Blood, Sweat, and Pixels Read online

  Different people who worked on the game point to different reasons for Stormlands’ ultimate demise—some say Microsoft was too ambitious; others say Obsidian was too petulant—but everyone agrees that by the end, the project had gotten unwieldy. “Expectation after expectation after expectation got piled onto the game,” Urquhart said. “It turned into this thing that everybody was scared of. I think in fact even we were scared of it.”

  Urquhart hung up the phone, trying to figure out what this would mean for his company. The standard burn rate for a game studio was $10,000 per person per month, a number that included both salaries and overhead costs, like health insurance and office rent. Using that number as a baseline, keeping all fifty Stormlands developers employed would cost the studio at least $500,000 every month. By Urquhart’s count, Obsidian had already put $2 million of its own money into Stormlands on top of what it had received from Microsoft, and the company didn’t have much left to spare. With only one other game in development—South Park: The Stick of Truth, which was having its own financial crisis thanks to the slow meltdown of its publisher, THQ—Obsidian just didn’t have the cash to keep all those people employed.*

  Feargus Urquhart gathered Obsidian’s other four owners and went to a Starbucks down the road, where they spent hours huddling over a big list of names, trying to figure out whom to keep and whom to let go. The next day, Urquhart called an all-hands meeting. “It started out fine,” said Dimitri Berman, a lead character artist. “People were joking around. Then Feargus came out all dead looking.”

  Choking back tears, Urquhart told the company that Microsoft had canceled Stormlands and that Obsidian would have to lay people off. The staff trickled back to their desks, wondering which of them were about to be escorted out of the building. For hours, they all just had to wait there, nervously watching as Obsidian’s operations guy prepared severance packages for those who hadn’t made the cut. “He comes around with a manila folder, and he walks around, and he tells you to pack your bags,” said Adam Brennecke, a programmer on Stormlands. “And he escorts you off the premises and he sets up a time when you can come back and get your belongings. He’s just walking around and you’re thinking, ‘Don’t come into my office, don’t come into my office.’ You’re watching him and then you see and you’re like, ‘Fuck, there goes one of my friends.’”

  By the end of the day, the company had been gutted. Obsidian laid off around twenty-six of the people who had worked on Stormlands, including one engineer who had been hired just a day earlier. These weren’t incompetent or inadequate employees; they were beloved coworkers. “It was fucking terrible,” said Josh Sawyer, the director of Stormlands. “It was horrible. It was probably the worst day of my career. . . . It was the biggest layoff I had ever seen.”

  Since 2003, Obsidian had survived as an independent studio, bouncing from contract to contract as its staff took freelance work to keep the lights on. The company had been through brutal cancellations before—like Aliens: Crucible, a Sega-published RPG whose demise also led to big layoffs—but none had hurt this much. None had left Feargus Urquhart with so few options. After nearly ten years, those remaining at Obsidian were starting to wonder: Was this the end?

  Four hundred miles north, as Urquhart and his crew tried to recover from catastrophe, the staff of Double Fine were popping champagne. Double Fine, an independent studio in San Francisco led by the illustrious designer Tim Schafer, had just found a way to revolutionize the video game industry.

  For decades, the video game industry’s power balance had been simple: developers made games; publishers paid for them. Although there were always exceptions—venture capitalists, lottery winners, and so on—the bulk of video game development was funded by big publishers with deep pockets. Publishers almost always had the leverage in these negotiations, which could lead developers to agree to some rigid deals. For the role-playing game Fallout: New Vegas, for example, the publisher, Bethesda, offered Obsidian a $1 million bonus if the game hit an 85 (out of 100) on Metacritic, a website that aggregates review scores from across the Internet. As the reviews started pouring in, the Metacritic number swung up and down several times before finally settling at 84. (Obsidian did not get its bonus.)

