Blood, Sweat, and Pixels Page 9
On February 26, 2016, a drained Eric Barone launched Stardew Valley. His girlfriend and housemates, Jared and Rosie, had taken off work for the occasion, and they sat upstairs with Barone while the game went live. As they all cheered and celebrated, Barone stared at his Steam developer account. When he clicked over to the live chart, he could watch the numbers move in real time as people bought and began to play Stardew Valley. As soon as he opened the chart, he’d know whether or not his game was an immediate success.
At this point, Eric Barone had no idea what to expect. He’d felt burned out for a long time now, and even with his friends telling him the game was great, there was no predicting how the world would react to his little Harvest Moon clone. Would people buy it? Would they actually like it? What if nobody cared?
He opened the chart.
Six months later, on a warm Thursday afternoon in Seattle, Eric Barone hopped down the front steps of his apartment, carrying a box full of video game plushies and wondering how much he could fit in his car. Friday was the start of Penny Arcade Expo, or PAX, a gathering of geeks from across the globe. Tens of thousands would be crowding the show floor, hunting for cool new games to play, and Barone had booked a small booth to demonstrate Stardew Valley. It was his first convention ever, which was causing him some anxiety. He’d never even met another game developer, let alone potential fans of his work. What if they were awful?
Alongside two of his housemates (and me, visiting from New York), Barone started packing his trunk with essentials: two small computer monitors, a homemade banner, a bag full of water bottles, some cheap pins, and stuffed toys from Stardew Valley. When we’d finished packing, Barone opened the front passenger’s door and climbed to the driver’s seat. The door had been broken for months, he said. The car, a hand-me-down, had belonged to his family for nearly twenty years. I asked if he planned to get the door fixed. He said he hadn’t really thought about it.
It was a familiar, almost hackneyed scene: Independent game developer scores coveted spot at big conference, recruits housemates to help man the booth. If the developer is lucky, the weekend’s press and exposure will lead to a few hundred new fans. For indies, that’s a huge opportunity. Great word of mouth during shows like PAX can transform a small game into a huge success.
But Eric Barone didn’t need any help. On that Thursday in Seattle, as he climbed across the front passenger’s seat, Stardew Valley had already sold 1.5 million copies. Since he’d launched the game, it had grossed close to $21 million. Eric Barone, who was twenty-eight years old and couldn’t open the front door of his car, had over $12 million in his bank account. And he still drove around town in a broken Toyota Camry. “People are asking me: When are you buying that sports car?” Barone said. “I don’t need it. I don’t know when that’s going to change, you know? At some point I guess I’ll probably buy a house, but I’m not in a rush. I don’t really need luxuries. I know that doesn’t make you happy.”
For the next few days, standing in a cramped booth on the sixth floor of the Washington State Convention Center, Barone shook hands and signed autographs for the first time in his life, feeling like a genuine rock star. Fans came dressed up as Stardew Valley characters like the purple-haired Abigail and the suave Gunther. Some people brought him art and homemade presents. Others shared personal stories about how playing Stardew Valley had gotten them through tough times. “I heard a lot of people thanking Eric in just these really sweet, heartfelt ways, and that was really nice for me to see,” said Amber Hageman, who helped run things at the booth. “That was basically what I wanted. I wanted Eric’s work to be appreciated and for other people to experience his music, writing, all these things I’d always admired and thought he was really good at. Getting to hear other people appreciate that and let him know, that was really cool to see.”
The past year had been a blur for Eric Barone and Amber Hageman. After Stardew Valley launched, Barone watched it leap to the top of Steam’s best-seller lists, selling tens of thousands of copies a day. He had thought the game might do well, but the final numbers were beyond expectations, which was simultaneously gratifying and terrifying for Barone. With success came pressure to keep making the game better. Now that more than five people had gotten their hands on the game, Barone had to spend all of his free time zapping the bugs that kept popping up. “It would be right as we were trying to go to sleep,” said Hageman, “and he’d be freaking out like, ‘OK, I just have to stay up and fix this,’ and he’d be up the whole night.”
