This book is absolutely fantastic and I’d recommend it to anyone who is into video games! Gosh I’d even recommend it to those who aren’t just so they can appreciate the work that goes into making them. It was a real eye opener, a brutal but important view of how difficult life can be as a developer during crunch times, and how we cannot take for granted the dedication and perseverance they must have to produce these wonderful games.

It also helps that this book has chapters on some of my favourite games ever made. The Witcher 3 and the work put into its rich story telling so that no side quest was ever the same. God I love the Witcher... How over hundreds of hours was put into perfecting what is the magnificent Uncharted 4 despite crazy management issues. God I love Uncharted... Bioware's challenge to beat an impossible schedule and overcome countless technical nightmares to build Dragon Age: Inquisition. God I love Dragon Age... And Bungie fighting for their independence against Microsoft to create Destiny, a project that they hoped would become as iconic as Star Wars. God I kinda love Destiny too...

That being said, it wasn’t just a book about the big names in gaming, even the chapters on games I had not heard of before were also brilliant. For example the struggle for developers of Shovel Knight to live up to the optimistic promises they made on Kickstarter or those of Diablo to produce massive updates and DLC content.

My favourite chapter though was for Stardew Valley and finding out that it was created entirely by one single person. From the concept to the design, to the coding, the writing, the music and audio production, the publishing and of course the constant patch updates needed ever since. It absolutely blew my mind and in fact it ended up making me buy the game so I could try it for myself! I have no regrets, not only is it fantastic but I get to support this incredible person for all the lonely years of hardships he faced. I’m on quite the sidetrack now, but I also loved the fact that he has since become a millionaire with his game ported to almost every platform there is, yet he still lives a humble life, with a normal house and car, but once in a while likes to treat himself to really expensive bottle of wine.

Anyway, Jason Schreier does a fantastic job of sharing these bonkers stories in this book and ever since I have enjoyed following him on twitter for the latest gaming news, and catching up on his fun articles surrounding the industry. One I highly recommend is the troubled development of Mass Effect: Andromeda!