Harvard and I go back a long way. We overlapped at Sony Santa Monica during the God of War III years, which mostly meant late nights, a lot of pizza and a shared belief that the next build would be the one. So I came into this conversation thinking I knew his story. I didn't.

Harvard has spent decades in production and project management, at Virgin and Westwood, EA, Sony Santa Monica and Bethesda. Underneath that he's still the twelve-year-old who mailed game ideas to Atari and got two rejection letters back. He wanted to make games. He ended up building the structures that let other people make them: frameworks, milestone processes and rules of play for teams. He's honest about how that went. As a young producer he wandered into design in ways that caused friction, and he still apologizes to people for it.

This is also the first time the show has really gone deep on production. Harvard explains frameworks, operations and why a milestone shouldn't be a surprise, and he makes all of it feel like part of making the game. By the end, after a layoff he calls the best summer he's had in years, he's back to building games himself. It's a Roblox game, with his daughter reviewing every build.

Alex (00:00)
Great to see you again, it's been a while. We've worked together a couple of times in the past, directly and indirectly, and I'm excited to dig into your history. I always kick this conversation off with my favourite first question: what first inspired you about video games?

Harvard Bonin (00:16)
You can probably tell from my history that I was there at the beginning, or at least close to it. I've always been a lover of video games. My first real system was the Atari 5200. The funny thing is it was something like 300 bucks at the time. My dad went to the horse track, won a little bit of money, and said, "What do you want to do with this?" I said I wanted that system, and he got it for me.

I've been through it ever since. I've been a player all my life and I still play. In fact The Witcher 3 has got its mitts into me right now, especially with the remaster. What are you playing these days?

Alex (00:56)
I just started Control Resonant. I'm a big Remedy nerd, so I picked it up a couple of days ago and I've been falling in love with it.

Harvard Bonin (01:10)
Are you gonna post a review?

Alex (01:13)
I don't tend to do public reviews very much, to be honest. But I'm definitely pulling a lot of reference from it. Seeing a studio I love pivot into a genre I'm very familiar with, melee games, is fascinating, and I think what they've done is really good. I've loved everything they've made.

I'm fascinated to dig into where you got started. The 5200 kicked off the love of video games. What was it that really attracted you to the experience, and kept attracting you over the following years?

Harvard Bonin (01:57)
It's funny, I've never really thought about why it was so appealing to me. Games are fun. I always liked the challenge. And I think adventuring into another world where you could have interactivity was a big deal. I've spanned genres. Nowadays I pretty much focus on adventure RPGs, but back then it was whatever looked fun. I used to go to the arcade, back when arcades were a thing.

I didn't really have other friends who played, so there wasn't a social appeal to it like there is now. It was just me in my own world, adventuring through and discovering what was around the corner. I've never really thought about the psychology of what did it for me. I was an only child, so maybe that's it. It was a way to have a playmate without having one. What about you? Are we only children together?

Alex (03:08)
Yeah, both only children. For me there was an element of competition, mostly with myself, since I'm not great at competing with anyone else. And I've always been drawn to the interactivity, the feel. Arcade and action games were always what pulled me in.

Harvard Bonin (03:41)
What did you start with?

Alex (03:44)
I started with computers, the ZX Spectrum. You had the crash in the eighties in the US, but that didn't really affect us here. In the early eighties I got a ZX Spectrum because my dad convinced my mum I really wanted one. I didn't even know what it was. He wanted it. That's what kicked me off, at about six years old.

Harvard Bonin (04:06)
Like I was telling you, my dad went to the track, won some money and got me the 5200. As I started working through the industry, my parents would always tell me it was the best investment they ever made. At the time they thought they were throwing money away. Talk about a path.

Alex (04:27)
It set you on a path that's turned into a career, and that's exactly what we're here to talk about. Where did you grow up?

Harvard Bonin (04:36)
I grew up in Maine, then went to California, to Fullerton for college and Chapman for my MBA. I moved when I was a sophomore in high school, which I don't recommend to anybody. But my formative years, as a child, were in Maine. Where did you grow up?

Alex (05:02)
A little village, so somewhat similar. Not many friends who gamed. My cousin was a big reason I got into games, since he'd send me games and we'd swap all the time. Back then games weren't everywhere and were still a bit fiddly to get your head around. So maybe we had a similar genesis: games took us somewhere we didn't otherwise get to go, and gave us our own friend and our own challenge.

When was there a point when video games felt like a potential career? Or were they always just games?

