Navigating the Gaming Industry With Sucker Punch’s Chris Zimmerman

February 6, 2024

Navigating the Gaming Industry With Sucker Punch’s Chris Zimmerman

Chris Zimmerman is the Co-founder of Sucker Punch Productions, a video game developer best known for creating action games for PlayStation consoles. A renowned figure in the video game industry, Chris has been instrumental in producing iconic titles such as Sly Cooper, inFAMOUS, and the critically acclaimed Ghost of Tsushima. Before his venture into Sucker Punch, Chris spent a decade at Microsoft, where he worked on various projects. In addition to his contributions to gaming, Chris has extended his expertise to the realm of programming wisdom. He authored The Rules of Programming, a book that distills Sucker Punch's programming insights into easily digestible and applicable rules.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Chris Zimmerman discusses his tenure at Microsoft
What inspired Chris to start Sucker Punch?
Recruiting and hiring for a video game startup
Chris on autonomy, work culture, and company values
The challenges of retaining talent in the gaming industry
Sucker Punch’s effective recruiting and team management strategies
Chris reflects on his career triumphs and challenges

In this episode…

Operating a video game studio comes with unique challenges and triumphs. While the journey begins with inspiration, the venture is more than passion and a love for crafting engaging gaming experiences.

Known for its fast-paced evolution, the gaming industry grapples with the challenges of retaining top talent. Finding the right talent is crucial to bringing creative visions to life, and studio head Chris Zimmerman shares insights into the intricate process of building a skilled and dedicated team. In navigating the dynamics of autonomy, work culture, and company values, Chris emphasizes fostering a collaborative and innovative environment. He highlights the strategies to overcome these hurdles and keep teams motivated and committed.

In this insightful episode of the Here’s Waldo podcast with Lizzie Mintus, Chris Zimmerman, the Co-founder of Sucker Punch Productions, delves into the inspiration behind launching the renowned gaming studio. Discover the intricacies and challenges of recruiting top talent for a video game company, and gain valuable insights into effective strategies for retaining team members in the world of game development.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by Here’s Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in the video game industry that prioritizes quality over quantity and values transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs and provide a white-glove experience that ensures a win-win outcome.

The industry evolves. The market changes. But at Here’s Waldo Recruiting, our commitment to happy candidates and clients does not.

We understand that searching for the best and brightest talent can be overwhelming, so let our customer-first staff of professionals do the leg work for you by heading over to hereswaldorecruiting.com.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together, we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique video game recruitment firm. This is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about what it takes to be successful. You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs. We provide a white glove experience that ensures a win outcome.

Today we have Chris Zimmerman with us. Chris started the video game studio Sucker Punch with some friends in 1997. These are Chris's words, "somewhat miraculously" there's still a lot of 26 years later with Three Sly Cooper Games, Three Infamous Games, and the Samurai Open World Game, Ghosts of tsushima, to show for it. Let's get started. Thanks for your humor and self deprecating introduction.

I want to start at the beginning of your career and work our way up. So you joined Microsoft in 1988. Did they recruit you out of college?

Chris Zimmerman: They did. Yeah, I got interviewed. I did undergrad at Princeton and they came on campus and interviewed. Like anyone listening to your podcast can completely do the math and figure out how old I am at this point. And the answer is very old. Yeah, 1987, I suppose I got interviewed on campus by Microsoft, flew out to Seattle to do an interview and decided that was the job I wanted. So I've been out here ever since.

Lizzie Mintus: How big was the company then? What was the state of Microsoft?

Chris Zimmerman: It was like 2000 people when I started. It was crazy. I was there during the craziest part of Microsoft, right? I was like employee 2500 or so, maybe. And when I left 9 years later, it was 25,000. 10 times as many people. People don't have an idea of how disruptive and how innovative Microsoft was at that point, how different it was than the other big computer software companies. Anything from hiring practices to the way work was organized to the ambition of the teams- now people have this idea of Microsoft being relatively stayed and conservative giant. But when I joined, it was not that at all. It was just a bunch of relatively young people trying to change the world. And it was really fun.

I talked to other companies when I was recruiting that were more traditional. They'd been around for a while. Companies like HP or Belt Labs, Microsoft at that point had a real kind of aggressive startup mentality. So it was a really fun place to work at the beginning of my career. There was room for me to go off and do really cool things that maybe wouldn't have been there if I'd been at a company that was more established and didn't have this explosive hyper growth where there were so many new people all the time that, after three or four years, I was an old timer. It was a neat environment to learn how to be a professional software developer.

Lizzie Mintus: How did you deal with all of that growth? How did you ingest 22,000 people over the time you were there? And you still managed to do well.

Chris Zimmerman: I didn't know any different . That was the only environment I'd ever known. I had jobs before, but not like a big, official tech company job. So I just assumed that's the way they all worked. I knew they weren't, but I think of my first company meeting at Microsoft. There were questions from the audience for whoever was on stage, Bill Gates or whoever, and one of the questions was- someone got upset because they were required to wear shoes in the hallway. I told you the story. On my first day of work, I was talking to my mom and she was like, Chris, what are you going to wear to your first day of work? And I was like, tennis shoes?

And she's said, no, Chris, you have to wear grown up clothes. You're going to a job now and I was like, no, mom, you haven't been there. I will wear penny loafers tomorrow. I will dress like a grownup tomorrow, but, only one day. After that, it's tennis shoes and hoodies, the Mark Zuckerberg, proto fashion approach there in 1988.