It became a vicious cycle. Fans would submit bug reports, and Barone would release patches to fix those bugs, only to inadvertently trigger more bugs. Then he’d pull all-nighters trying to fix the new ones. This pattern went on for weeks. “I think success like that on your hands can be quite a shock,” said Chucklefish’s Finn Brice. “Suddenly you feel as if you owe a lot of people a lot of things.”
What this success also meant—and what was still tough to internalize, six months later—was that Eric Barone was now a multimillionaire. You might not have guessed it from the modest house he shared with his girlfriend and housemates, or from the broken Toyota he drove around Seattle, but in half a year he had already made more money than most game developers see in their careers. Barone’s previous life—working as an usher, relying on Hageman for income—felt like it had existed in another dimension. “Before the game came out, we had to budget for food and stuff,” he said when I asked if he had done anything with his newfound riches. “Now I’ll get a bottle of wine if I want it, or whatever. I don’t worry about that.” He paused to think for a few seconds. “I also bought health insurance, which I didn’t have before.”
Later, Barone would tell me that he bought a new computer.
“It was really just surreal, is how it felt at first,” said Amber Hageman. “It’s really abstract. Yeah, we have a lot of money suddenly, but it’s all just numbers on a computer screen. . . . We’ve talked about how eventually we’ll be able to get a house, which is cool. And the Sunday newspaper that always comes with a really fancy house magazine in it, we flip through that just for fun, because that’s actually somehow possible now. We’re not actually going to do that. It’s just fun to look at.”
In 2014, the New Yorker writer Simon Parkin published an article titled “The Guilt of the Video-Game Millionaires,” examining the complicated emotions triggered by indie developers’ financial successes. In the article, game makers like Rami Ismail, the designer of Nuclear Throne, and Davey Wreden, the creator of The Stanley Parable, described the litany of feelings that came with newfound wealth: depression, anxiety, guilt, creative paralysis, and so on. “The money has made relationships complicated,” Edmund McMillen, the designer of the platformer Super Meat Boy, told Parkin. “I’m just a guy who makes games. I’m an artist who likes to be alone. This success has artificially elevated me; it’s caused jealousy, even hatred.”
Eric Barone was caught in a similar emotional vortex. In the months after launching Stardew Valley, he felt overwhelmed with intense and sometimes paradoxical feelings. At first, as the numbers started climbing and he started getting calls from big companies like Sony and Valve, Barone started letting it get to his head. “I thought I was some kind of hotshot,” he said. Microsoft took him out to fancy dinners. Nintendo invited him to tour its swanky headquarters in Redmond (a place so secretive that, to get in, you had to sign an NDA, a nondisclosure agreement, promising not to take any photos). “Everyone wanted something from me,” Barone said. “Nintendo wants me to port the game to their consoles, and I think what they really want is an exclusive deal, but I’m not doing that.”*
Yet insecurity kept creeping in. Barone felt like a tourist in a foreign country, trying to absorb decades’ worth of gaming knowledge as publishers wined and dined him. He had always liked video games, but until now, he didn’t know much about the culture surrounding them. “I was thrown into this crazy world all of a sudden,” he said. “I went from being an absolute nobody to sudden
ly being thrust into this scene, which I felt like a total outsider from. . . . I’m just a guy who got lucky, and happened to make the right game at the right time.”
Barone sunk deeper into his work, sacrificing sleep to keep cranking out patches for Stardew Valley. Then he started looking at his massive list of tasks, a list that included not just several patches full of new content, but the multiplayer mode he’d promised for years before the game launched. What bummed Barone out the most was that programming the multiplayer wouldn’t offer any creative challenges. It was simply a matter of writing lines and lines of networking code, which he dreaded.