Harvard Bonin (05:57)
I kind of fell into it, and I think that was true of a lot of people back then. There was no real track and no schooling. I went to school for advertising communications, which I did nothing with. Out of school I worked for a small direct marketing firm, and I got laid off after about three months. It was a true layoff. The place was tiny. I just happened to have friends at Virgin Interactive.

The very next day after I got laid off, I went to breakfast with a guy named Neil Young. It was for a position my friend Julie had turned me on to. All we did was talk about games. I'd always been an enthusiast, reading GamePro and Electronic Games Monthly and all those, so I knew what was going on in games, at least on the consumer side. I didn't know anything about the business of the business. But I was well versed, and that's all we talked about.

At the end of the breakfast, which took about an hour, he said, "Well, you're gonna get paid this, and this is when you start," and so on. I said, "So I'm hired? Am I really hired?" And he said, "Yeah, didn't I tell you?"

I started a couple of weeks later as a production coordinator. It was my first real job in the games business, and I went through the various incarnations from there: producer, senior producer, production director. All of that has changed a lot over time. Back in those days, barely anybody knew what they were doing. We had no real structure around what a producer was. People relied on their experience and what they'd learned over time, but there was no intentional track for how you actually manage a software project. That knowledge existed, just not in games. Around 2012 I started looking at software project management: the PMI, PMPs, agile certifications. We started applying some of it early on at God of War. If you remember, the God of War reboot actually had a reboot before the reboot, and it lasted about a year. Ariel, who's now directing the latest one, was associate producer on that with me. She's fantastic, and I wish them all the best with this latest one. It looks pretty cool. I have to talk to her about how she made the transition from production to creative director, but good on her.

We tried to reboot God of War with a very small team, about fifteen people. That was before Cory was at the studio. He'd left and then he came back. It's all a bit fuzzy, but in that period we had just started introducing agile practices: stand-ups, retrospectives, all of that. Before then it wasn't really being done at that studio. And if you remember, there was another title going on at the same time as Ascension. What was it called?

Alex (09:42)
Darkside.

Harvard Bonin (09:46)
Darkside. It didn't come out, obviously, and there were repercussions, and I wound up at Bethesda. Then they ended up redoing God of War again. But a lot of the core ideas were there from that very first reboot. It was still Norse. They had some great art direction that didn't quite make it into the game, but they were really experimenting. The over-the-shoulder camera and the axe were there from the beginning.

Darkside, though, tried to do everything new, and I don't recommend that to anyone. Look at what Naughty Dog did going from Uncharted to The Last of Us. It's almost like a chair with four legs: they took one leg out, replaced it, and now you've got a whole new experience. It was still third person and still shooting, but they trended toward stealth and changed the fiction, and that's kind of it. As a game designer, would you agree that they didn't pivot all that much and still got a great big change?

Alex (11:09)
I think the devil's in the details. There's a lot of nuance in the systemic changes they made: the type of game, the pacing, the complexity of the systems. A lot changed, even if on the surface it was familiar. But it was a smart move, and like you say, don't do everything new. What do you keep, what do you improve, and what do you iterate on?

Harvard Bonin (11:43)
That's the difference between production and a real game designer. I look at it from a very macro, simplistic standpoint, and you've got far more educated detail on it.

That side God of War was run by Stig as game director, I think. He went on to Apex Legends?

Alex (12:03)
He went to Respawn and did the Jedi games, and now he's running Giant Skull.

Harvard Bonin (12:08)
Doing some great stuff. But that Darkside game wanted to change it all. If I remember right, it was going to be a sci-fi shooter-melee with a totally new fiction.

Alex (12:22)
Open world, with a vehicle. Everything.

Harvard Bonin (12:26)
If you're going to challenge yourself like that, do it with that team, because they were very capable. But I think it was too much. That's why I love the elegance of what The Last of Us did. Sometimes you just have to step away from the buffet table and have some discipline, and let yourself succeed in a space where you're more likely to succeed.

Alex (12:49)
Absolutely. You mentioned almost stumbling into a production role at a very interesting era of the industry. You were obviously a fan, but presumably you had no real idea how games were made. How did you take to production?

Harvard Bonin (13:13)
I don't want to belabor this, but when I was a kid I used to send game ideas in to Atari. This is the twelve-year-old version of me. They rejected both of them. One was a Joust-Metroid hybrid, before Metroid had been invented, so I didn't know that's what it was. The other was a first-person 3D Scramble, before 3D existed. All I did was some drawings and a little three-pager: here's what it is.

