), Spring 1994, p. 18: “crunch mode” before Christmas.
- Amiga Format Special issue 7, 1993, p. 21: Archer MacLean profile.
- Edge issue 160, March 2006, “The making of E.T.”: Howard Scott Warshaw on writing the game in five weeks in 1982.
- Edge issue 144, Christmas 2004, news, “EA spouse speaks out”: crunch as “a necessary evil”. The settlements are cited in the EA Spouse entry.
- Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 188, February 2005, p. 59, Jennifer Tsao, “The reality of game development”: the Gamasutra salary survey, the range of causes, and Tim Schafer.
- Jason Schreier, “Inside Rockstar Games’ Culture Of Crunch”, Kotaku, 23 October 2018 (web, secondary): Dan Houser’s remark and clarification, and the interviews. https://kotaku.com/inside-rockstar-games-culture-of-crunch-1829936466
- Wireframe issue 25, October 2019, p. 45, Paul Walker-Emig, “A world without bosses?”: Houser’s “100-hour weeks”.
- Wireframe issue 13, May 2019, p. 15, news: Polygon’s report on crunch at Epic.
- Tom Ivan, “Epic claims 100-hour working weeks are ‘incredibly rare’”, Video Games Chronicle, 24 April 2019 (web, secondary): Epic’s statement. https://videogameschronicle.com/news/epic-claims-100-hour-working-weeks-are-incredibly-rare
- Wireframe issue 15, May 2019, p. 3, Austin Kelmore, “A call for unionisation”: Game Workers Unite and Game Workers Unite UK.