Here’s a newsflash for you that is probably super obvious: game dev is messy. Like, extremely messy. It’s all chaos all the time and then suddenly WHAM, out comes a game. Even throwing super regimented and organized individuals into the fray doesn’t seem to stem the tide of just pure, unadulterated chaos. I read books like Press Reset and Blood, Sweat, and Pixels and see some of the fallout from all this chaos and I can’t help but wonder…why? Why do people subject themselves to all of this…(please don’t say chaos again…) disarray for some pretty bleep bloops?

Enter PsychOdyssey, the enlightening 32-episode documentary series about Double Fine during the creation of Psychonauts 2. You read that correctly. Thirty-two. Episodes. 2 Player Productions, the documentarians in this venture, followed Tim Schafer et al. around for seven years, recording the ups, downs, and all the diagonals of the video game creation process. And boy are there a lot of diagonals.

Jonathan Hardesty

Writer/Creator/Web Guy for After the Hype. Created an animated fantasy webseries called Flagon. GM for Demon Dayz: An Actual Play Podcast, which you can conveniently find here on athpod.com