True Psychic Tales #33

July 30, 2024 8:32 AM

During the making of Psychonauts 2, Double Fine recorded the entire production as a part of their regular "making of" series, and released it as PsychOdyssey (previously) — a rare glimpse at what it takes to make not only a AAA video game, but also a sequel to one of the most beloved games of all time. Now they're back with a final epilogue that wrestles with the release of the game, but also the studio's attempts to learn from and reckon with the experience of reliving the troubled development process via documentary footage.
posted by Four String Riot (9 comments total)

I know it's a lot to ask of anyone to watch a 24-hour-long series about anything, especially a video game you haven't played, but I think this is a wonderful story about the highs and lows of a group of talented, empathetic people trying to make something together. With the epilogue, it spans nearly a decade of the company's history. I believe that anybody who works on a team with other people should watch this.

Polygon's Chris Plante called it "the best video game documentary ever" and "one of the most frank, thorough, and lovingly crafted stories of the video game development process ever made. There are tears. There are laughs. There are extensive conversations about how to fund a piece of art that costs millions of dollars and may never be finished."

It's amazing it exists at all.
posted by waxpancake at 9:25 AM on July 30 [1 favorite]

> I know it's a lot to ask of anyone to watch a 24-hour-long series about anything…

To put that in context, each season of Star Trek: the Next Generation had 20 or more 1-hour episodes. So 24 hours of content is about on par with one season of old syndicated television.
posted by neuracnu at 10:25 AM on July 30

I will probably never lose hope that there will be another. (Time for a replay, perhaps!)

Thanks for sharing, Four String Riot. Psychonauts-the-original holds a powerful place in my heart - one of the first games that I ever played, in my twenties, after being a kid who didn’t have a game system and always felt a little sad about how much fun games seemed to be. 2 fully lived up to the promise of the original, for me - tears and astonishment and silliness and deep appreciation for the artists who brought it to completion.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 12:15 PM on July 30

If on the other hand 24 hours isn't enough, there's also a whole documentary before this one about the development of Broken Age that's well worth watching. It leads naturally into this and adds extra meaning and context for what happens later. Also it starts, incredibly, 9 years ago which is so long ago it feels as though it's from another universe (and it a way, it is).

There's a whole chronological playlist with everything in order (including stuff like all the amnesia fortnights which are well worth watching), although it doesn't have this latest new episode yet. I went through this whole thing a year or two ago and was blown away.

I've spent my whole life adjacent to the gamedev space so I don't know what it's like to experience this without that connection, but I found the whole thing to be just a powerhouse of a documentary. We're very lucky it exists. I'm welling up a bit just thinking about it and I haven't even seen the epilogue yet. It fills me with love and melancholy for the whole human race.
posted by Flaffigan at 12:27 PM on July 30

Y'all sold me on it. I was not previously aware of this, jumped around the epilogue a bit, and tend to tear through shows while doing cardio so I guess I'll watch the whole thing...
posted by neuromodulator at 12:54 PM on July 30

Oh man. I’ll have to watch this in a few months for comparison once I have a bit more distance from our launch - I spent the last 5 years working on Homeworld 3, which was also the successor to a beloved game, and post-launch reception has not been what we hoped for over those years - game development can be a rocky road, and I’ve never worked anywhere where things have gone particularly smoothly. It’s amazing they often come together as well as they do.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 1:02 PM on July 30 [3 favorites]

I've spent my whole life adjacent to the gamedev space so I don't know what it's like to experience this without that connection

Take my feedback with a grain of salt, because I did spend a couple of years at a game development studio (although luckily never in crunch), but I felt like watching it resonated deeply with my experiences on other big creative/collaborative projects outside of that industry. I've recommended it to other journalists. It's a great story regardless, watching people try to get this construction over the finish line.
posted by Four String Riot at 1:29 PM on July 30 [1 favorite]

A warning to anyone diving in that this epilogue is (to my eye) probably the weakest of all the episodes, mostly because it's filled with a lot of straight-to-camera generalities (though it has some good, more specific moments, too, and I don't regret watching it).

But when the main bulk of episodes were initially released, I clicked on the first one, intending to check it out for maybe 10 minutes or so (mainly to see what style it was in?) and ended up watching the whole 20+ hour thing. It was that compelling.

I probably found it especially relatable via having worked in feature animation -- where, as here, the bus you're in is always moving and you have to build and rebuild the thing throughout the whole duration, always trying to figure out exactly what the thing you're making is.

But I think it's also relatable as a straight-up workplace documentary, with underdogs and villains and well-intentioned mistakes and miscommunication and just all the interpersonal things that arise when a large group of people are trying to get something done.

(I'm probably still mad at one of the characters, who'd I'd found myself wishing fired from pretty early on, and my opinion of one of the other characters dropped a whole bunch with this epilogue for his continuing, even now, to defend him.)

It's also so rare we get to see anything like this told over such duration. It's like it's from an alternate universe in which "reality TV" were replaced by real season-long TV docs.

The epilogue is maybe mostly fat, but all the rest really does earn its time on screen, episode by episode.
posted by nobody at 2:15 PM on July 30 [2 favorites]

(I'm probably still mad at one of the characters, who'd I'd found myself wishing fired from pretty early on, and my opinion of one of the other characters dropped a whole bunch with this epilogue for his continuing, even now, to defend him.)

So I'm on episode 10 or so now, and I don't want you to expand on this at all yet, if you can resist it, but this has been a super interesting angle from which to watch this. Each time someone is introduced, I'm trying to figure out if this is the person of whom you're speaking. I'm waiting for the villain of the piece to emerge.

(This is riveting regardless, and I don't mean to say I'm preoccupied with that angle. It's just an added bonus.)
posted by neuromodulator at 2:59 PM on August 12