Recently, former Rockstar Games Senior Designer Kris Roberts participated in the KIWI TALKZ podcast. The specialist shared memories of his work on the first Red Dead Redemption.
The last six months of development were the worst period in terms of crunch he had ever experienced in the gaming industry. However, he claims that all this overtime work was not so much to improve the game itself (fixing bugs) as it was to impress managers.
Eventually, our “working hours” expanded to include half a day on Saturdays — your presence [at work] was expected. Then “working hours” expanded to a full Saturday, and then Sunday became an “optional” but encouraged workday. And eventually, we started working daily, all day.
Kris Roberts was annoyed by “artificial” incidents when Rockstar announced the need for everyone to “work overtime” during visits by executives, such as Leslie Benzies or Sam Houser, on weekends:
I remember a couple of specific instances: on a Friday afternoon, management would send out an email saying something like, “Just to be clear: we need everyone in this weekend.” Then a second email would follow: “And by 'this weekend,' we don't just mean Saturday.” I had already made promises to my kids about what we would do over the weekend. And then on Friday at 4:30 PM, I'm told I have to be at work on Sunday, no matter what. That's unacceptable.
Roberts then went on to explain that it wasn't about a backlog of bugs that needed urgent fixing, nor were there any strong business justifications for such employee gatherings on weekends. It was done for the image shown to managers:
It was more like, “We need to make it look like everyone is constantly here because an executive is visiting or something like that.”