The developers of Red Dead Redemption crunched a lot to impress the top management at Rockstar Games
At least, that's what former senior game designer at Rockstar San Diego, Kris Roberts, says.
Red Dead Redemption
Roberts discussed the crunch during the development of the first Red Dead Redemption on the Kiwi Talks podcast. According to him, the last six months of production were marked by the most intense crunch of his career. One of the saddest aspects of this was that overtime was often necessary due to management's desire to "put on a show" for executives visiting the office for inspections.
Roberts recalls that the crunch started innocently enough and for a justified reason—Red Dead Redemption needed to be polished quickly before release.
Initially, Roberts notes, the team began staying late into the evenings. Then, work hours extended into the weekends: at one point, it became mandatory to work on the game for half of Saturday, and eventually all day Saturday. Working on Sundays was also actively encouraged. As the release of Red Dead Redemption approached, developers essentially spent all their time in the office.
According to Roberts, if someone planned to take Sunday off, plans could quickly fall apart if Sam Houser or Leslie Benzies decided on an impromptu visit. The night before their arrival, employees would receive an email demanding their presence at work, just to fill the offices and create the illusion of a continuous development process.
For Roberts, the situation was worsened by his responsibility at the time to oversee the development of the Red Dead Redemption multiplayer, which meant he regularly had to pass these directives to his team. He found this duty extremely unpleasant and partly due to this, eventually decided to leave Rockstar Games.