Amid the rash of industry-wide mass layoffs over the last several years, which has seen studios shut down, sold off, split up, and gutted of experienced personnel one after another, I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of a video game studio. What is a video game studio? What does it mean for a studio under a particular name to work on a game? Why do we get excited when we hear that a certain studio is working on something? Is it because we liked things that studio has produced before? But is it really the same people each time?
It’s not, and we know it. Game studios are Ships of Theseus even under the best of circumstances. Video games are not like books, or music, where authorship generally remains the same from piece to piece. It’s far closer to the entertainment industry, where different films and TV shows will have different combinations of directors and producers and actors and writers and so forth. But I don’t think the entertainment industry is quite as precious about studios as video games are. When we hear a film is being produced by A24, we might think of A24’s past work and imagine that this new thing is likely to be of similar quality, but we won’t assume that it’s being made by the same talent that made A24’s prior productions, nor that it will be similar in tone or setting or casting or theme.
But in video games, we do often make those kinds of assumptions. For example, I’ve been thinking about Retro Studios. When we hear that Retro Studios is making Metroid Prime 4, we immediately think of the studio that made Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. I remember when the announcement was made, people were excited, because Tropical Freeze is thought of (rightfully) as an excellent game. This meant Metroid Prime 4 should also be just as excellent, right? It’s the same studio, the same people, the same experience, right?
Except it’s not. Not entirely, anyway.
I did a little experiment. I went to Mobygames and made myself a spreadsheet of all the individuals who worked on Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. Then, I pulled up Metroid Prime 4, and logged those names as well, comparing them to the first list to see who was new, who had left since Tropical Freeze, and who worked on both. For this experiment, just to keep it simple, I focused only on the individuals listed under the Retro Studios credits, and not any names credited under support studios or directly for Nintendo.
Tropical Freeze and Prime 4 came out just over a decade apart, so it’s natural that there would be some meaningful turnover. That said, Nintendo and its owned studios have some notoriety for retaining employees for a long time, and not undergoing layoffs. Some of that is due to Nintendo being a Japanese company and, thus, subject to different laws about that sort of thing, and while Retro Studios is based in the U.S., we haven’t heard anything about layoffs there. Theoretically, one might assume that a decent number of folks would have worked on both games, with the expectation of quite a few new hires in the leadup to Prime 4.
Before I tell you the results, take some guesses. Don’t look it up:
- How many individuals do you think left Retro Studios between Tropical Freeze and Prime 4?
- How many new individuals do you think Retro hired for Prime 4?
- Which departments do you think experienced the most turnover between games? The least?
- Do you think that the Retro Studios that made Metroid Prime 4 is the same Retro Studios that made Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze?
Write those answers down! We’ll come back to them. Now, let’s see what I learned from this exercise.
With data pulled from Mobygames, I recorded a total of 349 individuals at Retro Studios who were credited on Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, Metroid Prime 4, or both. As a note, there’s one instance where a name whose spelling and job title on both games leads me to think they’re the same person, but the last name has changed. I’ll acknowledge there may have been a few other, similar issues in counting during this process, but I do not think it impacted the data in a significant way.
As another note, I also recognize that crediting is a messy business, and many people do work on games but are not credited due to leaving the project early on or leaving under certain circumstances or due to stupid logistical errors or for any number of other reasons, so I understand this list is not a foolproof way to understand this problem. But it’s what we have, so it’s what we’re using.
Assuming 349, of that total, 102 worked on Tropical Freeze, and a whopping 307 worked on Metroid Prime 4. 60 people worked on both games, meaning Retro Studios lost 42 individuals between Tropical Freeze and Prime 4, and gained…247 new people. Three times as many people worked on Prime 4 as Tropical Freeze! That’s a massive upscale!
Of course, there are some asterisks on that, too. For instance, a lot of these roles are contract roles, so individuals who are not full-time employees of Retro Studios. Their work is still just as valid, but from an employment standpoint they won’t necessarily continue to be part of the studio after their work is finished. On Tropical Freeze, a handful of contractors each worked on art, animation, audio, design, engineering, production, technical animation, and testing, all alongside full-time workers. And there are a few examples of individuals listed as contractors across departments on Tropical Freeze who either came back as contractors again for Prime 4, or who moved into full-time roles.
