At the beginning of a game project, everything seems possible. You start with notes scribbled on napkins, and sketches, and whiteboard flowcharts, and excited conversations with your co-workers about all the things you can envision it becoming. Sometimes you get lost while driving because you're so absorbed in designing a system or constructing a narrative that you literally forget that you exist somewhere outside the world of your game. But at some point along the way you begin to confront reality. That great idea you had in the shower can't be implemented, or at least not in the way you imagined. Things have to be cut not because there's a logic problem, but because the budget is running out, or a deadline is looming. This bright, brilliant thing that you dreamed at the beginning turns into meetings, and lists, and checkboxes, and spreadsheets, and deadlines, and deliverables. Suddenly it's 3:00 AM as you're staring at a computer monitor at your Sisyphean bug list, and you want to travel back in time to assassinate that imagination-drunk version of yourself that's committed you to living in this nightmare. You swear if you survive you'll never do this to yourself ever again...and yet you somehow always end up right back in the same place.
I can't recall any specific point at which John Cutter declared that we were in "crunch." We were all keenly aware during the last six months of Betrayal's production that we'd bitten off a project that might have been more ambitious than was entirely sane. We were months behind schedule, and significantly over budget. While the testers seemed to enjoy the beast we'd handed them, the world was far larger, the text more expansive, and the number of combinatorial possibilities of gear and strategic choice more complex than anything Dynamix had thus far handled. Gradually we'd all adjusted our lives to the longer hours, the truncated weekends, the cancelled plans. For most of the rest of the team the sacrifice was higher than my own because they had wives, and girlfriends, and children at home who needed them. For me, the only thing that required my attention was the world of Midkemia, and she was a very, very demanding mistress.