When I got into the games business, I didn't want to be a producer. I wanted to make games. And back then the roles weren't well defined. They still weren't, even as recently as 2005 or 2006, and I fell into the trap of feeling like I had to have a voice in the game design, because that was the fun part. It wasn't management or project management. And with the roles that loosely defined, you can imagine that caused friction.

In fact I just had a call with my friend Dustin Browder, who was lead designer on Red Alert 2 and went on to StarCraft II, among other things. I told him, "Man, I'm really sorry. That probably wasn't the best version of me. I stepped into your world a little too much and it caused friction." Over the years I realized you go where your lane is. What's your purpose on the team, and in the dynamic? That's how I got over it.

People always ask me, what's your dream game to make? I'm like, I made those already. That's not what does it for me. I'd like to see teams be successful, and figure out how we're going to navigate the next few years. It's going to be bumpy. It is bumpy.

Having a hand in making video games was the original want for me, and that's still true, just not in the same way. At Bethesda I'd periodically get airdropped into projects to help out, because I was one of the only people there who had worked on development teams. The last one was helping Indiana Jones and the Great Circle wrap up. I didn't have a giant impact, but working day to day with the studio and playing the game constantly felt like being back in the trenches. That's a rush, and it's what keeps me going. I just want to make a thing, and show my family: "Try this out, I worked on this."

Alex (16:32)
Definitely. I had that a couple of days ago. I forgot my voice was in one of the games I worked on years ago, and I was replaying it for fun and went, "Wait, that's me." I told my kid and his friend and they were like, "What, really?" Yeah, that's me twenty years ago, making silly cockney zombie voices.

But I want to zero in on that, Harvard. You're clearly a gamer with creative ideas, and the production track doesn't necessarily allow for that. In my opinion, design should be the shepherd of the best idea, wherever it comes from, but that doesn't suit every team. You worked on Generals and the Lord of the Rings series, and you've mentioned on LinkedIn that some of those early first-person ideas went into Starhawk. I remember us playtesting it in the studio. How do you contribute creatively when it's outside your lane, in a way that still has impact?

Harvard Bonin (18:16)
My drive for that has diminished, because the real success is a successful game, and production shouldn't get an outsized opinion on what you're making. Stay in your lanes, and be intentional about your role.

That said, you collect great ideas wherever they come from. Back then producers were basically the managers, and as a young buck I decided that meant I could contribute to the design, with no expertise except having been a player. Everybody has ideas and can share them. But because the role was undefined, a manager had more sway than others. That was the mistake I made.

Now, on something like Indiana Jones, I could talk to the team and say, "I'm playing this here and it's not working. What are we doing to fix it?" Or, "Here's an idea." And my idea was exactly as valuable as anybody else's. Not outsized at all. That was the main point.

Alex (19:54)
Interesting. You were at EA for about four years, and EA has at times blurred the line between production and design. Was it like that when you were there, or had it already split into production is production and design is design?

Harvard Bonin (20:13)
I've been part of a lot of acquisitions. Virgin Westwood was acquired by EA, so we went through a lot of transition there. When I was at EA the issue wasn't necessarily design, but I see your point, because it was the same sort of thing. They had introduced a separation between executive producer and development director, and it was blurry. I had trouble working with that model for a long time, because producers had been that whole role in one. Then they split it, and I was like, how does this work? I was working with schedules before and now I'm not. I'll admit I had a challenge with that.

Years later, when I started my project management journey, I asked my friend Patrick what the difference between a producer and a development director is. He said producers help decide where the value is in decisions, and development directors are more about managing the scope of the work and all the trade-offs that come with that.

At Bethesda I was at a director level, working much more with frameworks that guide milestone processes, and I've arrived at my own conclusions on those over the years. On design: you can absolutely have an executive producer who's heavy in design, architecting what the franchise is about. You just need to be intentional about it.

I always say one of the first things a team should do is set down its rules of play. What do you do, and what do I do? Don't rely on titles. Sit face to face, especially the lead designer, game director and executive producer, and agree who's doing what, and how you'll behave when you disagree or step on each other's toes. It's about intentionality and being clear. Have you run into that, where you felt people were in your sandbox?

Alex (23:30)
Definitely. As a designer, I've had someone change my system underneath me without a conversation. As a lead, I've had someone build a prototype in the background and pitch it to someone else. Those are tough, because a creative endeavor is really just a bunch of opinions about what the thing should be. Everyone's opinion can't carry equal weight or nothing gets done, so there has to be some hierarchy. But you also can't be too precious about an idea, because someone might take it somewhere you never would have.

How did you grow into setting those boundaries, so people understand who does what and when?

