Like making movies, making a video game is a dream job for millions of people. I tried myself (unsuccessfully) to get into the industry but as I have gotten older (and hopefully wiser), I have come to realize that a job is a job.

Making a game may be your "dream" but the job is still plain old hard work and there are often a lot of unsavory politics involved. Especially with big companies.

This post and the comments on Gamasutra is a great read. An example:

A Designer who had originally built only 1 mission on Halo was promoted by then manager John Batter, who had a hard on for Hollywoodesque big talent. John poured milliions into James Bond over Medal of Honor. This mean that less experienced personal got bigger salaries than the MOH teams. The designer "Dan Orzlak" experience on 1 mission in Halo was quickly used to calm DANJAQ's butterflies. He was promoted to Design Director. Although very personable, he only understood Halo's systems superficially. Why? Beause he was never a system's designer. Boom, fast forward to the next project.

The Producer pretty boy from marketing (insert his name) and Dan came up with a game called "vertical" that never saw the light of day. Neil young then moved them to Tiberium. While Neil squashed the old guard and created his own kingdom, FEAR fell upon all those working on Tiberuim. In other words no one wanted to make a design decision.

5 years later, Dan and team had changed the weapons 5 times. Hired a myriad of clown hack jr designers, all who wanted to be the "AI designer!" Dan was let go, and in came Tim Coolidge, who left after 2 weeks.

It seems like a slam dunk - take Command&Conquer, one of the biggest RTS franchises in game history, and create a first-person shooter out of it. The backstory is already written and the universe is familiar to customers. All you have to do is write some missions, build some levels, and pick an engine...

Or not.

Making video games may be a dream job but not all video-game jobs are a dream. Sadly.