Anyhow, crazy time. You look back and you're like, oh my God, it was so long ago. And things were so different.

Lizzie Mintus: What do you think was your biggest learning from your time at Microsoft?

Chris Zimmerman: Oh, wow. That's tough. I think a lot of people that your first couple of years at a job can be pretty formative, right?

Where it's your first time working in that sort of environment. That transition from what's ultimately a social environment when you're in school, or maybe a part time job, to a professional environment, take some adjustments. I was 22.

My brain wasn't fully formed. Understanding or appreciating the difference between the way I perceive myself and the way other people around me perceive me, you're not really forced to confront that when you're in college. But when you're locked in a room with people working on something 40 hours a week, you have to fix these things.

You can't just not hang out with the people that you're not getting along with. For me, that meant understanding and tempering some of the things I was doing or the ways I was approaching things, ways I would talk about things. My intentions might have been good, but it wasn't being perceived as in the way that I wanted it to be. So I had to be a little bit careful about that or be a little bit more aware of how I was working with other people in a way that I didn't when I was in college. That was more of a personal growth thing.

You learn a lot about how to define a project or ways in which you can fail. When I was at Microsoft, because my time at Microsoft was really rewarding and interesting. But it didn't result in a lot of successful products. I was drawn to working on things that were more aggressive, more ambitious, less version M plus one of something that the company had done before. Microsoft isn't really great at that- wasn't at the time I was there, isn't really now. They're great at, especially when I was there doing the second version or the third version of something.

The first version is harder. It's a different sort of problem. But that's the sort of problems I like solving. So I was always drawn to those projects and swimming upstream a little bit in Microsoft culture .I'm sure it's changed into 25 years since I've been gone. But it was a little bit of uphill climb to try to get new, interesting things done it was only marginally successful. But in the process, you see why that was hard for Microsoft. Why Microsoft's culture, which at that point was very a argumentative consensus, where the core concept of Microsoft at that point was that it was very engineering driven at that point, less so now the concept at that point was. We're just gonna get a bunch of smart people in the room and they'll discuss the problems and the issues and the consensus will form.

And that's what we'll go do. That can work, but only if there is a consensus that forms. If there isn't, it's pretty tough. It's hard to do things that are different where there's not an obvious answer. If you're doing, at that point the second version of Word for Windows, right? You've got a ton of customer data you can build on. It's pretty easy to look at that and say, here are the things that the people want that we don't have or things that people are confused by. Let's go fix them. But if you're doing version 1 of something, there isn't that right there maybe isn't even an obvious market for what you think you want to build. You're just good to guessing. It's hard to do that in a kind of an engineering consensus organization because there's no evidence. So it was tough to do really brand new things. So it was a little bit frustrating for me.

Lizzie Mintus: So you were at Microsoft and then what led you to start Sucker Punch? Talk to me about that journey.

Chris Zimmerman: I'd grown frustrated with Microsoft. My role at Microsoft at that point, my maybe self appointed role at Microsoft, was trying to make interesting things happen. Microsoft's culture at the time, being this sort of collaborative thing, the stuff I was interested in tended to span groups. That meant, a lot of time working across group boundaries to try to drive a consensus on something. And honestly, it's hurting cats, where you've got to get everybody to agree that this is the right thing for us to be doing next. And even after you develop that consensus, you have to maintain the consensus afterwards while you're in the middle of doing this thing. Once they leave the room, everybody skitters out of control. You're always spending all this time talking to people, trying to keep this consensus going until the thing is far enough along that it's obviously going to work. And, oh, my God, is that tiring, right?

So it's just tracking people down and making sure that everyone's still on the same page. And at some point I'm like, I do not want to do that again. That was just too much work. I want to be in a canoe where everyone is rowing in the same direction. It seemed like the easiest way to do that was just to split off and go start a company to do something. And I think the other thing that was going on, so there was this frustration with the environment and that I was swimming against the current a little bit.

This was the late 90s, so this is during the kind of antitrust stuff with Microsoft when it looked like Microsoft was going to take over the world. It was before there were other people were also involved. I felt like I was not necessarily working for the good guys. Was I in meetings where we talked about extending the windows monopoly into other products? Absolutely.

I didn't feel like I was necessarily on the right side. I was fighting for the empire at that point. I wanted to fight for the rebellion. And again, it felt like starting a company was a good way to do that. I knew we wanted to start a company. I was there to gather some friends to do this. And it seemed like actually building games would be fun. So I came into the games business from a really weird angle. I had grown up learning how to program by making games. I've been a gamer my whole life. Not my whole life, because video games weren't invented when I was born, but, a large part of my life I was a gamer.

So there was that draw, but in some ways, the decision to make a game company was a practical one. We started Sucker Punch because there was this whole ecosystem to support companies like Sucker Punch at that time, in the 90s, early 2000s, where you had a lot of small independent video game developers that would build product. And then you'd find a publisher to put it on into the market. We felt like we knew how to make products. It was nice that there was somebody else who was going to take care of all the business stuff. At least that was our kind of naive idea about how the industry worked at that point, but it seemed like it made sense.

The scale was about right. We could have our first game, Rocket Robot on Wheels. We had 17 people at peak. Not a big studio, but for the time it was not small. We could still do something that was competitive in the world marketplace for Nintendo 64 games. It was a practical decision as much as a decision driven by the emotional draw of making video games.

