For months, Andrés Vásquez’s days working on the first-person shooter game “Doom” blended into one another.
A quality assurance tester for id Software in Texas, he spent 10 hours a day sitting at a desk and “crunching” on the game with his colleagues, repeatedly playing through its map creation mode and running through multiplayer matches in search of glitches ahead of its 2016 release. He’d often work weekends, logging nearly 60-hour weeks.
“It almost starts to feel like ‘Groundhog Day,’” the 33-year-old says. “It’s just so mentally challenging. You’re so tired that you just sleep and wake up to do it again the next day. It becomes a blur. ... You peek your head out from being in a tunnel and you’d come back to reality once the crunch was over.”
