If anything, crunch is a natural occurrence brought on by the creative process.” By this point in the narrative, he’s has established himself to be enough of an eccentric that he willingly throws his entire life overboard for a project, but his screed in praise of crunch still feels like an echo of hustle-harder startup culture. “It’s not even exclusive to the games industry. “Crunch isn’t a pandemic or a death march,” he writes. The emotional toll crunch takes on workers and their families is universally derided, but it’s hard to find a story of game development that doesn’t fall into this trap. The term describes the moment when “game developer” ceases being a 9-5 job, and morphs into a haze of constant overtime, nights and weekends lost to endless coding, troubleshooting, and tweaking in order to ship a game on time.
It’s not until two-thirds of the way through Significant Zero, his memoir of working in the videogame industry, that Walt Williams finally invokes the dreaded five-letter word: crunch.
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