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  • Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

  • The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made
  • By: Jason Schreier
  • Narrated by: Ray Chase
  • Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (982 ratings)
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Blood, Sweat, and Pixels cover art

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

By: Jason Schreier
Narrated by: Ray Chase
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Summary

Developing video games - hero's journey or fool's errand? The creative and technical logistics that go into building today's hottest games can be more harrowing and complex than the games themselves, often seeming like an endless maze or a bottomless abyss. In Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, Jason Schreier takes listeners on a fascinating odyssey behind the scenes of video game development, where the creator may be a team of 600 overworked underdogs or a solitary geek genius. Exploring the artistic challenges, technical impossibilities, marketplace demands, and Donkey Kong-size monkey wrenches thrown into the works by corporate, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels reveals how bringing any game to completion is more than Sisyphean - it's nothing short of miraculous.

Taking some of the most popular, best-selling recent games, Schreier immerses listeners in the hellfire of the development process, whether it's RPG studio Bioware's challenge to beat an impossible schedule and overcome countless technical nightmares to build Dragon Age: Inquisition; indie developer Eric Barone's single-handed efforts to grow country-life RPG Stardew Valley from one man's vision into a multimillion-dollar franchise; or Bungie spinning out from their corporate overlords at Microsoft to create Destiny, a brand-new universe that they hoped would become as iconic as Star Wars and Lord of the Rings - even as it nearly ripped their studio apart.

Documenting the round-the-clock crunches, buggy-eyed burnout, and last-minute saves, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels is a journey through development hell - and ultimately a tribute to the dedicated diehards and unsung heroes who scale mountains of obstacles in their quests to create the best games imaginable.

©2017 Jason Schreier (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers

What listeners say about Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

an accurate picture of how games are made

No game is simple to make. these 10 stories showcase some of the ups and downs of videogame development and how familiar they all start to sound. I have a feeling this book will mostly appeal to game developers like myself who have a ton of similar experiences to reference. For anyone outside the industry it may be harder to get into or comprehend why we do it. I think this book does an accurate job at capturing that.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

Could do with technical detail

I thought it might reveal a little about how video games are actually made, ie the vast technical feat of making a game like Red Dead, but it only touches on these in generalisms. Mainly it's about corporate politics, which become repetitive after the first few case studies. I did finish it, however.





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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Interesting, Informative and Well Written

Jason Schreier is well known for his terrific games journalism, a veritable professional with an eye for detail and a nose for dirt. This book provides a somewhat sugary overview of the development of a number of well known and interesting projects, but does a great job of entertaining and informing you of the twists and turns of development. Well narrated by Ray Chase, this is an easy listen and worthy of attention.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

modern game development

a big focus on role-playing games, showing how games can end up in development hell. mainly outside forces which influence games such as the lucas arts example. first choice Lucas messing with the plot and character and then Lucas art being bought by Disney. but usually it is just a lack of actual focus on what the game will be. it seems like developers say ok let's make a game like unity but in the Star wars world. there isn't a clear idea of how the game will end up so when they realise they need to make changes a lot of the previous work gets thrown out. also having the right tools to develop their games seems very important such as the example of bungie. maybe would have like to see a little bit more of the personalities show through of the people developing the games. the most gripping examples were those with specific people who were described like the guy who did Star dew valley. that was the most gripping story of all.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Great insight into the behind the scenes of gaming

Loved it! As a gamer you never really understand the politics and drama going on in the background within a gaming studio. Good listen would definitely recommend.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
  • JR
  • 19-03-24

Like nothing else a book has to offer

I really like how they didn’t go in and bore use with some unnecessary facts and just did the cool things

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Interesting case studies in game-dev.

An enjoyable listen, helped by a good narrator. Reads as a series of half-hour narratives about many different game development cycles, along with all the challenges, success and heartbreaks that entailed. While not very long, it is probably about the right length to sustain interest and not overstay its welcome; covering a variety of different scenarios, it is well written and will leave you with a better understanding of how the games industry works, and how it fails at times.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Great insight, more variety would have been good

This is a great book for anyone who loves games culture and an important insight into how hard it is to make games. It is also a really interesting look inside the creative process. I don’t share the author’s love of rpgs and by the time I got to Witcher 3 I would have liked an example of a sim or other genres. The narrator’s dewy-eyed tone also tends to grate in places. We’re talking about videogames, not life and death. Nevertheless great book.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

enjoyable

Each chapter is an insight into the development of a different game. I'm not familiar with a lot of them and only own what are now classed as retro consoles but i enjoyed this audio book, was never bored and yeah, it was an entertaining listen and a good insight into the misery that is game's development- albeit sometimes with great reward.
the narration was fine and not irritating and robotic like so many others.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Good listen

Overall it was an entertaining listen with small hints of humour in it. The only thing that the author could have changed was that the system of the book was the same all along and got slightly boring right at the end, but don’t take that away from the 8 hours of enjoyment that it has to offer. There is also a good and enthusiastic voice behind it.

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