Press Reset: A Remarkable Examination of the Instability and Volatility of the Video Games Industry
Right off the bat, let me establish one thing. Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry is essential reading if you care about said video game industry. Just as with Blood, Sweat, and Pixels before it, Jason Schreier uses his unbelievable reporting to delve deep into our beloved medium. If you ever cared about the humans that make these pieces of art you enjoy, this is something you’re going to want to purchase right away.
Press Reset gives you wondrous insight into several true luminaries, but throughout its nine chapters you’ll come to care more about the people around them more. Things do kick off with Warren Spector (a personal hero of mine) and a fascinating insight into the makings of Epic Mickey at Junction Point, but things continue with general staff members at Irrational Games, 38 Studios, Big Huge Games, and many others. If you’ve noticed a trend between those studios, you’d be correct. None of them exist anymore.
This book, as fascinating as it is, is actually pretty profoundly sad. If you have even an ounce of empathy at all, your heart is going to break over and over. These studios did things right: put out hit games, worked their asses off, and generally sacrificed their personal lives so we could all have a little entertainment at home. The reward for all of this? To lose their jobs. Over and over again. Gone is their savings, their family security, and any hope of career progression.
Every time you get a little joy that things are looking bright, the light is turned off when you least expect it. We’ve all seen the headlines about a studio closure, or read the hollow words of a press release describing why it had to happen. But when you read 300 jobs are going away, it’s hard to properly process, and how normal it’s become doesn’t help. Prepare to learn just how awful and lazy the excuse of “games are too expensive to make” truly is, especially to the people that just bled, sweat, and cried to put out the next entry in your favorite franchise.
Press Reset, and Jason Schreier’s arresting prose, puts you in the shoes of these unfortunate souls. If you ever fell in love with a game like BioShock Infinite or Dead Space 2, you owe it to those developers to read through this book. I’m not even personally fond of Jason Schreier himself, yet I would still recommend this book to absolutely anyone. The depth of each developer’s tale, the shocking repetition of studio closures, and Schreier’s deft touch at weaving those things together make it an essential piece of literature about the makings of video games.
Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry
$17.99
