I feel like a lot game development disaster stories are driven by teams not wanting to think, and manage themselves, like a large software development project. Defining system architectures and writing interface requirements documents doesn’t sound sexy, but that lack of a formalized agreement really hurt their Star Marine module’s delivery, and left who to blame open to interpretation. The part where they had an art summit and “thought everyone was on the same page” until it turned out they weren’t made me cringe. They didn’t formalize and impose those requirements to the team, and lo and behold they got something they couldn’t use.