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Portal 2 is pretty handily an all-time classic and among the best co-op games, puzzle games, comedy games, or simply just one of the best games ever made. But that doesn't mean Valve had a smooth journey in getting the brain-bursting sequel to that point. As we've just been reminded, Portal 2 developers apparently went through some "nasty crunch" in the days leading up to the game's launch.
That reminder comes from a recently resurfaced interview between Kiwi Talkz and the game's lead designer, Josh Weier, who acknowledged that the Portal 2 team "loved what we were doing, so we kept adding stuff," despite the impending deadlines looming over everybody's heads.
"My wife was getting really tired of the project, and it [the game] was kind of weirdly like a mistress because I was working all these hours and I was just so caught up in this," Weier recalled at the time. "It's all I thought about. 'What are we gonna run into the next day? Where are we gonna go for design?' It was just this constant stress of, 'Are we gonna mess this up? Are we gonna make something people hate.'"
Part of that anxiety came from the incredible legacy of the first Portal and Valve's spotless track record up to that point.
"I think in the last three weeks [of development] my wife literally was like, 'Look, we're gonna divorce if you don't stop,'" Weier said. "So I called the next day and said I can't come into the office… It wasn't the worst thing in the world because basically at that point we had kind of wrapped up stuff enough that it was OK. But it was a really weird experience because I had gone from, like, 200% on to just, like, 'I gotta be away from this, I gotta take a step back.'"
Weier also wondered how anyone could keep up with that development schedule while being a parent, for example. "It's a hard one to figure out because I feel like video games, in a way, are like a young person's game, just in terms of the amount you have to give into it."
Hearing that Portal 2 nearly ruined a marriage is a good reminder as to why crunch became somewhat of a taboo for studios in the first place. A former Rockstar Games developer also recently remembered that the GTA studio sometimes felt like a prison during Bully's production, and honestly, no games - even the best ones - are worth the mental or physical health of developers.
