First principles. Creators from every medium doing the work that only they can do.
17 posts
EA closed BioWare on October 21, 2026. A year before Knights of the Old Republic shipped, E3 players couldn't tell when they were even in a fight. BioWare kept the rules and put the combat state on screen.
Barlog directed the game that won Game of the Year. For the sequel, he handed the wheel to someone whose whole toolkit he didn't understand.
4A Games won Best Visuals for Metro 2039 at Gamescom 2026 on a story about Ukrainian wartime survival. The studio that actually stayed in Kyiv the whole war gave up that name a year earlier.
Infold Games cancelled Love and Deepspace's newest character eight days after revealing him and banned new characters forever. The resourcing complaint that caused the backlash is still unresolved.
Cyberpunk 2077's launch exposed an org chart, not a bug count. The studio tore down how it built games to ship Phantom Liberty.
In a 2005 Japanese drama, a homeroom teacher built a point system that turned twenty-four kids into informants. GE and Microsoft ran the adult version. Both failed for the same reason.
LocalThunk built a math toy in poker clothes. Then the world kept mistaking the costume for the product.
Rakuro Hizakura spent years hunting kusoge, broken games nobody else wanted to touch. When he entered Shangri-La Frontier, 30 million players were already there. None of them had found what he found.
Eric Barone spent four and a half years building Stardew Valley alone. Publishers offered teams. Fans offered help. Every offer assumed the problem was speed.
Build a Rocket Boy raised £233M with Rockstar's DNA. MindsEye launched in June 2025 with a Metacritic score of 37.
Ten hours of Coachella 2026 and one artist was in every set. His name wasn't on the lineup.
Writing a pop-punk song to understand yourself is an unusually honest personality test.
The ad copywriter who made three games and stopped. Why that restraint matters.
In 2009, Sony's head of worldwide studios played Demon's Souls for two hours and called it unbelievably bad. FromSoftware published it without them. Then they built a genre.
NieR: Automata's creator was a self-proclaimed loser who hid from his publisher, designed a game that lies to you for 20 hours and then asks you to sacrifice everything for a stranger. It sold nine million copies.
Product management isn't dead but the old way of doing it is over. A rallying cry for PMs building in the middle of creativity and chaos.
YouTuber Kize Bae gave herself 30 days to learn drums from scratch. The lesson she found behind the kit, and what turned up afterward, beats any PM framework.