Harvard Bonin (24:55)
A lot of my ideas have just come from doing things and touching the hot stove one too many times. In the last few years my friend Jasmine turned me on to the concept of intentionality, being purposeful in what you're doing, and I've come to really love it. Whatever we're doing on a team has to be done with intent. Couple that with transparency of intent and communication.

People always ask what the hardest thing about working on teams is. It's people. It's always people. That comes down to communication, intentionality and transparency, and killing siloed communication and back-channeling.

Face to face is always most effective, which these days means video calls. And get people to actually say, "Yes, I agree, I'm on board." Saying it out loud makes it stick. It's a bit of an influence tool, but an honest one.

Take your prototype situation. From the start of a project you can say, "This is behavior we don't want. If you want to do this, let's talk about it and collaborate," rather than going around you to the lead. Teams are messy, but intentional communication plus rules of play gets you in front of a lot of it.

Have you ever had a players-only meeting on your teams?

Alex (28:00)
What do you mean by players-only?

Harvard Bonin (28:04)
Like in the NFL or MLB. The players, not the game players, get together and say, "Let's get rid of the management and work this out ourselves." I've always liked that concept. If you set up those sorts of team norms, you help develop a team that can figure things out independently, without a management layer handling it.

Alex (28:35)
I completely agree. I phrase it slightly differently, around trust. Trust is the glue that holds a complicated, messy team together, a bunch of humans trying to be creative and solve a nebulous set of problems.

Harvard Bonin (28:52)
In an area they're passionate about.

Alex (28:56)
Exactly, and where everyone has great opinions. Trust is the most important thing I've learned. That prototype got made because trust and clarity broke down. Plenty of companies say they run on trust, but you have to build it, maintain it and show up for it, because the team needs to feel empowered to go for it, fail and succeed. It comes from the top down, and without it you get infighting and disruption. People are the trickiest part, and trust is the hardest part of that.

Harvard Bonin (30:14)
Here's a timely example. I was talking the other day with a friend who runs production at another video game publisher. Someone said to him, "I always appreciated that you let me talk directly to the team." When the publisher talks directly to a team member, any number of things can happen, and none of them are usually good. If the publisher, who's paying the bills, tells designer X, "I really wish it would do this," designer X might overindex and go, "Well, the publisher wants that, I better do it." Then it flows up to the game director and messes everything up.

But he still follows that philosophy, because they have rules of play in place. The rules say: designer X, if you're asked, told or influenced to do something to the game that seems out of left field, and it upsets you, here's how you handle it. Being intentional about that communication is what allows trust to exist between publisher and studio, while still handling the things that could otherwise go wrong.

Alex (31:37)
That's smart. It's good to have rules and structures that help you navigate the challenge of building something very hard. Video games are very hard to make, and very hard to make well.

Harvard Bonin (31:57)
I think of those frameworks as containers. It's already chaos, especially early on, when you don't know what you're making and you're prototyping. If you add other problems, like team communication or the publisher-studio relationship, it just makes it super hard. The chaos should be happening around the creativity, as the team spirals into certainty about what it's making. For everything else there are established ways to handle it.

In the olden days I was ignorant of all those things. Some people I've worked with will watch this and go, "Yeah, I remember when you did that." To those people I say I'm sorry. I was learning, and I continue to learn. When you've been in this business a while it's easy to come off as wise, and it's not wisdom. It's just touching the hot stove too many times and going, I guess I won't do that anymore.

Alex (33:13)
It's learned behaviors and scars, that's what it is.

You mentioned Westwood. You were a big part of standing up a new studio, Westwood Pacific, and then it was bought by EA. What was that transition like?

Harvard Bonin (33:35)
I was at Virgin. Virgin was the house that C&C and The 7th Guest built. I don't want to overstate my part. I didn't work on the first C&C or Red Alert. Those were huge successes, and those teams have gone on to make games even now. EA bought Virgin for Westwood and those properties.

I think Tiberian Sun was running late, which opened a window for us to use that engine and make Red Alert 2. EA was pretty hands-off until Generals, when they started consolidating with the Medal of Honor studio. We moved out of Westwood Pacific to make Generals, and did Zero Hour up in LA in the Medal of Honor studio.

I remember showing Don Mattrick, who was CEO or president of EA at the time, our Generals demo. Back then 3D was brand new, certainly in RTS. Very few 3D RTS games had existed. We did a demo of a dam breaking, and I swear to God he fell out of his chair with excitement. That was so much fun.