Lizzie Mintus: And where did your co founders come from?

Chris Zimmerman: All from Microsoft.

Lizzie Mintus: None of you came from the game industry?

Chris Zimmerman: Nobody. All the people that had games industry experience were were hires. The founders were all programmers from Microsoft. Cause that was my peer group. Let's see Brian Plumbing, he's the studio head at Sucker Punch now and was co founder. What Microsoft calls a program manager, so like a technical design plus product management role. But he's also a programmer, so it wasn't that different.

We had six programmers at the very beginning, and then all the people on the creative side, we recruited from outside. I can't believe what any of them were thinking. I know them now. I'm still friends with them. The people that were like carrying out McGee was hired employee number one at Sucker Punch. I can't imagine how she managed to decide that this was actually a reasonable decision to come join these engineers. I thought they were going to build a video game, but thankfully she did. So did the people that followed her and. We built that side of the company up, not from people we knew, but from people we interviewed and hired.

Lizzie Mintus: They did a lot of recruiting from outside of your network.

Chris Zimmerman: Absolutely, had to be.

Lizzie Mintus: Were they adjacent? How did you even find her?

Chris Zimmerman: Oh, man, I don't even remember. I'd have to talk to Karen. I don't know how that contact was made. Maybe it was friends of friends because she had been working as a contractor on something that Microsoft's games division was called at that point. So maybe it was handshake stuff.

Gamasutra was pretty good even at that point. For the first decade or so of our existence, we would just put ads up on Gamasutra and deal with people coming in over the transom, we would say. Seeing an ad on our website or responding to an ad on Gamasutra or one of the other places, but Gamasutra is where we actually found people.

We did use some external recruiters for the first decade. Occasionally somebody would come in there but dribbled in. It was harder at the very beginning. When we hadn't actually made a chip to game yet. How do you get people to notice you? How do you get them to say yes, when you decide there's someone you want to hire? It got easier once we had games out. Once we have popular games out, it got a lot easier. But even the first game, even a game that was out that people generally hadn't played because there were like 100,000 copies of Rocket sold. It still helped a lot. At least it was clear that we were going to get something done.

The thing about it is like we were programmers, I knew how to hire programmers. I'd been doing that for 10 years. But how do you hire a concept artist? We don't know. You're just making it up as you go. You're building a ladder out of your own kind of failures, right? It's like failing to understand what's important about the position or what the positions even are and failing to understand what you need in this position.

Every company works differently. Every organization has a different way of working, different philosophy, how to get things done. It's not just enough for the person to be really good at what they do. They have to also be a good fit for your kind of way of doing things. I don't think we even understood that to begin with, because all of us have been at Microsoft for 10 years, and we were just used to that environment. That was the environment we knew. And it took years to get enough distance to understand all the things we were assuming that other people weren't going to assume about how companies should work and how we needed to adjust our way of thinking about recruiting and managing and running a company to deal with the fact that it wasn't Microsoft anymore.

The people were different. The products were different. The environment was different. But you don't know, right? There's a saying of, I don't know who discovered water, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a fish. When you're in the middle of it, you don't even perceive it. It's only when you get a little bit of distance that you can see what was interesting or what was different about the environment. Then you're like, now we're going to have to adjust how we do things to match.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's such a common struggle that I think founders that come from a big company go through, because when it's the time when I'm trying to hire for them, it's here's how we hired and I'd like to find the same people that I found at Google, but what worked for you at Google or Microsoft may not be the right person for your startup.

Chris Zimmerman: Absolutely. It took us a while to figure that out, to start finding the people that we wanted to find. But you build on failures having people that are good people and good at what they do, but just aren't a good fit for you in terms of what you expect.

Let me give you an example. One of the things that culturally was very true about Sucker Punch early on, and it's still true to some extent, is that we give people a ton of autonomy but there's also responsibility that comes along with that. There is not generally no matter who you are in the organization, someone looking over your shoulder at what you're doing. No one is managing you that closely. You just have goals and objectives, and you're expected to figure out what you need to do to meet those. And that's true for junior programmers or environment artists all the way up to people that are running a whole discipline at Sucker Punch.

And that is a great environment for some people, where they thrive in that sort of environment, where they're just expected to figure out what needs to get done and do it. And maybe that's not even what their manager thinks they should be doing. They're still expected to figure that out and make it happen.

And just not great at all for some people. Some people just really aren't comfortable in that environment. That there's nothing wrong with being happier. If you have a list of tasks, you need to march through. For some people that's very safe feeling, right? That I've got a list of 10 things to do this week. And if I do them, then it's a successful week. For a lot of Sucker Punch, that's just not the way we work. There is no list of 10 things. If there is, it's because you created it. You'll be supported and your mistakes will be accepted, but you're expected to figure out what it is that you should be doing every day. And that's just not a good fit for some people.

I don't know that we've always, I don't think even now we're necessarily that great at interviewing for that, cause it's a hard thing to interview for. You can't ask people, do you want more autonomy? Everybody says, absolutely. But it turns out that, maybe that isn't going to be a good fit for every single person that we interview, even if they're super good at whatever their discipline is. The cultural fit might not be there. It's also like a thing where if you're figuring out how to run an organization, it's really hard not to build on your own experience- to not build the organization that you think you would like, or that would've been good for you. It took a while.

