Time for a rant and no spoilers if you haven't finished the game yet.
So last night, I decided that I was finally finished with Red Dead Redemption 2. I have played through the entire 60+ hour campaign including the Epilogue, (which is like an entire game in and of itself,) I have done all of the side missions in my side-bar other than the tedious collectathons and I believe that I have encountered the majority of relevant strangers in the wilderness.
It's not my favourite game of all time, I don't even think that it's my Game Of The Year, but there is no denying that it is still one of the greatest achievements ever seen in the medium of videogames. There have been a few stories talking about the 6 figure bonuses that some Rockstar employees are receiving on the back of this release and frankly I feel like that is well deserved. As a 3D Animator near the beginning of my career, a project like this is what I aspire to one day get the chance to work on. The level of quality and vastness present here is astonishing from a development perspective.
Red Dead 2 has been in development for around 8 years, as apparently work began on this game very quickly after RDR Undead Nightmare was released. If you sit through the almost hour long credit sequence at the story's conclusion, you will see thousands of names scroll by. When you consider the salary of the amount of people that worked on this game over eight years along with the extravagant worldwide marketing campaign, the total budget for RDR2 must have been astronomical, yet the game made it's money back IN IT'S FIRST WEEK!
Regardless of the huge profit and enormous number of sales that this game has generated, the entire Rockstar staff that worked on this game can now put this milestone on their CV's. It's a golden mark against their name that would most likely land them a job at any other game studio that they desire joining.
The reason that I am bringing all of this up is due to a number of articles that were published on a fair few major gaming websites back at the time around the game's release. Kotaku, IGN, Gamespot and Unilad Gaming all reported that during an interview with one of the Houser brothers, (the joint CEO's at Rockstar,) when asked about the crunch period of the game's development that employees were more of less forced to work 100+ hour work weeks.
This was of course an exaggeration of what was actually said and the context was twisted for the sake of click-bait headlines, but nevertheless there was an outrage within the videogame echo-chamber. People online decided to become civil rights speakers on behalf of Rockstar employees before it came out that at most, even the heaviest work weeks leading up to the game's release never exceeded 60 hours and even then, that was only if the employee volunteered to work the overtime, time for which they were financially compensated.
As someone trying to break into the videogame industry, I understand feeling passion for a project and I recognise that feeling of pride you get when finally completing a project that you have slaved over, (on a much smaller scale of course.) I understand that there are developers out there that choose to work a 50-60 hour work week on something that they are passionate about and can be proud of and I also understand that games like RDR2, which are so vast and yet so full of intricate detail and high levels of quality don't get made without devs that refuse to put in the extra time required to pull something like this off. Frankly if I was a Rockstar dev that had put this amount of work into a product that I am proud of and then seen these rants online, I would be offended. Who are you to judge how much of a workload someone else can handle?
I am not saying that there aren't toxic places to work that have horrific line managers that force their staff to work crazy hours or lose their jobs, but by all accounts that I have heard, Rockstar isn't one of those places. So the next time that you decide to put on your SJW hat and sit in front of your computer and start berating someone for being passionate about something that they have worked extremely hard on, remember what Rockstar delivered through RDR2 and maybe do some research before unleashing your tirade.
When I was a kid I remember flicking through a magazine that I bought from the shop when suddenly a poster fell out. I opened it up to find it was this absolutely gigantic picture of a teenage boy holding a huge plasma weapon and towering over a dystopian city scape that looked like it was powering a big cybernetic heart off in the distance. I had no idea what the hell any of this was but I was immediately transfixed on it and believed it to be the coolest thing I'd ever laid eyes on. This was a time where we weren't allowed posters on our walls (fear of marking the wallpaper) but after studying it for so long I decided it was worth breaking the rules for and thus put it up with pride dead central right over my bed. From that day on I then decided it was my only mission in life to find out what on earth this image was from and to see it no matter the cost. Naturally after years of making drawings of this poster and imagining what an amiga game or movie would be like featuring this character (and of course having no internet) I gradually gave up searching. That was until one day my friend came bursting into school sweating and raving about how he had stayed up late one night till 2am watching channel 4 and recoreded off tv (without his parents knowing of course) possibly the greatest and most badass film he had ever seen in his entire life. So naturally that day we devised a plan of how we would sneak out of school at lunch time, go to his house and watch some of this movie even if we didnt quite believe him. That day lunch time hits and we sneak past the teacher on the gate run to his house, go up to his room and lock the door, pop the vhs tape in and hit play. I swear we must of only got literally 30 seconds in but the moment I saw the fist city shot I knew I had found the movie from the poster. Wow, and let me tell you now I still get goosebumps to this day thinking back to how I felt in that moment. Akira アキラ so thats what its called. I was literally in ecstasy and so happy I could of cried on the spot right there and then I was that flooded with joy. Now you might be wondering what the point of this long winded story is and theres a couple of reasons: The first is Akira literally changed my life. Its not only the film that got me seriously into cinema in genral but its the movie that made me realise just how powerful, emotional, addictive, influencing, important and absorbing films can be and how much they can imbed themselves into our minds and make us escape reality. Second today marks the release of the remastered (from the ground up) 4k uhd release of Akira in limited edition pakaging which means its literally going to look and sound the best its EVER looked, and if I'm being completely honest with you I feel like a kid again waiting for it to arrive. I'm honestly that excited I can't sleep, I'm anxious and while in this dark, sad and depressing time at the moment where we are all struggling and uncertain of what the future might bring I can tell you I'm so happy right now because a film that once changed my life all those years ago is now all these years later managing to keep me happy, positive, excited and strong once again. See this is why I love film, why I'm so passionate about movies, why I review films and why I believe everyone should embrace and keep doing the things they love no matter what other people think. Its unquestionably such a fantastic feeling when you get that connection to something that your so passionate about and it really does posses the power sometimes to lift you up, break you away from even the darkest of lows and help you revel in pure happiness even if its just for an hour or two. Stay in, stay safe and stay happy faithful followers hope at least a couple of you enjoyed my long winded nostalgia trip.
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