Some of the EA founders were still there. Bing Gordon was instrumental in helping us find the fun. We had access to John Riccitiello, and a lot of those people went on to Zynga. Mark Skaggs was my boss at the time. We had a whole bunch of people who went on to do great things and are still doing them. Dustin went on to StarCraft II, which I hear is not terrible, so they outdid themselves.

From that team, John Hight went on to run Warcraft for a long time. And I think it was Phil Robb, Mike Booth and Chris Ashton who went on to Left 4 Dead. I remember John saying, "Hey, we're gonna go see Turtle Rock," and we played Left 4 Dead well before it was out, and it was just: make more of this, this is awesome. I'm not trying to name-drop. It just helps me reminisce about all the great talent I've had the privilege of learning from, and all of that contributed to where I went.

Alex (36:39)
I completely agree. I feel lucky about a lot of places I've worked, and it's less about what I did than what I learned. Westwood is a storied studio, and many successful people came out of it, including you.

When you left EA and moved over to Sony Santa Monica, where we worked together, what triggered that transition?

Harvard Bonin (37:17)
They didn't want me there anymore. That's what happened. It's a relevant topic given the latest rounds. I think a GDC survey reported that roughly a third of US game developers have been laid off or restructured in the last two years. I've gone through those transitions myself.

The first was the marketing company. That was tiny, and I was right out of college and didn't know what I was doing. Then EA, where I think I fell into "I don't know where my role is anymore" when they restructured. That was in 2007, and it was the first real one. Especially when you're younger in the business, you go, "What did I do wrong? Why is it me? Why was I picked over that person?" I was distraught for a while after the EA one.

Then came the one at God of War, when Sony Santa Monica halved itself, if you remember. That time I said, "OK, I'm going to mourn for a day, and then I'm getting back in the saddle." I did, and I started writing articles. Some of them are hilarious now when I look back. I wrote one about my layoff and its impact on the business.

And I was recently part of the restructuring at Xbox and Bethesda. It's been the best summer I've had in a long time. Part of that is where I am in life, asking whether I want to retire and what I want to do. But the capability of ChatGPT Astra is ridiculous, and I've treated this as an opportunity for personal growth. Talk to me in a year and maybe I'll feel differently.

To everyone who's been impacted, and it isn't stopping soon: it will be OK. You'll figure it out. Use the opportunity to sharpen your axe.

I'm busier now than I was at work. I'm using ChatGPT Astra to make a Roblox game for my kid. I can't code and I'm no artist. A producer is the jack of no trades. But at night I work with Astra and run a build through Roblox Studio, then call my twelve-year-old down from her bedroom: "Come on down, we're doing a game review." I play the level, she gives feedback and off she goes. It's a real bonding experience.

To anyone job hunting: use the time to train yourself. I use Claude to prep for interviews. And here's a funny one I'm going to share on LinkedIn next week. I reread a 2014 article I wrote on frameworks and wished I'd known then what I know now. So I had ChatGPT moderate a discussion between me now and 2014 me, which it played: "In 2014 you said this. What do you think now?" It's so fun.

Alex (42:08)
You're right, there's nothing stopping you from sharpening your skills, especially right now. I just built an app for my wife. I make her a compilation album every year.

Harvard Bonin (42:25)
You mean a mixtape?

Alex (42:28)
A mixtape, yeah. I make one every year to celebrate her remission birthday. She had cancer about twenty-three years ago, and since we've been together I've made her a mixtape every year, and I always try to change it up. This year I wondered whether I could build an app that gave her every album in one place, because each one has custom artwork and track listings. I used Claude to build it and gave it to her on the 27th of September, her "second birthday," as we call it. Now she has a portable version of every album. I couldn't have done that myself. If I'd sat down I could have learned enough code to do it, but not in that time. No way.

Harvard Bonin (43:12)
I'd never made a website in my life, and I made one in three hours.

Alex (43:19)
And it's slick, man. It looks good.

Harvard Bonin (43:22)
It's funny. Everyone's on their own AI journey, and I don't want to go too deep, because especially for your audience there are pressure points you have to be careful with, and probably rightfully so. But as a player, or just a user of things, the freedom to discover what it can do is amazing. You just have to go try it.

When you run into problems, you ask. The last example: I have a newsletter I send to myself every day that scours websites, the standard stuff. I had to figure out how Task Scheduler works and get into PowerShell to automate it. Every time I hit something I didn't know how to do, I just asked. It would say, "Send me a screenshot," and then, "Click that button and do this." That's it.

