Indie studio Mega Cat will be displaying its retro-management sim – Fork Parker’s Crunch Out at Pax West this year. Devolver Digital has the publishing rights for the game, made exclusively for the SNES.

In Fork Parker’s Crunch Out, you play as the executive of a video game company pushing employees and developers to their limits in order to meet the deadlines. Having read a fair amount of articles and books on the struggles, I can say I have an idea of how things work in the video game industry.

The term crunch is used in the industry when company executives and publishers push its employees to work overtime, almost 80-100 hours a week, to meet the target release dates. Crunching developers often disbalances their physical and mental health conditions, leading to burnouts and extreme fatigue.

Fork Parker’s Crunch Out tries to illustrate the never-ending but consequential conditions at video game companies, in order to spread awareness. The game’s about raising capital, questionably motivating errant employees, keeping profits in the black and paying interns in experience, which happens in almost every industry, as interns are seldom treated as working humans.

Devolver Digital and Mega Cat will be donating 100% of its profits to the non-profit charity Take This, which is constantly working to spread awareness about mental health and mental illness prevention.

Fork Parker’s Crunch Out will be playable at Booth #654.

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