The Buffoon's Guide to Burning Out

I'm a neglectful wretch. For months, now, I've often thought to myself, "It's a damn shame I don't write personal blog crap anymore. I should get back to that." Oh yes, dear readers. I was dead set. But life gets in the way, as life often does, because life is a jerk bastard who doesn't return the shit it borrows and chews with its mouth open. Jerk bastard.

Since I last bothered to put anything to paper, I had been working at Shacknews, heading here and there for events and pounding out the daily happenings in our ridiculous industry. Some dude tried to hijack a cab in Thailand and blamed it on Grand Theft Auto, someone said something about games making you fat, and Denis Dyack spoke (which, naturally, was followed by controversy). These were the nuts and bolts of my days. At least the commute—a blistering six feet from my bed to my desk—was easy.

But at some point during E3, a spark flashed in my head that said "You don't have the stones to be a games journalist." The spark arrived at Konami's suite, where I was throwing down in Castlevania Judgment against the one, the only, the whip-carryin' and hat-wearin' Koji Igarashi. I was fortunate, because if he hadn't been there, the whole experience would've been an utter waste of time. I was unfortunate, because he was there, and I was playing his game. A game in which, sadly, I was fantastically disappointed.

Nevermind that Castlevania Judgment is a title doomed by its very nature—a one-on-one fighter that's not quite a fighter, framed in Castlevania? Oh dear—I really wanted to like the game, because Igarashi was standing right next to me. And then, the dude that brought me some of my favorite side-scrolling experiences asked me if I was enjoying the title. "Hell yes," I said. Oh, the shame! But there's a line to brutal honesty. Had I met Shigeru Miyamoto, I probably wouldn't have told him that I thought of Wii Music the way I thought of my parents for saying "good job!" when I failed miserably at something difficult.

Flash forward a few months, and there I was, tendering my resignation and gearing up for something new. Now that I'm on the other side of the fence and working for the Man and such, well -- it's alarming what you learn from that perspective. No matter how many post-mortems you read or developers you speak to, being part of the development process opens your eyes to a lot of things. Namely, how hard these people fucking work. Holy shit. Not that I'm not accustomed to a day of hard work or anything, but the pacing was otherworldly -- as breakneck as coordinating an entire E3 of coverage among four staffers is, it didn't prepare me for what it fucking looks like when twenty-five people converge on a single goal and hammer out a project. It's like Black Ops -- infiltration, execution, extraction in the blink of an eye.

It's infectious, too. The standard workweek is ballooning for me because I... I kinda dig it. And there are some evenings where I'd rather just kick around at the office, screw around on my devkit and get some of those loose ends tied up than be home. That's never really happened before, and it's a neat feeling to have. A month into the new digs, it's beginning to dawn on me why games industry folks are some of the most passionate motherfuckers you'll ever meet. If you're not when you join up, you definitely will be -- it's just a matter of time.