Alex (44:30)
Building the app reminded me of my early days in an engine, when my brain was on fire with everything I could add and change. It's infectious. And it's fascinating to hear that from someone in a production role. Not every producer has that fire, but you clearly do, even if you've put it to one side over time.

Harvard Bonin (45:19)
It just manifests in different ways. For the uninitiated, a framework is a project's milestone structure and its requirements: greenlight, first playable, vertical slice, some variant of those. Every team develops differently, yet they all kind of do it the same way. Creating and maintaining that is building something too, and I love it.

Going back to your trust point, a team will never respond well to something imposed on them. Everybody has their own version of what a vertical slice should be, so they have to be in the room. We used to hand developers a roadmap with alpha criteria, and they'd say OK, but it was always performative.

On one of the recent MachineGames projects we said, let's reset. Instead of telling you what you have to perform to, let's look at it together and define it. We'll have publisher guardrails, like you'll have X spend and it has to be within this timeframe. But we'll be much more lenient on the rest. If you say a vertical slice should do these things, nine times out of ten, if that's how you think the game is best made, let's do that.

That gets you away from the performative version, where the team paints by numbers, wink wink. Then publishing gets a build that doesn't do the thing: "I thought we agreed on that." "No, you gave us that. We were never gonna do that."

Alex (48:08)
I want to zero in on that, because I haven't spoken to many project managers on the podcast. A project manager has a wide view: phases, alphas, golds. In a creative field where games aren't a science, that's a hard relationship to navigate, internally and even more so externally. How do you handle creatives who don't want to tell you when they'll be done, often because it's genuinely hard to know?

Harvard Bonin (49:23)
No matter how many times you ask somebody, "When do you think you'll be done with that?", they'll go, "Well, if this happens and then this happens..." and they end up not giving you an answer, because they either truly don't know or they think even an estimate is a commitment.

Alex (49:43)
Yes, exactly.

Harvard Bonin (49:44)
You need that communication layer, and it goes back to building trust. Be clear about how we work: I need some version of this that tells me where we're going to land and at what quality, so I can set the lens for everyone who looks at what you deliver.

Developers often see production as a management layer that doesn't understand their plight. Now think about marketing, ops and legal, who have never worked on a dev team. They bring their own lens: do they think it's more finished than it is? You know it's a prototype, and someone says it clearly isn't market-ready. That's not what it was for.

So trust comes from working with people day to day. And if you get an estimate out of someone, you can't take what was clearly a best guess and hit them over the head with it later as punishment.

The other part is what I call tasting the soup along the way. There's never a version where you say something will take 30 days, one sprint, and at day 30 whoever's reviewing it looks at it for the first time. That's far too late. You taste the soup as it works through the sprint and give feedback along the way.

Same for milestones. Some studios still call them gates, and I used to think that way, until I realized it means delivering a milestone into the ether and waiting for feedback without moving forward. So I started saying: it's not Christmas Day, it's Christmas season. If you don't know what present you're getting at the end of that milestone or sprint, you did it wrong. You should know exactly what you're getting for Christmas.

These days I think of milestones like E-ZPass: you drive through the toll booth without stopping. Everything on a project is at a different level of done, so a stopping checkpoint isn't what really happens.

Alex (53:27)
I love that mentality. When you get to the date, nothing should be a surprise. It should be, "Yeah, we're good, we've already seen it, we've already had this conversation." Passing the date is almost a formality, because the conversations have happened all the way through.

I'm also curious about scope. Project management has a good handle on scope and feasibility. Us creatives have all sat there going, "Yeah, there's a lot, but we'll get it done, don't worry."

Harvard Bonin (54:16)
"Our secret sauce is gonna save us."

Alex (54:20)
And you're sitting there having seen enough games get made to know that X percent isn't going to get done. So who says that first? Probably not the developers. Do you have to? That must be tricky to navigate.

Harvard Bonin (54:43)
No, I don't say that. Typically the product owner does. There are a number of different roles for producers, but protecting the team is paramount. If you have a designer whose skill is making cool features and working with the team, you make sure that person is protected to do that and nothing else.

Another department, often operations, has a fire, their emergency becomes your emergency, and the designer gets pulled onto work that could have been planned for. A AAA title has twenty-odd operations areas, and about ninety percent of what they need is known from day one.

Alex (55:56)
Sorry, can you outline what you mean by operations? I'm not sure everyone will quite grok it.

Harvard Bonin (56:03)
Think of the development team as the earth. That's where the game is made, the thing you buy, the thing that excites and surprises you as a player, and where the blood, sweat and tears of creativity happen. Around it are satellites that support it: legal, QA, customer service, marketing, community, finance and many more. All of them have real needs that have to be accommodated.

