Limitations

Whether you’re watching the microwave, running a marathon, or conducting an orchestra, chances are good that you’re paying close attention to the passage of time. Seasons change, years pass, and people age, which means time is a finite source. People have many basic needs to meet with that time, too, so they only have so many hours to devote to creative projects. To make the most of these hours, creators across every industry set deadlines, either for themselves or others, and these deadlines can limit the kinds of stories we’re able to tell. Just as a two-hour movie will likely take longer to write than a two-minute YouTube short, a 100,000-word novel will probably take longer than a 100-word piece of flash fiction. While a variety of factors dictate the scope of a project, it’s fair to say that bigger projects require longer deadlines. Writers who try to squeeze massive projects into tight schedules often end up cutting corners and compromising quality, resulting in slap-dash stories that either feel unfinished or fall apart under scrutiny. 

Like most of us, video game developers are all too familiar with the limitations of time. Financial backers need to know when they can expect a return on their investment, marketing departments want to schedule ad campaigns, and audiences like to know when they can finally sit down with the most hotly-anticipated games. To meet these intersecting needs, game developers establish production schedules with various deadlines, and those deadlines dictate the scope of the game and its story. One famous example of scheduling determining story is The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (Nintendo, 1999), which was developed in a remarkably short timeframe. According to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time director Eiji Aonuma, he was challenged by series creator Shigeru Miyamoto to create an Ocarina sequel in under a year so that the studio wouldn’t have to release a rehash of Ocarina.⁠1 To meet this deadline, Aonuma and his team decided to tell a story about a world that mirrored Ocarina’s, which allowed them to save time by reusing audio-visual assets. The result was Majora’s Mask, a divisive title that some diehard Zelda fans consider their favorite to this day. 

Tight deadlines can sometimes inspire creators to write brilliant stories, but schedules can only be compacted so much before the creators have to make serious compromises. One such compromise occurred during the development of Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, the 1999 action-adventure game from Crystal Dynamics that went over its deadlines late in the process. According to game director Amy Hennig, the game’s development had gone on so long that they had to make a difficult decision: continually delay the game’s release, or split the game into two titles.⁠2 “We realized a while back that we had essentially over-designed the game,” Hennig said in a 2000 GameSpot interview, “and that the epic story we wanted to convey was too ambitious for a single product. Once we came to terms with this realization, we had a difficult decision to make — should we further delay the game’s release, or should we bite the bullet and leave Soul Reaver with a cliffhanger ending, to be resolved in the (already-planned) sequel?” While the truncated title ended up reviewing well, fans were disappointed by the anti-climactic ending and thought the story deserved better than it got. 

Although Soul Reaver left players satisfied despite its compromises, not all games made in a short timeframe turn out so well. An infamous example of a botched game with a limited deadline is E.T. The Extraterrestrial (Atari, Inc, 1982). At the time of E.T.’s development, console gaming technology was still in its infancy, but Atari developer Howard Scott Warshaw believed he could capture the feeling of the E.T. movie in a console game.⁠3 Securing the license took longer than expected, but the producers wanted the game to launch in time for the holiday season, so Warshaw was given five weeks to complete the project.⁠4 The resulting game was so poorly received that it contributed to an industry-wide contraction (The Video Game Crash of 1983, also known as the Atari Shock) that lasted until the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1995. Had Warshaw been given more time to realize his ambitions, or scaled back the scope of his designs, the landscape of video game development as we know it might be totally different.