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Blood, Sweat & Pixels:

One surefire way to annoy a game developer is to ask, in response to discovering his or her chosen career path, what it's like to spend all day playing video games.

But even if you accept the premise that video game development is grueling work, it's not easy for those of us on the outside to see why. People have been making games since the 1970s, haven't they? With decades of lessons and experience to draw from, shouldn't game development have grown more efficient?

Maybe it made sense for developers to crunch in the late 1980s, when gaming was the domain of teens and twentysomethings who gorged on pizza and Diet Coke as they coded all night and slept all day, but decades later, video games fuel a $30 billion industry in the United States alone.* Why do game developers still have so many stories about staying at the office until 3:00 a.m.? Why is it still so difficult to make video games?

To try to answer these questions, I went out and engaged in my favorite activity: bothering people who know way more than I do. I spoke to around one hundred game developers and executives, both on and off the record, asking them an endless number of nosy questions about their lives, their jobs, and why they sacrifice so much to make video games.