After years of being accepted as just how things are done, crunch—working horrifically long hours for weeks or months at a stretch in order to meet an arbitrary deadline set by an executive who's probably still going home on time every night—is now widely frowned upon in the videogame industry. But it also seems to be awfully hard to do away with: A new Bloomberg report says Naughty Dog has been pushing employees to work at least eight extra hours per week since late October in order to finish an internal demo of its upcoming sci-fi game Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
Intergalactic was revealed at The Game Awards 2024 with a long cinematic that landed (for me, at least) as kind of a mashup of Uncharted with Ready Player One, in space: Porsche-branded ship, Sony audio player, anime on the TV, and Pet Shop Boys on CD. Studio boss Neil Druckmann later said the game, despite its clear action trappings, is "about faith and religion," which is an interesting pitch, but we really haven't heard anything about it since.
