Ten years since Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory shipped

2005 was a crazy year. It feels almost surreal it&#x27;s been ten years.<p>Chaos Theory was one of the first games to use DirectX 9.0c&#x2F;Shader Model 3.0. A couple months later, Battlefield 2 was released. A few months after that, F.E.A.R. and Age of Empires 3. By the end of that year, X3: Reunion. All of these games had incredible graphical fidelity for their time, and the remarkable thing was that for the most part, they weren&#x27;t just glorified tech demos.<p>From 2004 to 2007, it really felt like a renaissance in graphics. Far Cry and the UE3 demo in 2004 served to kick it off. During 2007-2009, things sort of solidified in a sense, locking us in to this weird post-modern level of graphical fidelity that&#x27;s stayed more or less evolutionary ever since.<p>Hopefully there will be another golden age. Perhaps VR will lead the charge this time, rather than the GPU.<p>---<p>Also, Amon Tobin&#x27;s score for Chaos Theory was excellent. IMHO, it played a huge role in making the game what it was. Even today, you rarely see scores so eccentric, let alone in AAA titles.

While I can understand Clint&#x27;s concerns, I am very wary about his conclusion that his memory loss is a <i>direct</i> result of his stressful job. He doesn&#x27;t mention if he ever saw a neurologist.. it&#x27;s possible he had a &quot;silent stroke&quot;.<p><a href="http://www.webmd.com/stroke/news/20061009/can-you-have-stroke-not-know" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.webmd.com&#x2F;stroke&#x2F;news&#x2F;20061009&#x2F;can-you-have-strok...</a>

After working in software development for over 10 years I&#x27;ve been part of many late nights, weeks and even months before. Every time I have to work well over the normal 40 hours many things start deteriorating. I am tired all the time, the quality of my work goes significantly down and I certainly have issues concentrating and remembering things. I&#x27;ve had weeks where I&#x27;ve worked 100 hours and I&#x27;d be surprised if I was 50% effective as I was working around 40 hours.<p>Stress sucks and it ruins so much.

I experienced the same thing with my startup. My vocabulary started to deteriorate, my memory was shit, and it was taking me longer to calculate tips.<p>This is very alarming for a previously &quot;smart&quot; person.<p>I ended up retreating to a small town in the mountains and it took about 3 years for my brain to heal.

Every week we get a new article about a developer&#x27;s battle with burnout and too many hours, and they always get filled with replies from other developers with their own stories that are largely the same, and I&#x27;m sure there are 10x as many people who have been through it themselves as well and never comment.<p>And yet it still continues to be a problem.<p>I&#x27;m starting to think we only have ourselves to blame. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Why do we continue to let companies treat employees so poorly? Hell, why do we continue to start our own companies where we treat <i>ourselves</i> so poorly? If we can&#x27;t have a little respect for ourselves, how are we going to expect some middle-manager at a gigantocorp to care?<p>No more long hours. Stop it! I don&#x27;t care how exciting your startup is. The work will be there tomorrow. No, you aren&#x27;t trying to beat someone to market. Hire more people. If you can&#x27;t afford more people, then you can&#x27;t afford the project. Because you&#x27;re going to pay, one way or another.<p>I used to do it, too. I used to work 60, 80 hours a week, especially when I first started freelancing. I&#x27;d get burnt out and started goofing off during the normal busy hours. Then I&#x27;d feel like I had to make up for it, so I worked more.<p>I had to just stop doing it. I was lying to people. I was saying &quot;on yeah, the work is done&quot;, and then staying up until 3am to finish it so they could have it the next day. I was lying to myself, &quot;you can make up for this, and then everything will be back to normal.&quot;<p>I finally just stopped lying. I finally just told people, &quot;no, that&#x27;s not done&quot;. I took my lumps. And it wasn&#x27;t that bad. I didn&#x27;t lose any clients. They didn&#x27;t even express disappointment. It was just, &quot;oh, okay, let us know when it&#x27;s ready.&quot;<p>By forcing myself to work NOT work OUTSIDE of a normal schedule, I also grew a much more healthy respect for the normal schedule. I don&#x27;t goof off during the regular busy hours anymore. Work time is for work, because I don&#x27;t want leisure time to be for work. I set the schedule, regardless of who thinks they set the schedule. If people say, &quot;we need it sooner than that&quot; I just tell them, &quot;sorry, I can&#x27;t.&quot; It&#x27;s when you stay up the late hours and make miracles happen that they start expecting it.

Looking back at when I was a kid, these games and products felt like something that simply always existed as though they were a force of nature, something created by a huge faceless team that knew what they were doing.<p>Being in the industry myself now, what amazes me most is almost every one of these great forces of nature was actually the result of one leader burning themselves right to the ground in order to get it done. In some cases, it&#x27;s a small handful of people, but even then there&#x27;s usually one that takes the whole thing on their shoulders even above the rest.<p>It helps further the old saying &quot;if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.&quot;

Just a random aside: What&#x27;s also interesting about Splinter Cell Chaos Theory from a security point of view is that it was one of the hardest games to crack, ever. It was protected with a beefed up version of Starforce 3, and iirc it took around a year for a proper crack to come out, which is a huge achievement considering most games are cracked the day they are released.

I have been through something similar, when facing very tight deadlines. The most recent was in 2012. It was the first project where I had ever worked with Clojure, had ever worked with the JVM, had ever worked with &quot;functional&quot; concepts. I had to learn a great deal in a hurry, and the hours were crazy. I got very sleep.<p>I developed weird memory issues, in particular about people&#x27;s names. I could remember details about people -- where I knew them from, what they did, but their names went completely. This included some people who were close to me, so there was a scary feeling of the memory loss being strange and almost like dementia.<p>I have rarely had to learn so much in such a short amount of time, and for awhile it was literally as if each new thing I learned was pushing something else out of memory, as if my brain was full and I could only learn new things by erasing something else.<p>Thankfully, the project ended, I got some sleep, and a few months later I felt normal again.

The 2v2 SC:PT and SC:CT online multiplayer was the absolute best. It was asyemntrical, well balanced, and required good communication with your partner.<p>I&#x27;ve never been able to replicate that experience in another game.<p>Someone tried to clone it but never took off: <a href="http://www.projectstealthgame.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.projectstealthgame.com&#x2F;</a><p>Best wishes to OP for the game and (at least) giving me fond memories.

I was 11 when this game came out. My brother bought it for us to play and I have to say, even as an 11 year old I could tell this game was unique - I have never seen such a well designed game since the release of Chaos Theory. Everything about this game was fantastic. I&#x27;d definitely buy a &quot;anniversary edition&quot; if they made one.

Splinter Cell is probably my favourite game franchise. This gives me more respect for the people who make it happen :)

It really bothers me that so many people in this thread are talking about the game, their formative experiences with it, how much they enjoyed it, and not the man and his health issues caused by the unreasonable expectations set upon him by his employer. Right now, the only thing the top comment has in common with the original article is that they both mention &quot;Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory&quot;.<p>It bothers me on one aspect because the article is only tangentially about the game, so this talk about the game is really all off-topic and distracting from the bigger issue of healthful work-life balance. But even worse than that is the aspect that it is because of this single-minded attitude on the consumer side that employers like Ubisoft put this sort of pressure on their employees.

I can&#x27;t help but notice the post date is almost 2AM (after talking about late nights).

What a fantastic game that was, with an even more fantastic soundtrack. I wish they thought about a Remaster edition for the newest gen consoles.