I was in early. The studio was the kind of open space floorplan that the industry fell in love with at some point — no walls, sight lines everywhere, the ambient noise of other people’s work as your permanent soundtrack. The Senior Producer for the project was already there, playing a shooter at their desk before the day officially started. It seemed like as good a moment as any.
Starting a conversation you know has a negative center, barely hidden under pleasantries, is never easy or fun. But I thought I did okay. I laid out what I was seeing on the project, tried to be clear that I believed we had both the time and the ability to make adjustments, and made sure they understood I wasn’t there to assign blame — I just wanted my concerns heard. Six months to hard lock. Enough runway to course correct if we started now.
The producer was initially aloof. Dismissive in that particular way that suggests the conversation is already over before it’s begun. But I kept going, and at some point I asked why — why the things I was describing weren’t being addressed, why the gap between where we were and where we needed to be wasn’t being closed.
They raised their voice. Not a shout, but close. A stern bark that landed in the open plan office like a stone dropped in still water.
“Because we fucked up.”
I was shocked. Not by the language, not even by the admission — but by the word “we.” Because in that moment, with that tone, “we” did not mean leadership. It meant the team. It meant the people who had been raising concerns that weren’t being heard, working toward a target that kept shifting, building something that nobody in a position of authority seemed willing to look at honestly. The conversation ended there. I went back to my desk furious — not because I disagreed with the assessment, but because the assessment was wrong about who owned it.
That moment has stayed with me. Not because it was the worst thing that happened on that project, but because it was the most honest — and even then, the honesty was accidental, and it was over in seconds.
Three Ways To Stop Seeing
What I observed on that project wasn’t a single failure mode. It was three distinct ones, running simultaneously, reinforcing each other in ways that made the whole thing very difficult to interrupt.
The first is genuine delusion. This is the leader who has told themselves the story of the project so many times, with such conviction, that the story has replaced the project in their mind. They’re not lying — or at least they don’t experience it as lying. They have watched the edited video so many times that it has become the game (despite the editing). They have described the vision so often that the vision has become the reality. When someone brings them a concern, it genuinely doesn’t compute, because the concern is about a project that doesn’t exist in their version of events. This is almost tragic to observe. The gap between what they believe they’re making and what actually exists keeps widening, and they can’t see it because they stopped looking at the actual thing a long time ago.
The second is willful delusion. This is the leader who knows, on some level, that the story doesn’t match the reality. They’ve seen the builds. They’ve heard the concerns. Something in them registers the gap. But they have made a choice — conscious or not — to perform confidence anyway. Maybe because admitting the truth feels like admitting failure. Maybe because they don’t know how to have the conversation that would need to happen next. Maybe because the project has been presented to publishers and executives in a way that makes course correction feel impossible, and so the only available move is to keep moving forward and hope something changes. This is a choice, even when it doesn’t feel like one. And it is contagious in a way that genuine delusion isn’t, because it models a behavior that others learn to copy.
The third is performative certainty. This one is perhaps the most insidious because it’s the hardest to fault directly. These are the leaders — often newer to leadership, often promoted into roles that outpaced their experience — who don’t know enough to evaluate what’s in front of them, and respond to that uncertainty by projecting confidence rather than admitting it. They give minimal input. They avoid committing to positions that might later be used to assign blame. They learn the language of leadership without the substance of it, and in doing so they close off the very conversations that might have helped them develop into something better. It’s not dishonesty exactly. It’s a kind of self-protective fog.
All three were present. And in a studio that had already lost a significant number of experienced people in the years prior — a brain drain that left a lot of seats filled by people still finding their footing — the conditions were almost perfect for all three to take root and spread.
The Closed Loop
Here’s what happens when these failure modes compound. Feedback stops moving. Not because people stop offering it — at least not at first — but because it stops landing anywhere. Concerns get dismissed, deflected, or absorbed without response. After a while people stop raising them, not out of indifference but out of self-preservation. Why put yourself in the position of being the person who said the uncomfortable thing if nothing ever changes and the discomfort is yours to carry alone?
Meanwhile the gap between what’s being presented externally and what actually exists keeps widening. Stage gates get passed on the strength of carefully edited video. Publishers who should have demanded to see the actual game in motion don’t, and so the external accountability that might have forced an honest reckoning never arrives. The project continues. The story continues. And the game — the actual game, the one that exists in the builds and the playtests and the daily reality of the people making it — goes largely unseen by the people who most needed to see it.
The “we” in that conversation was technically accurate in the most cynical possible reading. By the time we were six months from lock, the failure had spread far enough that it was genuinely hard to locate. That’s what a closed loop does. It distributes the damage so thoroughly that accountability becomes almost impossible to assign, which is perhaps the point — or at least a convenient side effect.
What Was Left
I want to be careful here not to wrap this in a bow it doesn’t deserve. The project was what it was. I’m not going to pretend that everything turned out fine or that there was a clean lesson hiding in the wreckage.
But something did come out of it that I didn’t expect. The team — the people in the room, the ones building the thing nobody was looking at honestly — found each other. Not in a formal or organized way, but in the way that people do when they’re sharing something difficult and they’re the only ones who actually know what it is. There was a honesty in those relationships that the project itself never had. People said the true things to each other that they couldn’t say upward. They supported each other in ways that the structure around them wasn’t supporting them.
And then, when it was time, a lot of them left. Not in defeat exactly — or not only in defeat. They left because they were passionate creative people who had been reminded, by contrast, what it felt like when that passion wasn’t valued or protected. They went to other studios, other projects, other rooms where someone was actually looking at the game. Some of them are doing some of the best work of their careers.
The system failed. The project failed. The people didn’t.
That’s not a redemption arc. But it’s not nothing either. And in an industry that can sometimes feel like it’s asking you to choose between your integrity and your career, watching people choose their integrity — quietly, without fanfare, just by going somewhere they could actually do good work — is about as hopeful as it gets.
The game nobody was making never got made. But the people who would have made it, if anyone had let them, are still out there making things. That matters. Even when it’s hard to see why.