Masahiro Ito believes he paid an extremely high price for the years he spent working on the Silent Hill series. The Japanese artist says the personal sacrifices he made for those games have ultimately affected his own happiness later in life.

Video game development is often more of a passion-driven career than one chosen through purely rational calculation. Today’s wave of mass layoffs adds another layer to an industry with a long history of excessive workloads and labor exploitation stretching back almost to its beginnings. The developers behind our favorite games have rarely worked “only” eight-hour days, and many great releases were created at the cost of major personal sacrifices that are seldom discussed. Masahiro Ito has now chosen to speak openly about that side of development, with the Konami artist and creator of Pyramid Head explaining that his years on the Silent Hill team have, in some ways, made his present life a little sadder.

Sacrificing Everything to Create Video Games

The Japanese artist explained on social media that the eight years he spent working on the Silent Hill series were essentially a constant grind. “I gave up getting a girlfriend and never went on a date. I sacrificed my days off and slept on cardboard boxes on the floor,” he wrote on his personal social media account. He made those sacrifices because he wanted the early games in the series to achieve the best possible results. There is little doubt that he and the rest of the team succeeded in creating something enduring, but Ito now believes the personal price he paid was far too high.

“To be honest, lately I’ve been thinking that maybe I would have been happier if I hadn’t sacrificed my personal life, if I had found a girlfriend and gotten married,” Masahiro Ito said while reflecting on those years. The immediate consequences of crunch are well known, as excessive workloads can lead to anxiety, stress, irritability, and various health problems. What receives far less attention, however, are the long-term effects of these practices and the consequences of giving up other important parts of personal life in order to keep working.

The video game industry’s working conditions have improved in some respects since then, even as today’s mass layoffs have introduced another serious problem. Crunch, however, remains part of the development process for many major productions. Employees working on Grand Theft Auto VI, for example, have previously complained that Rockstar was encouraging crunch and demanding further sacrifices from its staff. Developers may no longer be sleeping on cardboard boxes on office floors, but excessive work is still a practice that can have lasting consequences for the people creating the games we love.

Source: 3DJuegos