jducoeur: (Default)
From: [personal profile] jducoeur

Also - I didn't know you worked at Looking Glass. That's pretty cool.

Thanks! I was there for the last couple of years -- worked on Thief and System Shock II.

(Although I know the games industry chews people up and spits them out.)

To be fair, LG was way better than many of the horror stories I've heard about: a lot of great camaraderie, amazing technical talent, and a general sense of fun. They did care about folks' needs, and understood how tough long crunch periods are: after Shock shipped, everyone was basically ordered to take several weeks off (on the company) to recover.

But the top-level facts of the industry, especially at the big publishers, are insane -- the way that ship dates are set years in advance, with millions of dollars depending on hitting those dates, demos locking you into features early and no room for anything other than perfection. It's a terrible environment for sane software development.

We were starting to explore Extreme Programming in the late days of LG (about 20 years ago), but it's hard to push back against all those forces. Good to see folks standing up and doing so...

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