Prime 4, however, uses far, far more contractors. In addition to the departments above, Retro also brought in contractors for all sorts of art specialty roles (light, environment, concept), contract writers, cinematics, storyboards, and more. In fact, the sheer number of contractors on Prime 4 kind of floored me! Tropical Freeze‘s credits have fewer contractors per department than full-time employees in almost every case (audio and testing being the two main exceptions). For Prime 4, several departments were almost nothing but contractors. The concept art team, for instance, has an art lead, two artists, one contract senior artist, and 31 contract concept artists. Lighting artists and cinematics were in a similar situation. By contrast, Tropical Freeze had 11 artists with no specialties listed in the credits, one art lead, one principal, two senior artists, and five art contractors. Some departments had to be created wholesale out of contractors for both games. Tropical Freeze‘s audio team, led by Scott Petersen and with music by David Wise, was staffed with contractors. So was the testing department. Both departments were similarly mostly made up of (different) contractors for Prime 4.
To be super clear: I’m not here to pass judgment on whether any of that is good or bad. I certainly think Prime 4 benefitted from just having more total artists and more specialized artists! But it’s a fascinating difference to me.
You can also get a good look at some other logistical and departmental changes at the studio this way. For example, Tropical Freeze credits seven people as “Operations” with no further details. Three of these people reappear for Prime 4 under “Special Operations & Support,” alongside 17 others, for a total of 20 individuals. It takes a lot of people to keep a studio three times the size it was before running smoothly!
One thing that becomes apparent, looking at the sheet like this, is which departments had more or less turnover. The engineering team, for instance, almost entirely stuck around from Tropical Freeze to Prime 4, with only two folks out of 18 listed in the credits for the former but not the latter (four more were bumped to Special Thanks, though, indicating they may be gone now). Art, as mentioned above, is significantly spottier.
Another fun thing to look at here is studio leadership. Michael Kelbaugh, the executive producer on Tropical Freeze, is now the president and CEO of Retro. Ryan Harris, the production director for Tropical Freeze, was credited as “Studio Operations & Support” on Prime 4. Vince Joly, the creative director for Tropical Freeze, left Retro a while ago and is just credited as Special Thanks on Prime 4. Tim Little, Tropical Freeze‘s VP of engineering & technology, seems to have left the company in 2022. Bill Vandervoort, a senior designer on Tropical Freeze, got a promotion to design director on Prime 4. It’s actually just generally fun to see all the names that were promoted between games, because there are quite a few. Congrats to you all!
Finally, there are 13 people who had roles in some department or another on Tropical Freeze, who appear on Prime 4 under “Special Thanks,” alongside 36 others who weren’t on Tropical Freeze. This could mean absolutely anything, but my hunch is that the former group did some work for Prime 4, but left the studio at some point before it came out. A couple of the folks in that group appear to still be at Retro per LinkedIn, which makes me wonder if they’ve been put on some other project (or just haven’t updated their profile in a while) but that’s all just speculation.
There’s a lot more you can glean, actually, from closely examining these credits, and I’d encourage you to look through them (or the credits for other games by other studios you like!) when you have the time. But in the meantime, let’s revisit those questions from before:
- How many individuals do you think left Retro Studios between Tropical Freeze and Prime 4?
- How many new individuals do you think Retro hired for Prime 4?
- Which departments do you think experienced the most turnover between games? The least?
- Do you think that the Retro Studios that made Metroid Prime 4 is the same Retro Studios that made Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze?
I’ve given you answers for the first three: 42, 247, art, and engineering. But that last question is the one I want to really focus on, because it’s a subjective one. I don’t think the Retro Studios that made Metroid Prime 4 is not the studio that made Tropical Freeze, but it’s certainly starkly different in a lot of key ways. It’s three times bigger, relies more heavily on contract labor, is far more specialized, and requires a lot more support. That’s not shocking. Metroid Prime 4 is a bigger game, and it seems to have had a hell of a development cycle. The credits will never tell the full story.
But what they do tell us is what we already know but often forget: video games are made by human beings. Very rarely are they made by one, single human being with one, singular vision. They’re made up of a collective, all pushing together toward a common goal, and that collective can shift and change dramatically over time, even in what seem to be (relatively) stable circumstances. Those changes are, in some respects, natural: people leave jobs for all sorts of reasons, new hires are made, and the studio changes shape together. New identities emerge from the old, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker, sometimes just different. That’s collective art!
I don’t have a good answer for when one can say definitively that a studio has changed so much as to no longer be what it was, because like the famous ship-themed thought experiment, there isn’t a good, definitive answer. But I do think there’s a slightly stronger argument to be made for the ship no longer being the ship when Moby Dick or whoever takes a giant chomp out of it suddenly and all at once. Time may not be the enemy of studio identity necessarily, but mass layoffs certainly seem to be. At the end of all this (because surely, there must be an end?), I hope we can still recognize the ships that remain.
