The Dream Architects
Adventures in the Video Game Industry
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
The inside story of the booming video game industry from the late 1990s to the present, as told by the Managing Director of Ubisoft's Massive Entertainment (The Division, Far Cry 3, Assassin's Creed: Revelations).
At Massive Entertainment, a Ubisoft studio, a key division of one of the largest, most influential companies in gaming, Managing Director Polfeldt has had a hand in some of the biggest video game franchises of today, from Assassin's Creed to Far Cry to Tom Clancy's The Division, the fastest-selling new series this generation which revitalized the Clancy brand in gaming.
In The Dream Architects, Polfeldt charts his course through a charmed, idiosyncratic career which began at the dawn of the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox era -- from successfully pitching an Avatar game to James Cameron that will digitally create all of Pandora to enduring a week-long survivalist camp in the Scandinavian forest to better understand the post-apocalyptic future of The Division.
Along the way, Polfeldt ruminates on how the video game industry has grown and changed, how and when games became art, and the medium's expanding artistic and storytelling potential. He shares what it's like to manage a creative process that has ballooned from a low-six-figure expense with a team of a half dozen people to a transatlantic production of five hundred employees on a single project with a production budget of over a hundred million dollars.
A rare firsthand account of the golden age of game development told in vivid detail, The Dream Architects is a seminal work about the biggest entertainment medium of today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Art erupts from the crassest of commerce in this rollicking memoir by a video-game studio chief. Polfeldt recounts his path from being a dreamy Swedish art-school grad to head of game developer Ubisoft's Massive Entertainment subsidiary, maker of mega-seller The Division, in which special-ops fighters battle bad guys in a plague-ridden Manhattan. He paints the industry as Hollywood without the movie stars (his meeting with James Cameron to explore an Avatar-based game is a study in unspoken power-plays), but still full of temperamental creatives software engineers, artists, scriptwriters whose egos need massaging and executives who put profits ahead of quality. ("veryone knows it's great, but no one wants to pay for it," says one suit of a gorgeous but mediocre-selling war game.) Amid the money-grubbing and high-pressure coding crises Polfeldt recounts miracles of immersive visual art and epic storytelling his team managed to pull off (such as jumping in at the last minute to help finish an Assassin's Creed game called Revelations). Polfeldt delivers insightful commentary on gaming tech, as well as piquant character sketches. ("He was a smoker, the kind who smokes with no guilt, as if to signal I am killing myself and I like it," he writes of a "closer" sent to crack the whip on a project.) The result is an entertaining and nuanced look at the human side of digital media.
