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In the summer of 2000, Paul Mclaughlin and Daniel Deptford work on the game. |
Game development has never been a profession characterized by easygoing nine to five workdays, but once the long cruel summer of 2000 set in, there was no question that Team Lionhead was completely consumed with Black & White. Twenty hours a day, seven days a week, the team was desperately trying to pull together all the pieces of the game. By July, the sheer enormity of the task at hand caused most of the team to devote every waking hour to the game. It is, in many ways, the ultimate sacrifice a developer can make--to be totally consumed by his or her creation, to the exclusion of everything else.
Just ask Molyneux, who says he "lives, breathes, eats, and dreams" Black & White. Never one to come into the office before 11am, Molyneux is often there until the wee hours of the morning. Seven days a week, he follows the same routine: wake up, work on Black & White, go home, watch Friends, and go to bed. "I got in this weird habit where the only contact I had with the real world was through Friends--I had all the episodes on DVD," admits Molyneux. The only other addition to the schedule is Games Night every other week.
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In a tender moment, Molyneux remembers breaking up with his girlfriend last summer. |
Molyneux's diet of Black & White and Friends didn't sit well with his girlfriend, who had stuck with him through the early stages of Black & White. "It's just horrible," Molyneux says in a quiet moment at Lionhead. "My girlfriend could just see me drifting away--you have so much in your head, and having a social life in addition to that is just impossible." Last summer, the inevitable happened: Molyneux and his girlfriend broke up, right at a pivotal juncture in Black & White's development. "This always happens to me," he acknowledges. "Right near the end of a project, the game I'm working on saves me from marriage, and I end up losing my girlfriend." Black & White wasn't just work for Molyneux--it was everything. "Why do I do it?" he says softly, as if to ask a question out loud that he doesn't fully understand how to answer.
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Cofounders Mark Webley and Tim Rance discuss the game's progress. |
While the stakes, both financial and personal, are especially high for Molyneux, the rest of the team has made similar sacrifices, often without much recognition from the public. "The people here have totally ruined and destroyed their social lives for the sake of this game," says Molyneux. Personal relationships have been replaced with a devotion to lines of code. Cottier's new baby was 14 months old in the summer of 2000, born during Black & White's development. "I just hope we are done soon so I can spend time with my baby," Cottier said last summer. Richard Evans and his wife were expecting a baby in the fall of 2000. For cofounder Webley, the toll of working on Black & White was particularly high. "Mark has missed out on seeing his 5-year-old son and his 3-year-old daughter for the last year and a half--he's been working every weekend," explained Jayne Webley last summer, who signed her e-mail, "The Extremely Tolerant Wife of Mark."
If anyone had any doubt of just how all-consuming Black & White could be, Barnes admits that he had a dream about the game last summer. "I was asleep in bed with my girlfriend Jackie," he says, "and I just started talking in my sleep about the gesture recognition system. All of a sudden, Jackie turned over and poked me on the shoulder and said, 'Jonty, what the heck are you talking about? Gesture recognition?'"
If Barnes' dream proved anything, it was that Black & White had turned into an eight-day-a-week job for all of Lionhead. The sacrifices were already hard to bear, but as the summer drew on, the game kept slipping, and the team was faced with what seemed like a project so large and complex that no one knew when it would really be done.
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