I think for me, even having been at Microsoft for 10 years-ish, to understand that other people didn't think like me, which is crazy. If you know me, you're like, Oh, Chris, yeah, you're an idiot. If you didn't think that, nobody thinks like you, Chris. But I didn't realize that cause I was surrounded by people that were pretty much like me. And I would be like, oh yeah, I have created people that I work with. I work with graphic designers and I work with. It's no,

but they are the most technical graphic designer in the world. They are a programmer. It's just that you don't think of them as a programmer. They really are. Any normal person would think of this person as being super technical. They just happen to be a graphic designer who's super technical, right? And now we're at Sucker Punch, that wasn't the case anymore. People weren't super technical. And so the things that I wanted, like when I'm looking at like our performance review process, I'm like, oh, that would have been great when I was getting reviewed. For people at Sucker Punch, they're like, this is just making me weird. They're like numbers and stuff. Why are there numbers here? I don't like this.

But I thought this was going to be good for you, but it wasn't. That was not what I wanted or expected. We had to do that. Like the first time we did performance reviews for people, we did it the Microsoft style. And it turns out that, a performance review system that's built by engineers for engineers does not work for someone who can't do the math in their head. It's just not a good fit. We had to take a big step back then and rethink our whole idea about, how does the performance review process work? Why does it work that way? Because that's the other thing, we talked earlier about how when you're at a big company you get used to it, and you don't really think about, why is it the way it is? Why are things designed this way? Are we in the same situation we were in when we were in a 25,000 person company?

The answer is no, we are not. Our goals are different. Our performance review process evolved away from thinking of performance review as a way of evaluating people's performance, where if you're at a big company, you need some way of knowing, who are the people who are high performers in the organization? Who are the people that are struggling? How do we make these sorts of evaluations when we have 25,000 people that we need to make this decision for. How do you compare between groups? It turns out that every manager thinks their team is full of high performers. How do you sort that out?

You have this very hard problem to solve and it took us a while to realize we didn't have that problem. We knew every single person at the company. We did not have a problem of figuring out who was doing well. We knew. What we had was a situation where we wanted to help people grow. We had a personal development problem, not a performance evaluation problem.

It took us a while to figure this out and to actually put it into practice, but we effectively pivoted our annual performance review process away from being an evaluation process and into being a personal development process. If we want this to be about an opportunity for personal growth, how do we change things? It means that our process becomes a lot more driven by the person being reviewed. Because if they don't buy in, nothing's going to change, right? So instead of having it be manager driven, it's employee driven or reviewer reviewed. Switching around who in charge really changes the dynamic of it.

And getting rid of all the numbers because that's not helping. How is that helping me grow as an animator. Tell me what I'm doing so I can do more of it. Tell me what I'm struggling at or what people think I'm struggling at so they can prove at it.

Now a lot of our performance, our annual processes is built on 360 degree feedback. So we get feedback on everybody from everybody they're working with. And then that forms the biggest part of the review. It's not just how your manager thinks about you, it's how your peers think about you. That ends up being a lot easier way to take feedback, right?

I've done lots of management meetings, where if I say, look, you're not doing a good job at this thing, that's, that can put people into a really defensive posture pretty quickly. Even if they know it's true, it's still hard to not go into a defensive crouch right away. But if the way it's framed is, here's what your peers are saying about the way you're working. That actually ends up being a lot easier for people to take. It depersonalizes a little bit. It's not just the person you're talking to, it's not just your manager and you, your manager is your coach at that point, it's like someone who's helping you along your journey. When our process works well, that's the way it feels.

The person giving your review. is helping you grow. They want you to succeed, and they're trying to figure out how to help you succeed. They're not an antagonist, right? They're on your side. That makes it a lot easier to work together. Again, when it works, to work together to find things that you can do better as an employee to be more effective, which I think was generally people's goal is to be more effective at what they do.

Lizzie Mintus: Nobody comes to work to do a bad job. Everyone wants to do what a good job is. That was one of my biggest learnings in my business too. I'm an intense person and I like to get stuff done, but not everybody functions that way. And I would say I'm impatient. I like stuff to happen. And so if I were in somebody's shoes, I would want all these things to happen. But some people are on just a different path. They want things to happen in a different way than I would. And so you can't put your own expectations of what would be good for.

Chris Zimmerman: As an as a manager, as an organizational head, you have to decide what am I going to change about myself? Or what am I going to accept that we're not going to work exactly the way I want to work because it just doesn't work for other people. Where are you going to draw the line at? What are the core principles that you're going to run the company on, right?

Lizzie Mintus: That's the other important thing. Then you can interview and review on those, right? And if you don't have those...

Chris Zimmerman: yeah, it's not going to work. It's not going to work. I think that's the thing. There are companies where people are just going to come punch the clock, right? It's a job. They're going to do the job. They're going to go home, right? But that's not the kind of company that we have, right? We're only going to succeed if people are really invested in the quality of the work they're doing.

That's a different sort of company, right? And guess what? If you've got a company where everybody has to be bought into what you're doing or you're not going to succeed, you have to figure out how you're going to run the company so that everybody's bought in. That's the core challenge.

How do you get to the point where you understand enough about what's important about your company and your culture and how you approach building a product that you can assemble people that are going to match, that are going to all fit together and make up that culture, right?

For us, one of the things that's a philosophical point at Sucker Punch is that it's all about the product. The thing that's important is that the game experience is as good as it can be. We're doing this for the people that are playing the games. And that might seem obvious. Of course it's that way, but there are other laudable goals that you could have for your company. Your company could be all about empowerment and personal growth for the people that work there. Or it could be about addressing societal ills. It could be about any number of things. It could be about making as much money as possible, right? Or it could be about their business goals and I think it's okay.

