Kris Roberts worked at Rockstar for years, first tuning the vehicles for the Midnight Club games and then leading the design of Red Dead Redemption's multiplayer modes. He says the final six months of development on Rockstar's cowboy epic was the worst period of crunch he's experienced in the game industry, and he argues that the overtime wasn't even really about making the game better. Instead, it was about putting on a show for executives.
With his transition from Midnight Club to Red Dead Redemption, Roberts went from an hourly employee to a "full-time" dev working what Rockstar called "core hours," as he explains in a new interview with Kiwi Talks on YouTube. "There was the expectation that you'll be there by 9:30 and we're going to stay until 6:00. If you're staying after that, there's dinner available and blah blah blah."
But those expectations changed over time. "Eventually core hours expanded to include half days on Saturday, where you were expected to be there," Roberts continues. "Then core hours expanded to be full days on Saturdays. Then Sunday was 'optional,' but encouraged. By the end, we were working every day, all day."
Roberts describes the last six months of work on Red Dead Redemption as a "blur," alluding to the delirious effects of sleep deprivation. "You end up in an amnesiac state where you probably don't have clear recollection or memory of exactly what was going on," he says.
Rockstar's history of crunch goes back years, and it became a matter of public debate around the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 – a debate the company responded to with testimonials from employees suggesting that things weren't actually so bad. But even now, allegations of overwork continue, and protections against crunch are a key point among the employees attempting to unionize at Rockstar.
For his part, Roberts feels "conflicted" about airing these old frustrations, in part because he pushed himself into "self-directed" crunch on Midnight Club. "I was doing that because I thought it was important or I wanted to be involved at that level and it was me doing it," he says.
But things were different with Red Dead Redemption, and Roberts is particularly frustrated by "artificial" incidents where Rockstar would declare "all hands on deck" overtime during weekend visits from executives like Sam Houser and Leslie Benzies.
"I remember a couple specific examples of a Friday afternoon, [when] management would send out an email that said, 'Just so we're all clear, we need to be here this weekend.' Then a follow-up email would say, 'And this weekend doesn't just mean Saturday.' I've made promises to my kids about what we're going to do this weekend. and Friday afternoon at 4:30 you're telling me I need to be here on Sunday regardless of what's going on. That's unacceptable," Roberts says.
"And it wasn't because, 'Oh, if you have a certain number of issues in Bugstar, or 'If you have critical things that must be fixed before the next build,' or 'If you have a legitimate business case for putting in that weekend time then we want you to be here.' It was more like, 'No, we need to put on the show of appearance that everybody's here all the time, because we have an executive visiting' or something."
As multiplayer design lead, Roberts was then tasked with communicating these expectations to his team. This was a part of why he eventually said "I don't want to do this" and chose to leave the studio. "It was certainly in the top four" reasons for moving on, he jokes.
