Take Two has grown substantially over the 23 years since Ripper’s release. Five of its games, including Grand Theft Auto, are in the collection at the Library of Congress. Ripper, even with its all-star cast and its boast of containing the first audible “fuck” in a videogame, didn’t make the cut. The last time I heard about Ryan Brant, he had made headlines for writing bad checks to pay for a painting he bought at a charity auction. The fundraisers had to sue Brant to get him to settle up. And then in March of 2019, tragedy struck: Brant, a father of four, died of cardiac arrest. He was 49.

Take Two claims its latest title, Red Dead Redemption II “is the second-highest grossing launch of all time.” But before the title debuted last year, an article published in New York magazine detailed the game's intense production cycle and spurred controversy among employees. Dan Houser, cofounder of Rockstar Games, a subsidiary of Take Two, talked about the "100-hour weeks" he worked in the final stage of game development. Employees took to social media, sharing stories of months of "crunch" time, in which long hours and weekends on the clock are expected. Rockstar fielded similar complaints, and even a petition-style post from employee spouses, in 2010 just before the release of the original Red Dead Redemption.

Handy sees an industry in need of a reckoning. “It’s not amenable to society or to workers. There can’t be a 120-hour work-week. The only way we’re going to get out of this is preservation.” Handy believes that videogame archiving and a healthier work environment are inextricably linked. His thesis is that if the gaming industry built up assets, they could be reused. Then, the tools that are currently proprietary and licensed could be released as open-source software. Each game wouldn’t have to be built from scratch, and that would save everybody time. This already happens in other industries. “There are banking applications out there written in Cobol that are older than we are.”

I kept thinking back to the memories of Quinto Martin, Ripper’s 3D artist. “I went out to LA and work was 100 percent of my life. I did 3D work for a bunch of games. It’s all this labor that just spits you out. I worked on Freakboy, Propaganda, and Escape from LA, which were all cancelled after years of development,” he says. “One night I was hanging out with my roommate and we were talking about how there has to be more to our lives than what we were experiencing. That’s when I made the decision to get out.”

Martin moved to Pittsburgh, where he ran a tattoo parlor. In 2008, he started teaching online classes in game art and design and is also an instructional designer at Seton Hill University, a small liberal arts college about 30 miles east of Pittsburgh. “I think about the work I did, and it’s just bits. There’s nothing tangible.” Now a father of seven, Martin tells me he doesn’t play videogames anymore. “They’re too much of a time suck. I can see the schematics right away, the illusion of choice, and honestly the games all look alike now.”

For the last seven years Martin has spent his free time in the impressive barnlike workshop he built behind his house where he has found his passion in smithing metal. He wanted to craft something with his hands, something that lasts. “Now,” he says, “I make knives.”

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