Take compliance. Player-to-player communication rules vary by country and need dev support. If you knew you were having that feature, you knew that from day one. There's no excuse for another department to show up at the tail end and hand a developer work that jumps above everything else. It comes back to protecting the team.

At ZeniMax we introduced something, and you probably had a version of it at ZOS, called end-to-end readiness. For everything in operations, especially marketing, map all their requests to the development schedule now, and then curate that over time. Say a vertical slice is coming up: legal, you said you needed these things by then, how are we doing? Is there PR work coming that the dev team should know about so it can be planned in?

That's a long-winded operations explanation. It probably went over even my head.

Alex (58:21)
No, that's a really good synopsis. It's easy to forget the whole machine that gets a game from a studio server out into the world, compliant and shippable. And now that we're mostly digital, a lot of that is consistent from project to project.

Harvard Bonin (59:09)
You'll still get something out of left field, some new regulation, or you'll take it into a new market. But generally it's the known unknowns, whatever.

Alex (59:25)
The mostly known unknown knowns.

Harvard Bonin (59:29)
What was the original question?

Alex (59:33)
You were talking about protecting the team, and about not being the person who says you have to cut scope.

Harvard Bonin (59:50)
From a production standpoint, and maybe the EP role straddles this a bit, I've always felt my role, at least in later years, wasn't to decide what goes on the backlog and what doesn't. That's the product owner, when you run into trade-offs. How many times have you been in a sprint where it's, "Well, we didn't do that, we'll just put it in the next one"? I think that's some of the abuse and misuse of agile. Nothing is free. If a feature slips, something comes off the backlog, and you should be trimming the backlog as you go.

Crunch has inevitably been a subject. Less so in recent years, but it certainly was when I was at Sony Santa Monica.

Alex (1:00:51)
We've eaten a lot of pizza together, Harvard, on a lot of very late nights.

Harvard Bonin (1:00:57)
It has to be a core discipline that the producer makes sure everyone understands the repercussions. If you're going to slip something, be clear about what that means for the team. You might effectively be accepting that the team is going into crunch because the backlog hasn't been pruned and the feature set hasn't shifted. The team can't hold the publisher hostage with "you'll just have to move the date." That happens, of course, but you can't be hijacked into that role. You have to responsibly trim the backlog, and I think that falls to the product owner.

It depends on the team, though. My perspective tilts toward AAA development. On a mobile team or an indie team, with ten people or one person, who's making those decisions?

Back to Darkside, and this is hindsight from the outside, because I wasn't on that team. They'd just come off God of War III and had been given a lot of freedom and trust, because what a great game that was. But I think the best creative decisions come from limitations, guardrails and constraints. I'd like to hear what you think.

Alex (1:02:46)
A hundred percent. They come from constraints.

Harvard Bonin (1:02:48)
Give people all the time and money in the world creatively and they'll take it, and you might not get anything. Forcing decision points is where the best creative decisions come from.

Alex (1:03:02)
I agree. At its best, the framework is a positive forcing function: here's the deadline, here's what we have to deliver, so what are our priorities? Big-budget games today would be very hard to make without that structure. They'd go on forever and collapse under their own weight.

Harvard Bonin (1:03:49)
They would. If we're going to talk about the business a little, here are some facts I find interesting. During the pandemic I think the industry was at roughly $180 billion, and now we're up to roughly $214 billion. There was a lot of hiring in the pandemic, with some of the highest engagement we've seen. So one puzzle I've been trying to work out is: we're making roughly fifty billion more than we were then, with roughly 3.7 billion players globally, and we're not hiring, we're contracting. Why?

One thing I heard is that record revenue growth doesn't necessarily mean health. Especially in Western markets, the US, Canada and Western Europe, budgets have gone crazy. A AAA product is now often around $300 million, roughly. That's not sustainable. It's just not.

Sony Santa Monica is in one of the most expensive markets in the world, and God knows what the God of War budgets will be. Add a console costing roughly a thousand dollars or more, and Sony limiting its market by not being on PC, and I don't know how it's doable. Three years used to be a long dev cycle. Now some run five, with 400-person teams. Until budgets come under control, it won't be sustainable.

It's always been the case that the top game gets twice as much as the one underneath, but that's truer than ever now, and on top of that you have the forever games people are stuck to. It's going to be an interesting ride for studios and publishers. What are your thoughts?

Alex (1:06:42)
My big issue is that we're making too many games that are too big, and we're giving away too many games. You've got giant games that people can play for hundreds of hours without flinching...