  Traditionally, independent studios like Obsidian and Double Fine had three ways to stay afloat: (1) finding investors, (2) signing contracts with publishers to make games, or (3) funding their own video games with war chests they’d hoarded via options one and two. No decent-size indie studio could survive without relying at least partly on money from outside partners, even if that meant dealing with cancellations, layoffs, and bad deals.

  Double Fine had found a fourth option: Kickstarter, a “crowdfunding” website that had launched in 2009. Using this website, creators could pitch directly to their fans: You give us money; we’ll give you something cool. During Kickstarter’s first couple of years, users of the site were hobbyists, hoping to earn a few thousand dollars to shoot short films or build neat folding tables. In 2011, however, the projects started getting bigger, and in February 2012, Double Fine launched a Kickstarter for a point-and-click adventure game called the Double Fine Adventure.*

  It shattered every record. Previous Kickstarters had been lucky to break six figures; Double Fine raised $1 million in twenty-four hours. In March 2012, just as Microsoft was canceling Stormlands, Double Fine’s Kickstarter concluded, having raised over $3.3 million from 87,142 backers. No other crowdfunded video game had earned even a tenth of that. By then, Obsidian’s staff were all paying attention.

  With Kickstarter, a developer wouldn’t have to rely on any other companies. Independent studios wouldn’t have to sign away the rights to their intellectual properties or give up royalties to big publishers. Instead of pitching to investors or executives, game developers could make a case directly to fans. The more people they could get on board, the more money they’d make.

  The crowdfunding revolution had begun.

  Back down in Irvine, Feargus Urquhart and Obsidian’s other co-owners started talking about their next move. They still had South Park: The Stick of Truth in development, but they knew that wasn’t enough. If South Park ran into more trouble, or if they couldn’t find a new project when it was over, the company would simply run out of money. Obsidian needed to diversify. And even after laying off so much of the Stormlands team, the studio still had two dozen developers who needed work.

  Thanks to the Double Fine Adventure and other high-profile projects, the Kickstarter bug had spread throughout Obsidian. Several employees were high on the idea of crowdfunding, including two top veterans: Adam Brennecke and Josh Sawyer. Both had worked on Stormlands—Brennecke as a programmer, Sawyer as the director—and both thought that Kickstarter would be the perfect fit for a work-for-hire studio like theirs. During meetings, as management tried to figure out the company’s next step, Brennecke and Sawyer kept bringing up the Double Fine Adventure. If Tim Schafer could make $3.3 million, why couldn’t they?

  Urquhart shut them down. He saw crowdfunding as a desperation move. He thought there was a strong likelihood that they’d flop, that they’d be embarrassed, that nobody would give them a dollar. “Even if you feel like you have the greatest idea,” said Urquhart, “and you really believe in it, and you would put money into it, you still wonder if anybody’s going to be there.” Instead, he asked Sawyer, Brennecke, and the remaining Stormlands developers to start putting together pitches for outside investors and publishers.

  As spring turned into summer, Obsidian offered its services to almost every big publisher in gaming. The studio’s leadership talked to Ubisoft and Activision about doing big series like Might & Magic and Skylanders. They spent some time pitching (and briefly working on) their own version of Bethesda’s ill-fated Prey 2.* They even took a few of their ideas for Stormlands and transformed them into a new pitch called Fallen that was spearheaded by one of Obsidian’s co-owners, Chris Avellone.*

  None of those pitches went anywhere. Big publishers
had reasons to be conservative: the Xbox 360 (released in 2005) and PlayStation 3 (2006) were near the end of their life spans, and a new console generation was on the way, but analysts and pundits were predicting that console gaming was doomed thanks to the rise of iPhones and iPads. Publishers didn’t want to invest tens of millions of dollars into big games without knowing that people would actually buy the next-generation Xbox One and PS4.*

  By June 2012, many at Obsidian were sick of failing. Some had already left the studio, while others were considering calling it quits. Those who weren’t making South Park felt like they were stuck in development purgatory, moving from pitch to pitch with no real work in sight. “Nothing was going anywhere,” said Brennecke. “Even the pitches we were doing, I don’t think anyone was really into.” Feargus Urquhart started having breakfast meetings with the company’s lawyer to talk about what it might look like if they had to pull the plug, in case they couldn’t find another project by the time they’d finished South Park.

