amy hennig
The Troubling Story Behind Visceral’s Star Wars Game
The Star Wars game by the EA-owned Visceral studios appeared to be quite promising. The 15-second trailer revealed at E3 2016 had awed the fans across the globe (although it revealed nothing much more than a man on Tatooine). It was a hard hit on fan’s heart when EA shut down the studio on 17 October 2017. But those who had worked for the studio found themselves unsurprised. In many people’s eyes, doom was inevitable. There were layers of socio-economic clashes, both between the studio and the parent company EA and within the studio itself, that led to the downfall of the long-running studio. If you wanted to pinpoint the exact moment that Visceral Games became doomed, you’d need to go back to the beginning of 2013. On February 5 of that year, Visceral released what would turn out to...
Uncharted Writer Criticizes AAA Gaming Industry, Says It’s Not Worth It
Amy Hennig, the writer behind the critically acclaimed Uncharted series, has publicly denounced the AAA gaming industry, saying that the conditions under which the people making the games work are unacceptable. In an audio interview for the Idle Thumbs Designer Notes podcast, here’s what Hennig had to say when asked about how the industry’s standards affect her personally, “Really hard. The whole time I was at Naughty Dog – ten and a half years – I probably, on average, I don’t know if I ever worked less than 80 hours a week. There were exceptions where it was like ‘Okay, let’s take a couple of days off’, but I pretty much worked seven days a week, at least 12 hours a day. A lot of the team was there. I mean, Naughty Dog is pretty notorious for the...