A number of senior staff were quitting Irrational, frustrated with the constant overhauls and Levine’s directorial style. To replace them—and to try to wrangle the game into shape—Irrational kept hiring.That’s a typical passage from Press Reset, which so far, is not edifying because I already know that the video game industry tricks thousands of workers into wasting their lives. And yet, it’s fun to read. I don’t think of myself as a train wreck fan. I do not want to read any of those books about Trump. But I guess if the stakes are lower, some disaster reading does get through to a morbid part of my brain.
In March 2012, Irrational brought in Don Roy, a veteran game producer, who had some experience closing out games at big publishers like Sony and Microsoft. He was shocked to see just how bad things were. “I get there and there was essentially no game,” Roy said. “A tremendous amount of work had been done. It just hadn’t been stood up as a game in any particular form. To the point where the first thing I did was go, ‘Can I play a build of the game?’ The answer was no. They said, ‘You can play these pieces of things, but there’s not an actual functioning game.’ ”