Jason Schreier “Blood, Sweat, and Pixels”

A month ago, I celebrated my 10-year anniversary working at the game company Wargaming.net. However, my entire professional career actually began with video games, back when I used to write out the program for a computer version of Monopoly in a notebook. I never finished it—making games is tough, especially when all your work can vanish due to a faulty audio cassette where it was saved. But even my first programs were related to games: business simulations, educational, and card games. So, you could say I’ve been in the industry, with breaks, for over 25 years.

That’s why it was especially interesting for me to read Jason Schreier’s much-talked-about book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, which, as its subtitle suggests, reveals “stories behind how video games are made.”

Jason Schreier is a reviewer for well-known gaming websites, so he’s quite familiar with the industry and has connections with many of its key figures. He structured his book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels as a collection of articles or chapters about the development of individual games. He seems to have selected games that were either highly successful or significant for the industry, even if their releases didn’t meet expectations (or never happened at all, like Star Wars 1313).

Each chapter tells the story of a particular game, supposedly in a documentary style, based on interviews with various members of the game’s development teams. What’s interesting is that, in some cases, people weren’t too eager to share details about the internal workings, especially when the development process was controversial. In those cases, the author tends to rely on feedback from people who left the team, and this sometimes becomes noticeable in the tone of the narration.

Even though the perspective can sometimes feel one-sided, the book is very engaging—at least for those who know the industry from the inside. Judging by online reviews, regular gaming fans also rated the book highly.

If I were to summarize the key messages that run through the book, they would be:

• Game development is hard work, solving problems with many unknowns.
• Good games are almost always the result of “crunches”—periods when teams work overtime for weeks or months, pushing themselves to the limit to make the game on time and at its best.
• Often, we don’t know how players will respond to our ideas, so we just keep trying to make games better and better.

Almost all the games described in the book were developed this way. Moreover, I generally agree that this is how our industry operates. We hear about many successes and failures, but there are even more that we never hear about. Only a few games (to the joy or sorrow of their creators) become well-known, while thousands quietly fade away, unnoticed by almost anyone—or they never get released at all.

What I like is that the author doesn’t try to sugarcoat the video game industry (even though many people from the outside think making games is easy). He shows that it’s hard work, where many sacrifice their free time, personal lives, and families. I won’t lie—at some point, I also realized that work was taking up much more of my life than my family. It’s sad, but at the same time, fulfilling when you love your job so much.

One of my colleagues said that the book is “a hymn to immature management” and that all the examples highlight how poor management led to the problems described. I partly agree. However, for me, the key takeaway from the book was something else: that people are willing to sacrifice a lot to work passionately on something they love and want to show the world. Very few developers make games to become super-rich. All the examples are about passion projects. And even though success isn’t always guaranteed, people keep pushing themselves into crunches for the love of it.

The book doesn’t provide deep insight into the industry’s processes, but it doesn’t need to. It’s more about the people in the industry, showing not so much “how” games are made, but “why” and “for what reason.” This perspective can appeal to a wide audience.

I liked the book, and I’m ready to recommend it.

My rating: 4.5/5

Jason Schreier “Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made”

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