Harvard Bonin (1:07:01)
With their friends.

Alex (1:07:02)
With their friends. Combine that with a bunch of games given away for free, which I think has devalued a chunk of the smaller, middle tier. I think that's why B-tier games have gone away. Why buy them? By the time you get around to it, they're free on Games with Gold or PlayStation Plus.

Harvard Bonin (1:07:21)
Or on sale. Steam has trained everybody to buy things on sale.

Alex (1:07:25)
My summary is that we're a snake eating its own tail, and it needs to correct.

I'm conscious of time, so a couple of last things I'd love to understand. Your journey through production into project management and where you are now: has it changed you as a human, and has it changed you as a gamer?

Harvard Bonin (1:07:51)
Certainly yes, I'd say. As a human, it wasn't the journey of the games, it was the journey of the teams and the people I worked with. I'd encourage anyone to be as self-reflective as they can and recognize that nobody's perfect and everybody has something to learn, and I'm at the top of that list.

Back in the olden days I was kind of a taskmaster, very gung-ho. When you only have a hammer, everything's a nail. Over the years I like to think my toolbox has become more of a Swiss Army knife. Recognizing the situation and which tool fits it is a quality worth having. I wouldn't say I'm great at it, but I'm conscious of it now.

Alex (1:09:13)
And as a gamer? Has it affected the way you play?

Harvard Bonin (1:09:19)
You mean, did it lose the magic when you saw behind the curtain?

Alex (1:09:26)
That's very open-ended. How would you interpret it?

Harvard Bonin (1:09:33)
I guess not. I've learned over the years which games I like more. I've never been into sports or racing games. I gravitate toward a particular genre, and that dovetails with your original question about what it is about games for me. It's the adventure of discovery. Other people have different motivations, and I get that, but we all gravitate toward certain things. I can't wait to play the new WoW. I'm super looking forward to it.

Games have been such a defining part of my life. I play them for fun and I do them for work. How many people get to say that, besides musicians and rock stars? That's pretty cool.

People always ask me how to get into making video games, and I'm like, are you sure you want to do that right now? You've had this experience, I'm sure: your nephew comes up and says, "I've got a great idea for a game, I can't wait to tell you about it," and you hear some derivative idea you've heard a thousand times. Nowadays I just tell people: go make it. The tools are there. Unreal 5 is free. All of this is free. And then there's the democratization of AI. I never would have been able to do what I'm doing with Roblox. That immediately took me back to when I was sending games into Atari as just write-ups on ideas. And now I can go do it. That is so awesome, and anybody can do it.

Alex (1:11:22)
I love that full-circle moment, from sending those ideas in to actually making the thing. Last question: if you weren't making games, Harvard, what would you do?

Harvard Bonin (1:11:37)
Probably nothing.

Alex (1:11:39)
[Laughs]

Harvard Bonin (1:11:40)
Nothing at all. I can't sit still, even now. I don't know what career it would be, but I'd want to build things, however that manifests. I can imagine being a woodworker or a carpenter, something like that.

Alex (1:12:05)
Something practical.

Harvard Bonin (1:12:06)
But that's in retrospect. I didn't know it then. Maybe when I retire. I keep looking at woodworking and thinking it looks fun and really challenging. Building the Roblox game, building the website, building procedures. Building, building, building is where I get my excitement, even from something as simple as frameworks. I don't think people see those as building things, but I think building something durable that can outlast you at a company is. They're still using that stuff now, and I'm not there.

Alex (1:12:43)
Just quickly, where do you think that building instinct comes from? Has it always been in you, or is it a learned skill?

Harvard Bonin (1:12:52)
It probably evolved over time. As you get older you realize who you actually are. When I was younger my parents instilled a work ethic in me, mowing lawns and all that. I think a lot of it comes from your upbringing and your parents, and maybe some people are just built that way. Born or bred, I don't know.

Alex (1:13:18)
I suspect it's in your DNA, Harvard. It's clearly such a driving part of you that I don't think it happened by chance.

Harvard Bonin (1:13:30)
I might as well credit my parents, since they'll probably see this at some point.

Alex (1:13:35)
Love it. Thank you, Harvard. Great conversation, and a really interesting exploration of topics we haven't covered much on the podcast so far. I really appreciate you sharing and opening up, and it's great to see you again.

Harvard Bonin (1:13:49)
It's always good to see you, Alex. Let's do it again. I'm available anytime you want to chat, even off camera.

Alex (1:13:55)
Love that.