One morning, halfway through 2016, Eric Barone suddenly stopped working. He just couldn’t do it anymore. After four and a half years of nonstop work, the thought of dedicating months of his life to Stardew Valley’s multiplayer mode was nauseating him. “I just felt completely burned out,” he said. “I was doing so many interviews, and talking on the phone with people every single day and doing business deals, merchandise. It just got to me at some point.” He called up Chucklefish and said he needed a break, and the publisher offered to put one of its own programmers on multiplayer, which Barone happily accepted.
It’s normal, in game development, for staff at big companies to take long sabbaticals after shipping their games. When the crunch is over and they’ve made it out of the hellfire, game developers are generally entitled to take a month or two off to recharge. Barone hadn’t done that in February when the game had launched, but over the summer, he decided it was time for a long break. He spent hours playing PC games and zoning out in front of the computer. He drank a lot. He smoked a lot of pot. He had started taking an herb called ashwagandha, which helped relieve stress and keep him energized, but even that couldn’t get him motivated to spend much more time on Stardew Valley.
On August 6, 2016, Eric Barone wrote a new post on the Stardew Valley website. He wanted to update fans on the progress of his newest patch, 1.1, which was supposed to add new features and content to the game. “To be entirely honest,” he wrote, “the main reason the update is taking so long is that I was feeling very burnt out for a while recently, and my productivity went way down. Stardew Valley has consumed nearly every waking moment of my life for almost five years now, and I think my brain demanded some time away from it.”
Barone added that he’d spent the summer doing very little, and feeling awfully guilty about it. “In truth, I’ve always had ups and downs, periods of intense productivity and energy followed by periods of low motivation,” he wrote. “I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember. This time around did seem a little worse than usual, but I reminded myself that with the success of Stardew Valley, my life got very weird very suddenly. It’s probably normal to need some time to adjust. I’m not even sure if this recent funk was due to the sudden success, to my own volatile brain chemistry or simply a result of working too hard for too long without a break. Sometimes I forget that I am actually a human with the need to relax and have a little fun.”
There wasn’t much more time for relaxation, though. After PAX, Chucklefish told Barone that to hit the deadlines for the PS4 and Xbox One versions of Stardew Valley, he’d have to finish the 1.1 patch by the end of September. Barone again went into manic work mode, crunching for weeks to hit that deadline. Once he got there, burnout snuck up on him yet again, and the cycle continued.
In November 2016, as he kept working intermittently on Stardew Valley, Barone got an e-mail from a representative of the publisher NIS America asking if he’d like to meet a man named Yasuhiro Wada. Of course, Barone said. It would be crazy to pass up that kind of opportunity. Wada, a Japanese designer who’d been making games since the 1980s, was in Seattle promoting his new simulation game, Birthdays the Beginning. Before that, however, Wada had been best known for designing and directing a game about running your very own farm. He’d called it Harvest Moon.
Anxious and intimidated, Barone drove to the office space that NIS America had rented in downtown Seattle, knowing he was about to meet the man whose work had inspired him the most. “I was quite nervous about meeting him,” Barone said. “But I figured I have to do this, because it makes for a great story if nothing else.”
Barone and Wada shook hands and exchanged pleasantries, speaking to one another through Wada’s Japanese-English translator. Barone said he’d brought his Super Nintendo cartridge of the original Harvest Moon, which Wada signed with a smile. They had dinner, drank beers, and played each other’s games. “It was so surreal,” Barone said. “Just to talk to this guy who made Harvest Moon. He was thirty when the original Harvest Moon came out and I was just a little kid playing it. And now I’m meeting the guy and talking to him about his development on that game, and he knows Stardew Valley.”
Wada told Barone that he enjoyed playing Stardew Valley, and that he was thrilled to see how Barone had iterated on the genre he’d pioneered all those years ago. “He kind of got addicted to cleaning up his farm,” said Barone. “He spent most of the time just chopping the grass with a scythe and chopping down trees.”
Five years earlier, Barone had been living with his parents, flunking job interviews and trying to figure out what to do with his life. Now the creator of Harvest Moon was chopping trees in his best-selling video game. “Surreal” may have been an understatement.
