A guide to properly crediting game workers and why it matters
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Stories about developers being omitted from game credits have been multiplying in recent months.
Prominent examples include former MercurySteam employees being left out of Metroid Dread's credits, 20 people from Striking Distance Studios forgotten in The Callisto Protocol's acknowledgements, or the original Metroid Prime developers omitted from the remastered version, among many others.
While the issue isn't new, there's a fresh movement highlighting discrepancies in game credits and devs of all persuasions campaigning for staff to be properly acknowledged for their work.
The IGDA has had a special interest group about the matter since the late 2000s, behind a one-page cheat sheet for proper crediting, as well as more in-depth crediting guidelines (which are currently being updated). The group also experienced a new lease of life with a wealth of initiatives in the past couple of years.
"At the moment, we're six [people]," says the IGDA Game Credits SIG co-chair Nazih Fares, also head of communications and localisation at The 4 Winds Entertainment. "The majority of us fell into that – I worked on roughly 50 games before I got my first credit and it was just a humble 'special thanks'."
Tarja Porkka-Kontturi is a board member of the Game Credits SIG, as well as Global Game Jam's director of community engagement. She recalls her first experiences in the industry.
"The two biggest first projects I worked on I still can't talk about," she says. "And I wasn't credited on either. I didn't understand [I could] ask about it because it never crossed my mind that it could happen. I didn't know anyone in the industry, I came in from a weird angle
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