This is not my first Jason Schreier book and I hope it won’t be my last. Making a name for himself with Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, Schreier now offers a compelling follow-up to the volatility of the market with Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry. Each chapter focuses on a studio or developer and how the forces within the industry that led to their rises and falls.
What really stands out to me about the book is that Schreier really knows how to tell a story. Going beyond the scope of regular reportage, every interview and board meeting and game release is imbued with a sense of high drama. On occasion, I was familiar with the games being discussed (Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite get particular attention; XCOM and the Firaxis team is a particularly tragic tale). Schreier’s ability to balance first hand accounts, raw data, and narration makes the stories riveting and dynamic. These could be presented as timelines or dry nodes on a path to a bigger picture, but Schreier’s voice engages readers far beyond the facts.
I’ll have to admit that I don’t remember most of the details from each of the chapters. I was along for the ride, but my memory is pretty faulty when I don’t take notes. Some of the trends that emerged across contexts were conflicts between executives and developers, budget adjustments and restructuring, teams working on projects piecemeal, and other kinds of corporate challenges. Schreier really exposes the challenges of being a game developer—beyond the regular effects of crunch and burnout, the number of times that developers find themselves unemployed is wild. Studios get closed and employees get reshuffled. Employees get jobs and move across the country for a year or two only to watch projects fall apart. Employees finish a project they’ve worked on for years and find the next day that they’ve been laid off. Teams get collapsed or rejigged and people get lost in the shuffle. It’s intense and it’s unpredictable. The book tells stories of individuals in the broader context of an industry that is routinely exploitative, exploitative as a matter of course. Hopefully this book serves as the impetus for widespread unionization, but I’m not holding my breath for now.
Unfortunately, I don’t have many notes to extend this conversation. All I can say is that Press Reset was a wild ride that was both informative and entertaining. Since Schreier has a knack for finding the emotional core of the story; the ‘angle’ he finds and the way he digs in makes something as commonplace as turning on a video game console into an epic tale of betrayal, desperation, and empowerment.
It’s definitely worth a shot.
Happy reading!
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