Growing Pains

If Jones's gambit was predictable, so was the company's response: Grow up. Finish what you start. Prove yourself. Then we'll talk. This was no idle career feint by Jones, nor was it a disciplinary move by THQ. This was a big deal. The company hopes that Aidyn will help vault it into the ranks of the most-respected video-game companies. The game is a mystical role-playing fantasy, the most difficult kind of game to make -- "the biggest long shot of all," as Jones describes it. It requires a huge team: two producers, backed by eight testers, all of whom are dedicated to the game at THQ's Calabasas Hills headquarters, as well as 33 more people at its studio in Vancouver and freelancers on contract in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. Aidyn Chronicles has already developed a cultlike following that is based on little more than screen shots and game descriptions that have been posted on the Web -- even though Jones estimates that nearly a thousand bugs in the game have yet to be fixed.

How should Jones interpret the Vancouver assignment? Is it a vote of confidence in him or a form of exile? He hopes it won't be THQ's final offer. THQ hasn't offered what he'd hoped for: a blank check to produce the video game of his dreams. Nor did he get a new job title. He got Vancouver. Rather than getting a promotion, he got one more chance to prove himself worthy of a promotion.

Jones's unhappiness and uncertainty wouldn't much matter if the future of the company didn't ride on shoulders like his. But it does, which means that both Jones and his decision represent a dilemma that is central to any company facing rapid growth: How do you keep your best, most crucial people happy when the inner culture of a company is changing so radically that the old ways of motivating, organizing, and measuring success no longer work?

Jones and his fellow game producers are the fulcrum of the whole operation. As Brian Farrell, THQ's 46-year-old CEO, put it: "The single most important thing for a company like ours is to marry the creative side with the business side." The shock troops for the battle waged among video-game companies are the game producers, the ones who stay faithful to the creative vision and the quality of a product while constantly eyeing costs and signing milestone payments to the people who create the games. In the figure of the producer, in the work of people like Jones, a company stands or it falls.

In December 1994, Jones was introduced to THQ by a friend. Jones was hired and lived a producer's life during crunch time: 18 hours of work, 6 hours of sleep, day after day, for weeks on end. He established what was a long-standing record for the most consecutive hours of work without sleep at THQ: 36. He worked so hard that his eyes would start to play tricks on him. He learned the business by working in the trenches, and he studied other games to learn how to "break," or solve, them. In the process, he learned how to make them. As a producer, he has put that knowledge to good use, "tuning," or sprucing up, timeworn titles into marketable new games.

"Easy to learn, hard to master," Jones says. "That's the fundamental rule -- for the games and for the job."

Jones has earned his chops. He is one of the company's best producers. His first assignment when he took the job as a producer was to tune Madden '97 into Madden '98. It was a small investment for big returns and a key to THQ's success. He did it so well, so easily -- tweaking the game simply by updating the player roster, by changing viewer angles, and by putting in a transparent menu scheme -- that the game felt both familiar and new to users. And it made good money, even when newer, more-powerful platforms and video games were edging the old-platform games off the shelf. He did the same with other games, including Road Rash 64 and Nuclear Strike 64. And he's attempting to do the same thing again, with an original, one-off game built from scratch: Aidyn Chronicles. It will be designed for Nintendo 64, just as that platform seems to have died in the market -- a gutsy move and a big risk for THQ. This game isn't being tuned into completion. It's a major, original, creative undertaking.

To complete the job, Jones, in a sense, must transform himself.