Lizzie Mintus: If your goal is just about money and you don't have the passion at some point, that becomes obvious.

Chris Zimmerman: I think so. But I appreciate that there are other ways of looking at this. That there are other ways to run a company, other things you could think were important. I don't have any data, right? It might be our situation is unique to us. What's important as I think that we understand what is unique to us so that we can talk about that with people so they understand what it is. If the culture doesn't fit then they're not going to be happy and they're going to leave right? One of the things that we rely on culturally is that we have lots of people that that are sucker punchers. They're going to stay, they're going to be here for a long time. Because we don't have a lot of turnover, we have a really strong core of people that have been around for a long time. That lets us run more efficiently and therefore more lean.

Then a lot of companies that are like us do, we don't have to waste a lot of time because everybody understands the basic ideas of what's important to us and how we're going to do things. We can give people a lot of autonomy. We can not have a lot of layers of management. We don't have to have lots of extra people around to fill in holes to do work that might get thrown away because we just don't have that problem because so many of our people have been here for 10, 15 years. It lets us run a lot more efficiently. But that's a heavy burden, right? What's the success line for having somebody new to the company? For us, it's five years. They stay five years. We're like, that was the right decision.

And that's a huge number. Most people in the video game business, that's our turn. We're turning over half our staff every year. And for us, it's more like voluntary attrits, maybe a couple of year. Because we're set up that way, we can dispense with a lot of the costs that you bear if you're flipping your staff over all the time. I think one of the things that people are surprised by, Sucker Punch at this point builds these really big open world games, like 50 hour games that are big in scope, big in ambition, big in amount of content, big in number of hours to play through. So single player games with big single player games.

People have read stories often about how many people worked on GTA? Answer, 2,000, right? Wow, that's a big number. For us, it's like we have 150 people. Yet we're going to build games that have that scale and ambition. One of the reasons, there are lots of reasons why we can do that but one of them is that we have this efficiency that comes from having this long term, stable, employee base. People that have been here and have gone through this process before don't panic and know what the important things are to work on. And as a result, there's not a lot of wasted effort. What we work on tends to end up on screen more so than when you have the inefficiencies of working with 1000 people, 500 of whom have never worked on this project or with this team before. Part of the secret sauce.

Lizzie Mintus: How have you been able to retain people for 10 to 15 years? That is so impressive.

Chris Zimmerman: Yeah, not everybody does. If people aren't happy and leave, that's sad. . It's unfortunate. But, it's often I think for the better. Maybe that's self serving. But I think that someone's here and they're not a good fit and it's not working out. It's not good for them, right? They're not happy and nobody wants to be in a situation where they feel like they're underperforming or they're struggling or they're a square and a round hole.

Especially the people we hire, we have people that, that don't work out or they're unhappy with how the company works most commonly, but sometimes we're unhappy with how they're fitting, but it's more often that people realize that themselves and they know they're unhappy. Everybody that we hire is really good at what they do. It's like none of them have a problem going and finding a job somewhere else. Like our bar is incredibly high. I think that's the thing is that we really do want people to stick around a long time because it helps us do things, but we don't want people to stick around, if they're not happy, right? If someone's unhappy, they should go do something else.

Sometimes those people, for a variety of reasons, we have a half dozen people here at Sucker Punch now that for one reason or another decided they wanted to do something different, went away, did something different for a while. And then we're like, Oh, no, actuallyI want to come back. I was like, yeah, you can come back. That's fine. We don't mind. The door is never shut once you've demonstrated your worth that you're that you fit here. if you go away, you can come back, we'll take you back. Might lose some of your profit sharing in the process, but it's your call, man.

A lot of people leave and are happy that they've left and I'm happy for them. It's fine. That's why that match is hard to find. I think that's the thing that's super weird about recruiting or the interviewing process is that you're making this incredibly important decision based on almost no information. Like you walk into an interview with the company and how much do you know? You've done some, maybe you've done an assessment ahead of time. Maybe you've done a phone interview and you come into an office or you don't even come to an office now, you do virtually. You do five zoom calls and then you're like, okay at the end of this, you're going to have to decide where you're going to spend the next 10 years, 40 hours a week, 10 years, right? That is like the craziest thing possible. It's 90 day bride, right?

You're making this huge decision based on almost no information. And guess what? Everyone's being super cheery and positive about everything the whole time on both sides and yet you're still going to try to make this huge decision. How do you cut through that? How do you actually figure out whether this person's going to be effective and they're going to be a fit from our side. That's what I tell people when they come interview. I will say, look, this is as much about you evaluating us as it is about us evaluating you. Because if both directions don't work, this isn't going to work, right? If you're here and unhappy for nine months and then leave, we wasted everybody's time. You haven't gotten anything done in nine months. You're still figuring out where the pencils are, right? It's going to take a while for you to get up to speed. We have to figure out how to make it worth work both ways. And that's tough.

How do you design your very limited interview day, so that the person you're talking to gets the information they need to make this super important life decision. How do you do that? At the same time you're gathering information about whether you think they're going to be a fit, whether they're up to the disciplinary bar that you have, whether they're a cultural fit, whether they're a personality fit like It's a super tough thing to do.

It's amazing that you ever get it right. It's tough. it's like one of the core problems.

