Let’s Try
On July 2nd at 10:33 Bruce Straley, director of Uncharted 2 and The Last of Us, received an email.
Subject: RE: Notice of Termination
Chapter 1
I went to GDC 2026 last week. This is notable for many reasons, not least of which: I am not currently a game developer. And in fact have not been for roughly 20 years.
Oh, sure. I’ve got a pile of hobby games deep enough that the cats sometimes get lost in it. I’ve written a MUD in just about every language it’s possible to do that in. And also some where it isn’t.
But nothing that’s ever seen commercial release. Most of them haven’t even been played by other people.
So like, why spend the cost of a Disney World vacation to go to a trade show for an industry I’m not involved in?
Because, dear reader, I was trying to figure out if maybe I shouldn’t be. I was looking for my tribe. I wanted to know if I would belong.
But if I’m being honest, by the time I boarded the plane to GDC, I already knew. I wasn’t at GDC to figure out if I should make games. I was at GDC because I can’t not.
Chapter 2
One of the interesting things about attending GDC as a relative outsider trying to find their place is that there’s no “obvious” set of sessions to attend. If I were showing up as a technical artist, then great, attend all the sessions on technical art. Looking for a publisher? Talk to lots of publishers.
GDC does a great job of providing paved paths where paths make sense.
But I was there for the tasting platter. The smorgasbord. I went to every session that seemed even remotely interesting or relevant.
I listened to Owlcat Games talk about their Etudes system for highly-branched narrative design.
I listened to Outersloth talk about indie game funding.
I listened as developers big and small talked about the tiny games they made in their free time when they weren’t making bigger games. Because they, too, have a spleen demon that compels them to create.
The only thread that tied it all together is that each and every session was interesting. And in almost every case I had traded off one if not two other equally-enticing sessions to be in the room.
Chapter 3
Here’s the thing. I never once heard anyone say it was easy. Quite the opposite. There was broad agreement that making games is hard. This is a field no sane person would ever enter. Except we feel compelled to do it for reasons beyond even our own understanding.
To abuse a line an old professor of mine once tossed out: if you want an easy job that pays well, go into finance. Everyone else has to work for a living.
I’ve spent the last 20+ years trying to run away from video games, because my first professional experience was wildly negative, and I was young, and I didn’t understand that one bad job is just a bad job, and that it wouldn’t change what I was passionate about.
When I booked my tickets to GDC it was because I wanted to prove out the idea of a pivot to Video Games. I’m middle aged! By traditional wisdom it’s getting kind of late to start a new career!
What I found was room after room of people that would sagely nod that they had unwisely chosen to do this difficult, impossible thing. And would do it again. Every time.
Towards the end of the week I ended up at a talk titled: From a Naughty Dog to a Wildflower: The Fears, Failures, and Freedoms Found because I was interested in the founding-an-indie-studio part. Boy was I in for a surprise.
Chapter 4
Bruce Straley spent 18 years at Naughty Dog, making several highly acclaimed video games. You may even have heard of them.
He left in 2017 because he felt like he’d done what he needed to do. Said what he needed to say. The challenges no longer felt challenging.
And then his spleen demon (my words, not his) rose up and said, “Hey. Buddy. You didn’t really think you were going to retire did ya?” (In my head his spleen demon, as is traditional, has a vaguely unplaceable but roughly New Jersey-esque accent.)
So he started Wildflower Interactive. There’s much about that journey I’m not qualified to tell, and I’m just roughly paraphrasing what he said during his GDC talk on his career journey from Naughty Dog to Wildflower. But things did not entirely go as he had hoped.
Wildflower’s publisher required milestone deliverables every three months. In practice, that meant roughly a week and a half shoring up the deliverables and a week and a half postmortem after. Basically one month out of every three spent not trying to find the fun. A quarter of the year not making the game.
Eventually, disputes over the staggering of releases would lead to a strained relationship with the publisher. Every milestone was a showdown. Deliver, or give the publisher their chance to cancel.
Eventually, they canceled anyway.
Subject: RE: Notice of Termination
But Wildflower’s legal team had been smart. Cancellation for convenience meant that the publisher needed to pay out. And that meant Wildflower had runway. And a new problem.
Straley had three choices:
- Keep the full team and fix the game.
- Reduce the team and rescope the game.
- Close the studio.
The problem with option #1 is that runway only lasts so long, and he didn’t think they had enough runway to deliver the game as they originally imagined it.
The problem with option #3 is Straley seems like a genuinely good guy. He could have taken the money and run. It would have been completely legal to throw in the towel.
So he made the hard choice. He picked option #2. They laid some staff off, they reimagined what that game could be, and they soldiered on.
Chapter 5
Wildflower’s remaining staff had a rough road ahead. If you’ve ever had to take ownership for someone else’s code, you know how hard it can be to figure out what they were trying to do.
Hell is someone else’s implementation.
They cut away the parts of the game that weren’t working, while worrying whether the studio was even going to make it.
Three months into rebuilding the game, Straley asked if a problem was solvable. He expected resistance. He expected no.
“That’s just a knob. I’ll tweak a variable.”
The team had survived the trial by fire, turned the corner, and were capable of moving forward.
All of this led Straley to a line that will live rent free in my head for the rest of my life. I might even get it tattooed.
“Stick your chest out and go like — fuck it. Let’s try." - Bruce Straley, GDC 2026
The whole reason I was at GDC in the first place was to answer a question. Should I found an indie game studio?
Fuck it. Let’s try.