From Magicka to Helldivers: The sharp pain of crunch

Problems began for Pilestedt almost immediately, when he suggested that the best place to locate the team was in the kitchen of the modest apartment where he lived with his girlfriend. She struggled, as might most people, with a game development team in the midst of her house, noisily working late-night shifts.

"There was a bit of trouble considering that I wasn't living alone at that time," says Pilestedt. "The mood in the apartment was weird. We were sitting in the kitchen with five or six computers set up to develop the game. It resulted in conflict."

"I got the feeling that she didn't really appreciate her kitchen being occupied," remembers Englund. "It did feel strange because [Pilestedt's] partner was there and she wasn't really a part of [the project]."

The team members had made the decision that nothing in their lives would get in the way of making Magicka. "We were all putting the company at the top of our priorities list," says Englund. "It's hard to keep anything else, anything big, going on in your life."

Pilestedt's relationship with his girlfriend fell apart. "Sometimes you have to choose which path you're going to take through life," he says. "Games development has always been the primary motivator. Nothing was going to get in the way of that." This was still early in the development schedule. After six months working in that student apartment kitchen they secured a small grant and found a humble office. Their lives were now entirely devoted to game development.

"Every time we went to parties together, we would all stand around, talking about the project," Pilestedt says. "Someone would say, 'Maybe we should go back and work some more.'"

"Weekends weren't sacred at all," says Englund. "We came in at nine to start work and we didn't stop until 11 at least, seven days a week, all the way up to the release."

The two years of Magicka's development brought a crippling amount of work on the team, so much that their seemingly boundless energy was replaced with utter exhaustion. Their confidence vanished, pushed out by self-doubt about their ability to complete the project. Outside of the game, there was precious little freedom or fun in their lives.

"Eventually of course, everyone was devastated with fatigue," says Pilestedt. "We had put ourselves in a situation where we all had to work 12- and 15-hour days, one after the other. We just kept doing that."

The project lacked something fundamental from the very beginning: a plan. Barreling forward in the early days, energized by their desire to create a game that would establish the team as a serious force in game development, Arrowhead's members kept adding features, and then sought to perfect those features, even when they weren't central to the experience.

"We overestimated our ability to create such a big product," says Pilestedt. "In the early days we always saw it as a small title. But looking at it now, in retrospect, the game has a ton of features and a ton of maps. There so much in that game. We could easily have removed 50 percent of it and people wouldn't have noticed."

The damage this freewheeling approach dealt to the project wasn't just counted in the man hours that piled up; it was psychological. Without a plan, Arrowhead's team members had no blueprint to which they could compare progress, only the collective memory of their original ideas. As Magicka approached its deadline, the reality was that the game had a plethora of content, none of which was entirely completed.

"We poured everything into that project. We lacked discipline," says Englund. "Being noobs, we prioritized getting everything into the game, rather than spending time polishing."

"Everything was broken," says Pilestedt. "Nothing was complete. We needed to fix things in every single feature to make it shippable. We couldn't cut anything, because it wouldn't help. Everything was basically at 80 or 90 percent. We might as well have finished all of it rather than cutting many of the features."

This engendered a certain panic in the team, a sense that perhaps they might not be up to the task of creating a hit game after all. "That really, really hit us hard," he says. "We couldn't see our hands in front of our faces because we were so blinded by the development of the game." The boost the team had received from that award, from the seasoned jurors and from the university dean was a distant memory.