  Then Josh Sawyer and Adam Brennecke came to Urquhart with an ultimatum: they wanted to launch a Kickstarter. They preferred to do it with Obsidian, but if Urquhart continued to stonewall, they’d quit, start their own company, and do it themselves. To sweeten the pot, Sawyer added that he’d be happy to keep working on pitches for publishers, as long as someone at the company started planning a Kickstarter.

  It helped that other Obsidian veterans had also expressed a great deal of interest in crowdfunding, including Chris Avellone, who had been publicly praising Kickstarter for months, even going as far as to poll Obsidian fans about what kind of project they’d want to help fund.* Urquhart relented, and within the next few days, Adam Brennecke was locking himself alone in an office, trying to come up with the perfect Kickstarter.

  One thing became immediately clear to everyone who was left at Obsidian: they needed to make an old-school RPG. Much of the company’s DNA came from Black Isle, the studio that Feargus Urquhart had operated back in the Interplay days, which was best known for developing and publishing RPGs like Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, and Baldur’s Gate. These games had several things in common. They were all based on the world and rules of Dungeons & Dragons; they all put a huge focus on story and dialogue; and they all used a fixed, “isometric” camera that would let you play with an angled perspective, as if you were looking down at a chessboard. Since they all used the same base technology, called the Infinity Engine, they all felt similarly to play.

  Nobody was making games like that anymore. Isometric RPGs had gone out of favor in the mid-2000s, replaced by games with 3-D graphics, voice acting, and far fewer conversations. Publishers were mostly trying to chase megahits like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the Bethesda-developed 2011 RPG that had sold over thirty million copies.* Gamers had been grumbling about this trend for quite some time. Anyone who’d grown up playing Black Isle’s isometric RPGs agreed: those games were classics, and it was a shame that the game industry had moved past them.

  Obsidian didn’t have the Dungeons & Dragons license, so they couldn’t blast magic missiles or sojourn in the Underdark, but the studio did have several people with experience working on games like Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate, and they knew that making an isometric RPG would cost far less money than trying to develop a brand-new 3-D game. If they kept their team small and somehow managed to raise a couple million dollars on Kickstarter, even selling just a few hundred thousand copies could turn Obsidian’s fortunes around.

  Adam Brennecke spent the next two months working on a pitch, compiling PowerPoint presentations and spreadsheets in preparation for what they were now calling Project Eternity. He brainstormed with Josh Sawyer, Chris Avellone, and other veterans at Obsidian including Tim Cain, a designer best known for his work on the original Fallout. Before they could launch the Kickstarter, they needed to nail down every detail, so they spent weeks mapping out a schedule, a budget, and even reward tiers. “There was a lot of debate,” said Brennecke. “Do we have a physical box? What goes in the physical box? Do we do a collector’s edition? What items go in the collector’s edition?” You’d get a box by pledging at the $65 tier on Kickstarter, they decided. For the snazzy limited edition, which came with a cloth map, you’d have to pay at least $140.

  In August, Brennecke sat down with Obsidian’s owners and gave them the full pitch. This would be “D&D without the bullshit,” he told them. Project Eternity would take the best parts from those old-school RPGs that everyone loved, but it’d ditch the features that felt obsolete after the last ten years of innovation in game development. Brennecke told them he’d budgeted for a Kickstarter goal of $1.1 million, but he secretly thought they could hit $2 million. “Obsidian employees want to make this game,” he wrote. The owners agreed. They said Brennecke could put a small team together and launch the Kickstarter in September.

