The Dream Architects - David Polfeldt - 2020

Adventures in the Video Game Industry







By: David Polfeldt

Narrated by: Matt Wolfe

Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins

Unabridged Audiobook

Release date: 09-01-20

Language: English

Genre: Biographies & Memoirs, Professionals & Academics

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Format: mp3 64/48 stereo







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.



©2020 David Polfeldt (P)2020 Grand Central Publishing



Critic Reviews



"THE DREAM ARCHITECTS is a fascinating look at Swedish game development and a peek behind the curtain of one of the most interesting video game publishers in the world. Full of colorful characters and political machinations, this memoir is a charming collection of anecdotes that highlight the struggles of balancing artistic endeavors with financial realities - and what it's like to spend a week eating bugs in the woods." (Jason Schreier, nationally best-selling author of Blood, Sweat, and Pixels)



"If you have any interest in learning about what happens behind the scene of game-making, you must read THE DREAM ARCHITECTS. In these pages, David Polfeldt provides a refreshingly candid exposé of the highs and lows that game developers experience in their quest to fulfill their dreams. This is a rare glimpse at the inner workings of one of the defining entertainment medium of this century." (Pat Plourde, Ubisoft Editorial VP)



"THE DREAM ARCHITECTS is an amazing, first-hand account of the incredible highs and terrible lows found in the production trenches of the games industry. David's insights on creative leadership and the magic-making of game development are second to none." (Martin Walfisz, entrepreneur and investor, founder of Massive Entertainment)











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