Credit where it's overdue | This Week in Business
Brendan Sinclair
Managing Editor
Friday 1st April 2022
Earlier this week, IGN published a write-up of a GDC postmortem for Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. It was not the kind of session or article one would expect to kick up a firestorm, and yet...
In the postmortem, Insomniac Games lead designer Mark Stuart discussed the creation of the game's co-protagonist, the female lombax Rivet, explaining various dead ends and flawed ideas that were pursued en route to finding the version of the character that would end up in the game.
The quotes of Stuart lean on the first-person plural. "We" realized this. "We" switched to that. It's a perfectly normal and understandable way to talk about a team effort like game development -- particularly when key decisions are arrived at as a group -- but it also flattens the discussion and gives no indication as to who drove those decisions, leaving plenty of room for individual contributions to go unrecognized.
That became clear when Sam Maggs, lead writer on Rift Apart for over a year before her departure from the studio in early 2020, posted a thread about the IGN write-up, taking exception to how her contributions to the game -- and the Rivet character specifically -- had gone unrecognized.
QUOTE | "This total erasure would make me less furious if I didn't have the memories of SOBBING in offices for hours after fighting tooth and nail to stop Rivet from being cut from the game entirely weren't BURNED into my brain." - Maggs, in one of numerous tweets about the creative process on Rift Apart.
When Maggs says her contributions to the game have been erased, she's not exaggerating. She's not in the game's credits, not even as a "special thanks," "additional work," or any of the other weaselly
Read more on gamesindustry.biz