Lizzie Mintus: What have you found to be the most effective way to discern that somebody is going to be a 15 yearner or at least five years.

Chris Zimmerman: I think it's easier for some disciplines than for others. You have to be introspective and for us, data driven. You have to look at your understanding that recruiting and staffing for a company like Sucker Punch is one of your core functions.

It's not like we build games. Eh, actually you got to think of it as we hire people to make games, right? But this is a core part of your value add as a company, is assembling the team. You have to be as serious about it as you are about anything you do. I think that's not something most people do.

I think that if you talk to the people that are the art director or the animation director, they tend to be focused on what they think of as making the game- reviewing content or talking about direction or putting together vision boards. And they under invest in the things they need to be doing to help build their team.

They just expect that the team is there. But it isn't. They're part of making it growing it maintaining it. I think people under invest in it. So part of it is making sure that the hiring managers, the people that are going to be making the decisions about who to invite onto the team are actually engaged and invested in the process. Especially if you're on the recruiting side of things, if you're like Sonia Jackson, who does our recruiting here internally, understanding how to help people see that and understanding that their ability to focus on that may wax and wane over the course of the product.

And so if you're at a point where they actually probably should have the bandwidth to focus on recruiting, that you take that opportunity to get them to focus on it. There's a sort of making sure that you at the kind of upper management level or mid management level and up in your company, that there is a realization that recruiting and team management is a core part of your function- not something that you also do is a core part of what you do. I think that is part of what you need to do to be successful.

Then you also need to look discipline by discipline at your process for sourcing, evaluating, onboarding, managing people, and treat it like you would the game you're building for us, right? You have to be as serious about it. We'll do focus tests for our game. We do them all the time. We do internally throughout the whole process. We've done external focus tests on the game we're working on now. That's a super important part of our process, to actually look at what you've built and evaluate it.

If recruiting and onboarding and all that stuff is as important to you in the long term is building your game, you should be doing the same things there, right? How do you look at what you've done? How do you gather data about all the parts of this funnel that results in the 10 year employee? How do you even think about what you've done so that you can improve your process? Because if you're not improving, That kind of human part of your process in building your team, you're being dumb, right? It's a core part of your company. How can you not try to be getting better at it, right?

We do try to do that as much as we should. I think we're as guilty as anyone else is just getting focused on the day to day of building the game and losing track of the year to year of building the company. But we at least know we're making a mistake. That's a step. It does mean looking at what for each discipline is going to be a different process, right? But we're going to keep working on that process, and try to evaluate it against the success that we've had.

1 of the things that we do that is controversial, for some of the things we do, we're super assessment focused. So assessment being the sort of recruiting phrase for programming tests and take home projects that we would do for someone building environments for our game, they're going to have a prompt, and they'll have to do something for us offline. And for some people that's kind of offensive. There are people on the Internet and I know as a recruiter, you definitely talk to people that are like, I cannot believe that someone have the gall to ask me to solve this intro programming problem. But for us, that is a core part of our process. That is not something we're going to negotiate on if you don't want to play by that set of rules, that's fine. Go play in someone else's sandbox because you're not playing in ours.

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. I have a hard time with that. If you want the job, I think that you should do what the job requires within reason. I had a post about this on LinkedIn. People sent me hate mail. People wrote me the nastiest comments, that companies should only have one interview in the interview process, which blew my mind because like you said, you are committing to this marriage. How can you get married if you don't even know the person?

Chris Zimmerman: Exactly. It's you're only hurting yourself, right? Whatever. I'm old now, so with age comes at least a little bit of wisdom. There is more than white a skin cat. It's fine. If someone has this very emotionally important, deeply held conviction that that companies should be better at evaluating people, and shouldn't be asking them to do this thing that they feel is beneath them. I'm sure that works for some people. It does not work for us and we'll look at the data to find out.

We will actually look at it how we've gone through and how people have been graded through the process and we will then correlate with that with how they do at Sucker Punch. If that correlation is there, which it is, we're not entirely wrong about how we're doing this. We might need to keep working on it, but we're not entirely wrong that the assessment is really helping us identify the people that are going to work, because the people that did really well on the assessment tend to do really well here.

That's the problem with a lot of this stuff. We say no to everybody, right? To a first approximation, the answer is no. We will on the programming side, where I actually know the numbersof people that get in touch with us. Maybe 1 in 50 will get a job offer from us. So there are lots of stages that lead up to that. It's not like we're going to say no to 50 people that come, took like a full interview cycle day here on, on site or remotely. But like everybody, we say no to everybody. And we say no to lots of people that we think would do really well here? Absolutely.

You can't think you're going to say no to 49 out of 50 people, or 100 people and not realize that you're thrown out of the job some really good candidates along the way. That's not the point. The point is we have limited time to invest in people here. We really want them to stick when we're here. We are absolutely going to eye break in favor of saying no to someone where we're not sure in return for most of the people that we bring through and bring in, at least from the stuff we can evaluate are going to be able to do the job are going to be able to work culturally are going to be able to interact with everybody on the team positively and are going to stick.

We can look at some, especially the assessment driven things that we do- environment or something where we've had a lot of success hiring because we have a better process for evaluating whether the person is going to be able to do the work that we have to do it well. And it's gonna fit in the team programming the same way. We're pretty good at evaluating programming or programmers.

