The Dream Architects: Adventures in the Video Game Industry [Audiobook]

The inside story of the booming video-game industry from the late 1990s to the present, as told by the managing director of Ubisoft's Massive Entertainment (The Division, Far Cry 3, Assassin's Creed: Revelations).

At Massive Entertainment, a Ubisoft studio, a key division of one of the largest, most influential companies in gaming, Managing Director Polfeldt has had a hand in some of the biggest video game franchises of today, from Assassin's Creed to Far Cry to Tom Clancy's The Division, the fastest-selling new series this generation that revitalized the Clancy brand in gaming.

In The Dream Architects, Polfeldt charts his course through a charmed, idiosyncratic career that began at the dawn of the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox era - from successfully pitching an Avatar game to James Cameron that will digitally create all of Pandora to enduring a weeklong survivalist camp in the Scandinavian forest to better understand the post-apocalyptic future of The Division.

Along the way, Polfeldt ruminates on how the video-game industry has grown and changed, how and when games became art, and the medium's expanding artistic and storytelling potential. He shares what it's like to manage a creative process that has ballooned from a low-six-figure expense with a team of a half-dozen people to a transatlantic production of 500 employees on a single project with a production budget of more than a hundred million dollars.

A rare firsthand account of the golden age of game development told in vivid detail, The Dream Architects is a seminal work about the biggest entertainment medium of today.