In December 2016, nearly a year after Stardew Valley had launched, I called Barone to see how he was doing. We spoke about his meeting with Wada, about his manic work cycles, and about the glitches that he and Chucklefish had been running into with their console ports. He told me he was again sick of Stardew Valley, and that he was ready for something new.
I asked if he’d started planning his next game.
Yes, Barone said. He was thinking he might make a game about catching bugs.
I asked how long he thought it might take.
“I’m trying to be a little more realistic this time around,” Barone said. “I’m hoping it takes two years.”
4
Diablo III
On May 15, 2012, hundreds of thousands of people across the world loaded up the Battle.net Internet client and slammed the launch button for Diablo III, a game that the developers at Blizzard had been making for nearly ten years. Fans had waited patiently for this moment, counting down the days until they could again click-click-click their way through demons in a hellish hodgepodge of gothic fantasy. But at 12:00 a.m. Pacific time on May 15, when Diablo III went live, anyone who tried to load the game found themselves greeted with a vague, frustrating message:
The servers are busy at this time. Please try again later. (Error 37)
After a decade of turbulent development, Diablo III had finally gone live, but nobody could play it. Some people gave up and went to bed. Others kept trying. An hour later:
The servers are busy at this time. Please try again later. (Error 37)
“Error 37” turned into a meme, mushrooming across Internet forums as fans vented their frustration. Diablo players had already been skeptical about Blizzard’s decision to make Diablo III online only—a decision that cynics assumed was driven by fear of piracy—and these server issues nourished the belief that it had been a bad idea. It immediately occurred to fans that if they could play Diablo III offline, they would be fighting their way through New Tristram right now, not trying to figure out what Error 37 meant.
Over at Blizzard’s campus in Irvine, California, a group of engineers and live-ops producers sat in their self-proclaimed “war room,” freaking out. Diablo III had outsold their wildest expectations, but their servers couldn’t handle the flood of players trying to log into the game. Around 1:00 a.m. Pacific time Blizzard posted a brief message: “Please note that due to a high volume of traffic, login and character creation may be slower than normal. . . . We hope to resolve these issues as soon as possible and appreciate your patience.”
A few miles away, at the Irvine Spectrum outdoor mall, the rest of the Diablo III team had no idea that peopl
e couldn’t play their game. They were busy partying. Hundreds of hard-core fans, dressed in spiky armor and carrying giant foam battle-axes, had come out for the official Diablo III launch event. As Blizzard’s developers signed autographs and passed out swag to the crowd, they started to hear whispers about overloaded servers. Soon it became clear that this wasn’t a standard launch hiccup.
“It really caught everybody by surprise,” said Blizzard’s Josh Mosqueira. “It’s kind of funny to say. You have such an anticipated game—how can it catch anybody by surprise? But I remember being in the meetings leading up to that, people saying, ‘Are we really ready for this? OK, let’s double the predictions, let’s triple the predictions.’ And even those ended up being super conservative.”
Later that day, as fans tried again to load Diablo III, they found another vague message: Unable to connect to the service or the connection was interrupted. (Error 3003). Error 3003 didn’t grow as popular as its younger, catchier brother, although it did make one wonder how the other 2,966 errors had been averted. The next day, Error 37 reemerged, along with a host of other server issues that continued plaguing Diablo III players for days after the game launched. Blizzard’s war room was active 24/7 as tired engineers gathered around computers, sipping on coffee and trying to figure out how to bolster their network.
Within forty-eight hours they’d managed to stabilize the servers. Errors would still pop up sporadically, but for the most part, people could now play the game without interruption. On May 17, once things had settled, Blizzard sent out a statement of apology. “We’ve been humbled by your enthusiasm,” they wrote. “We sincerely regret that your crusade to bring down the Lord of Terror was thwarted not by mobs of demons, but by mortal infrastructure.”