The things where we struggle a little bit are the disciplines where we haven't figured out how to do assessment well enough yet. Game design has been one of those things for us where we have lots of really good game designers, but our rate of finding those people has been lower than it is for other things. We fail more often and. Again, it's just bad for everybody to have a mismatch where someone doesn't like the work doesn't really fit their skill set, doesn't like the company. We've been able to succeed despite our relative lack of success in hiring people, we do find people that are great. we've gone through a lot of people where it didn't match. I wish we were better at it. We keep trying to get better at it, but it's tough. We haven't cracked that nut yet.

Lizzie Mintus: I love that you have data and you look at the data of how people do in the interview and you know that it works. I talked to somebody at a large company who said that they leet coding assessments on the programming side, which was not a great way to test somebody who does not solve these problems in their actual job.

And Andrew told me that a few people had just knocked out of the park with best leet code or ever. And he followed up later to see how they had done and they were actually performing low because I don't look at that correlation or really consider it or take it that seriously. A lot of hiring managers I work with copy a job description from somebody online and then they're like, oh, this is it. This is our job description. Why do you want these things? Why is this in your description? We need 5 years.

Chris Zimmerman: Yeah. It's just tough, right? It's hard to do. It's hard to do well, but if you don't, you're going to fail in the long run. You're only as strong as the people that you have for a company like ours. So unless you're continuing to get stronger by adding new people that are strong or by helping the people within your organization grow, and sometimes by having people who aren't working out, that aren't a good fit, leaving that you grow all three ways. We're way stronger now than we were even 10 years ago. It's because even though we have a lot of people that have been here a long time, we can't stand still. We have to keep growing cause the challenges that we face are still growing, right? The expectations of customers are still growing. We need to grow them to meet those.

Lizzie Mintus: I want to talk about your biggest success you're most proud of throughout your time at Sucker Punch and also want to highlight what the biggest struggle has been, because I think I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs and they're like, oh, it's sunshine and rainbows, it's not. It's important to share highs and sometimes your personal, what you think the high isn't always what the outside world would think the high is. I think it's important to talk about the lows because everybody has lows and struggles.

Chris Zimmerman: Yeah. Highs are easier. One of the things about working on video games is that, for me, at least it's like a personal statement. It's like important for me to feel like I'm doing something worthwhile with my time, right?

I feel like I've been given lots of gifts and benefits and advantages, and it would be wrong of me on an ethical level to not take advantage of that, to not do something worthwhile. And for a while, I felt like that at Microsoft, even though the things I was doing weren't necessarily ending up in the hands of consumers. I felt like I was doing that. At least there was a gigantic scale. If I did do something that was worthwhile, there was like hundreds of millions of people were going to use it. That's cool, but when we switched to doing video games, I struggled with that for years. Is this indulgent?

Is this actually my calling? Is it actually the highest and best use of me as a resource? It was only once we got a few years in and I could start seeing the impact it was having on people's lives, the games we were making. First it was for kids, but, to see that we were putting smiles on faces, that there was some seven year old out there playing Sly Cooper where that was their first love. That was the first game they played that was their favorite game and it always will be, right? We still run into those people now, even 20 years later, where that was their first love.

Sometimes they'll come to Sucker Punch as employees, cause they're old enough to work at Sucker Punch now. It will sometimes take some while to get around to mentioning that, but it's super heartwarming when they do, where you realize what, that you are part of this really special moment for a kid.

On Sam's Dream, when we were doing the Infamous Games, Ghost, these are games that were an important part of someone's life for a lot of people they're just entertainment, but for some people, it was what they needed at the time. Being able to be part of that is, is I think the most rewarding part of the job for me.

We got a shout out in the Seattle Times actually like a couple weeks ago in the gaming column. I'm just reading through the newspaper because I'm old and I read the newspaper. They're like talking about new games and the person who wrote the article gave a shout out to Infamous Second Son. We made this game 10 years ago, came out 2014. They talked about what they liked about him. It's wow, that's cool. That 10 years later. This had enough of an impact that this person, when they were writing about the new hot game that's coming out, that they wanted to talk about this game, which I feel like is underappreciated. It's neat to have that and to have people come up and ask you about your jacket. I'm wearing a Ghost. I think I can go for an entire month just wearing black T shirts that have a Sony logo on them. So I can't not do this. It's not that I'm trying to get people to come up and talk to me, but, it's neat to see that, to have people come up and talk to you and tell you how much they liked this experience, how much value added to them. That's cool. That's the positive for me. I don't know what you were looking for, but that's what I would say.

Lizzie Mintus: I'm looking for your positive and that's it. That is the most rewarding part of any business when you make people happy and you make this impact. Same thing for me.

Chris Zimmerman: Yeah, exactly. Like it's the satisfaction of seeing someone end up in exactly the right spot for you. The flower can now bloom. They are in exactly the right spot.

Lizzie Mintus: Then they get promoted and make this cool feature for the game or for the and that's the best. Or the best as if they weren't going to accept the offer, I have one in particular who wasn't going to, but was for me not fully understanding the option. So we had a coming to Jesus about what the situation was and I had a lot of data. And if it's not the right fit for somebody, That's fine. If it's truly not the right fit, I want you to be happy. I want you to go to the job that's the right fit for you. But I was positive this person wasn't seeing everything and they messaged me me later and was like, Lizzie, thank you for giving me all the information. I made the right decision.

