Glen Schofield, the co-creator of Empty room now directs the production of its spiritual sequel The Callisto Protocolhas retracted comments he made over the weekend that appear to have bolstered excessive working hours at his company, Striking Distance Studios.
As reported by Jason Schreier of Bloomberg, Schofield said his team at Striking Distance worked 12 to 15 hours a day, six to seven days a week to complete the game. (The Callisto ProtocolRelease date is Dec. 2.) He said no one is “forcing” the team to crunch that way, but admitted they were “exhausted.”
“We work 6-7 days a week, nobody forces us. Exhaustion, tired, Covid, but we work. Bugs, glitches, perf fixes. 1 last pass-through audio. 12-15 hr days. This is playing. Hard work. Lunch, dinner, work. You do it because you love it,” Schofield tweeted Saturday.
Later that same day, Schofield deleted the tweet and offered a retraction and an apology to Striking Distance staff, saying, “We value passion and creativity, not long hours.”
“Anyone who knows me knows how passionate I am about the people I work with,” he said. “Earlier I tweeted how proud I was of the effort and hours the team put in. That was wrong. We value passion and creativity, not long hours. I’m sorry the team came off like that.”
There is no reason to believe that Schofield is not sincere in his apology. But as Schreier pointed out, his original tweet is a textbook example of how unhealthy work practices and crunch culture persist in the video game industry.
Charismatic and creative, Schofield is well-liked in the industry. With an artistic background, he has been developing games for over 30 years. He was a key player at Crystal Dynamics and later at EA Studio Visceral Games where he helped create Empty room with Michael Condrey. The pair then founded Sledgehammer Games, which was quickly acquired by Activision. After a decade working on Call of Duty, Schofield left to form Striking Distance and returned to the sci-fi horror setting that made him famous.
He is both a well-known creative and a studio boss. He’s clearly feeling passionate The Callisto Protocol, a game deliberately reminiscent of his most famous work. It is understandable that it would be personal for him. (Schofield may also feel intense pressure to top his former company’s original remake Empty room to market.) But he’s also an employer who sets an example for Striking Distance’s development team and guides their careers. And he brings to both of those roles attitudes that have been formed over three decades of game development where crunch was the norm.
“Nobody’s forcing us,” he says, without questioning the example his own makeover sets for his employees or the pressure it puts on them to conform. Working through meals, working through exhaustion and illness is just like that and always has been: “This is gaming.” Passion for games is both an incentive and a reward for the extra effort: “U do it cause ya luv it.”
It almost sounds like a mantra. That’s how ingrained these attitudes are in developers of the Schofield generation. The speed and clarity of his withdrawal shows that he understands, in some way, the importance of changing these attitudes. But the proud glorification of the makeover in the original tweet shows how instinctive the Crunch value system is to Schofield. It’s all he knows. Those are the values he was taught himself, and they’re hard to change.
Schofield shows he understands changes need to be made. But the real proof will be in the hours the Striking Distance team puts in over the next three months leading up to it The Callisto Protocol‘s publication.
