On October 26, Red Dead Redemption 2 finally releases. It took immense effort from the studio Rockstar to make this happen.
The dreaded Crunch Time: “Crunch Time” generally refers to the period before the end of a project when everything urgently needs to be completed to ensure the final product is right. In many games, a lot of overtime accumulates before the release can finally be initiated.
Especially in Korea, this Crunch Time is very tough, which has already led to fatalities among developers.
The amount of work developers at Rockstar put in
The crunch before the release: Fortunately, there have been no fatalities at Rockstar, the developers of Red Dead Redemption 2. However, the developers likely invested a significant amount of overtime into the game.
According to a major interview with Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser on Vulture.com, massive extra shifts were worked to get everything completed.
100-hour weeks were necessary: Houser mentions that throughout the year 2018, the team often worked 100-hour weeks. That would average to 14 hours per day if one worked the whole week.
This extra work would have been bitterly necessary, as the finished game is supposed to contain around 300,000 animations and 500,000 lines of spoken dialogue. Still, it is 5 hours shorter than originally planned.
Bosses also put in overtime: According to a former employee, this hard crunch time is typical for Rockstar, but the bosses are not excluded and also “crunch” along without complaints.
Overtime under criticism
Massive workload has already caused issues: However, there has also been bad blood. In 2010, worried spouses of various Rockstar employees in San Diego published a blog post criticizing the harsh working hours and the behavior of management severely.
The developers in question were said to be burnt out and constantly stressed. One even showed suicidal tendencies.
Rockstar responded to this accusation with the statement that they were “sad if some former employees of the studio felt that their time here was not enjoyable or creatively fulfilling.”
They wish them luck in finding a working environment that would better suit their temperament and needs.
There are alternatives – Bungie does not crunch
Crunch Time is common in many companies, but there are alternatives. The studio Bungie has not utilized Crunch Time for Destiny 2, according to their own statements. This was the lesson learned from the murderous overtime during their previous project, Halo 2.
Back then, it was common for each employee to work at least 50 hours a week for a year and a half. Those who survived that vowed, “Never again will we put ourselves through that!”