  From there, Brennecke pulled Josh Sawyer away from the dreary world of pitching and asked him to start designing the game. They knew Project Eternity would be set in an original fantasy world, but what would it look like? Brennecke had thought it’d be cool to do something that focused on human souls, so Sawyer riffed on that. In the world of Eternity, souls wouldn’t just be metaphysical ideas; they would be tangible sources of power for people. Your main character would be a gifted Watcher, with the ability to peek into other people’s souls and read their memories. “I came up with that sort of concept as, that’s what the player character’s going to be,” said Sawyer. “Where does it go from there? We’ll figure it out.”

  You’d start off by customizing your character. You’d pick a class (fighter, paladin, wizard, and so on), a race (traditional fantasy fare like humans and elves, or one of Eternity’s original races, like the divinely enhanced “Godlike”), and a smattering of skills and spells. Then you’d get to go out into the world of Eora and explore. You could go on side quests, recruit companions, and fight monsters using the gear and weapons you’d acquire along the way. Combat would unfold in real time, but in the vein of classic RPGs, you’d be able to pause at any time to zoom out and figure out a strategy. Like those old games, this one would be on computers only. No consoles. Eternity, as Obsidian envisioned it, would take the best ingredients from Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment and put them all together in one delicious stew.

  For the next few weeks, Adam Brennecke and Josh Sawyer met daily with their small Kickstarter crew. They pored over every word, every screenshot, and every second of their video pitch. They battled against last-minute second-guessing from some of the owners—Was this really a good idea? What if nobody showed up?—and on the morning of September 10, 2012, they launched a teaser countdown on the Obsidian website, promising big news in four days. “This was FINALLY our chance to sidestep the publisher model and get financing directly from the people who want to play an Obsidian RPG,” Chris Avellone wrote in an e-mail to me that week. “I’d much rather have the players be my boss and hear their thoughts for what would be fun than people who might be more distant from the process and the genre and frankly, any long-term attachment to the title.”

  Around the same time, a separate team at Obsidian was working on a pitch for the Russian publisher Mail.Ru, one of the largest Internet companies in Eastern Europe. Mail.Ru had been watching the success of the game World of Tanks, which brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year primarily from fans in Europe and Asia, and the publisher was eager to make its own online tank game. Although multiplayer tank games weren’t Obsidian’s MO—Obsidian was, as Urquhart liked to say, the “dorky RPG guys”—the company’s owners saw it as an opportunity for a stable stream of income, so they dreamed up what would later be called Armored Warfare.

  Toward the end of 2012, Armored Warfare would turn into an important financial security blanket for Urquhart and crew. What it meant was that they weren’t gambling everything on Kickstarter. Just a few things.

  On Friday, September 14, 2012, a group of Obsidian employees gathered at A
dam Brennecke’s desk and hovered behind him, waiting for the clock to hit 10:00 a.m. They’d run into a scare an hour earlier, when a big red text alert had informed Brennecke that there was an ambiguous “problem with the campaign,” but a quick call to Kickstarter HQ had resolved the issue just in time. At exactly ten o’clock, Brennecke hit the launch button. When the page loaded, the ticker was already at $800. How the hell? Brennecke hit refresh. They were over $2,700. Then $5,000. Within a minute, they had broken five digits.

  If you were to have visited the offices of Obsidian Entertainment on September 14, 2012, you might not have realized you were at a game development studio. There was very little game development happening there. What you’d have found instead was dozens of people mashing F5 on their keyboards, watching the Project Eternity Kickstarter raise hundreds of dollars per minute. In the afternoon, realizing that they weren’t going to get much work done, Feargus Urquhart took a group of staff and went to Dave & Buster’s across the street, where they ordered a round of beers and proceeded to stare silently at their phones, refreshing Kickstarter. By the end of the day they’d hit $700,000.

  The next few weeks were a whirlwind of fundraising, updates, and interviews. Project Eternity raised its original goal of $1.1 million a day after the Kickstarter went live, but Urquhart and his crew weren’t content settling for the minimum—they wanted to raise as much as possible. More money wouldn’t directly translate to a better game, but it would mean that they could afford to hire more people and take more time on the project (which would probably lead to a better game).