Chris Zimmerman: Yes. Absolutely. Lows. People will tell you that I am very negative about the work we do, which is true. At the top level, we make good games. I have lots of evidence that people like them. Yet when I'm working on them, I can only that's not true.

I can see the things that are good about them and talk about them as well. But I can see lots of things that aren't good about them and where they could be better. I have a fairly negative outlook on the things we're working on typically.

Lizzie Mintus: What about COVID and before the interview and trying to ship Ghost?

Chris Zimmerman: Yeah, that's right. COVID hit while we were just about done with Ghost. We were like three months away from wrapping up when suddenly the whole company had to shut down and we had to pivot. The thing though, that one's not really a low because it was terrifying. You're like, how are we going to do this? We've never done anything like this, but it was a miracle. Brian and the IT guys sorted it out. Magically we didn't lose hardly any time at all. And we managed to ship this game. That feels like a movie, right? There's an incident at the beginning that suddenly everything's in chaos and how could we ever possibly succeed? And that somehow we did. So it's you can't call that a low.

I'll give you a recent low. After we shipped Second Son, we wanted to do a new IP because that's one of the things we think we do pretty well at Sucker Punch. We're going to develop new ideas for games. We don't just build the same thing over and over again.

We've done it three times. I'm not going to count Rocket, but we've done it three times, right? Sly Cooper, Infamous, Ghost of Tsushima. We've done it and we know we can do it. We know that actually, again, getting back to my core motivation, it's adding more value to what we do if we're creating new things for people. Because people like new things, as long as they're good.

We knew we wanted to do something new after Infamous. We'd been working on it for quite a while. So I was part of the process of defining what we were going to do next. And we spent a year and 15 months, maybe, working on things that we ended up canceling, walking away from. That's a low, right? Because I clearly didn't do my job very well, if at the end of this we're not doing any of the things that we've worked on over the last 15 months. You can actually find this on YouTube. If you look hard enough, you can find the vertical slice video of the game we didn't make so that we can make Ghosts.

Someone posted it on LinkedIn at some point. Not realizing that was really not a good idea, but you can find it on YouTube. I'm not gonna tell you how. You're gonna have to work for it, but you can absolutely find it.

Lizzie Mintus: My team, they're expert finders.

Chris Zimmerman: And you can see what we decided not to do. It's a low, right? We spent a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of money making a lot of things that we ended up deciding we weren't going to do. Us deciding not to do it though is a fun story, because we've been working on it for a while.

We were getting close to the point where we're going to actually commit to building this. This game is another kind of a open world game, but more of a city kind of fantasy- ish, but grounded fantasy in a city. We were getting close to the point where we're really going to crank up and build it. But we at the exec level at Sucker Punch, so like me, Brian, the other studio head at the time, Nate Fox, our creative director, thought we can absolutely build this game. It's going to be a fine game, but it's going to be a B plus game. And we're not here to make B plus games. We're here to try to make game of the year. And we don't think we can turn this game into game of the year. It's not good enough. So we thought about what we wanted to do instead. We went back to basics in terms of the sort of open world games we do. We realized that the game concept we had was too complicated. We needed to simplify it down to a more kind of digestible core user fantasy player fantasy. We talked about some. We decided that actually samurai ish story was under explored at least in western games.

We hit on this idea of you were the first ninja. It was a ninja game and a samurai game. We never say ninja, by the way. Never say that but that's what it was. And then we worked up a proposal for it. And so when our management treaty came to Sucker Punch to see the vertical slice, we prefaced it. This is a really long setup for this. I hope the story works out okay.

We prefaced it by saying, okay, we're going to show you what we've been working on for the last year or so. It's going to look good, but we don't want to build it. But we spent so much making this, we feel like we have to show you. Afterwards we're going to tell you what we want to build instead.

We ran the video, we sat down, and Grady Hunt and Connie Booth, Scott Rohde, our managers, turned and looked at us. And Scott said, that looks pretty good. Then we launched into the proposal for Ghost. We'll tell you why we want to do this instead, but here's what we want to do instead. And God bless those guys. God bless Sony. They were like, okay, we trust you. We can see that we believe you. We believe that you believe at least, that the game you're talking about building, Ghost, has more potential. It's okay for you to basically throw away what you've done, reuse some parts of it, and build something new.

It worked out for everybody. It was a much better game that we built. It was much more successful. Everybody looks like a geniuses at the end of it. But it really took some guts for those guys to write down the investment that they'd already put into this other concept and decide, no, that's not Sony. It's not PlayStation studios.

We're not here to make B plus games. We're here to make a plus game. If you think this tops out at b plus, we probably should reboot. It was a low moment to be, we've wasted a lot of effort, time, and blood, sweat and tears have gone into this and we're gonna walk away from it.

But at the same time, it's a story that ends well. Just maybe a sign of our good fortune at Sucker Punch- all of our low points have been followed by eventual successes, right? Lots of second act turns that turned into kind of a rousing finale.

Lizzie Mintus: I think a lot of success stories are like this. You don't make what you intend or you intended to make, and you have some twists and turns and things go wrong, but in the end it works out.

Chris Zimmerman: Yeah. Yeah. You hope so. You're not around to tell the story, right?

Lizzie Mintus: If you had shipped that game, you wouldn't have had the success it did.

Chris Zimmerman: No, it wouldn't have, it would have been fine. I'm sure it would have been a game people liked. But, Ghost of Tsushima is definitely the best game we've made. It's epic and people really love it. Our high point so far. So I hope that the one we're working on now becomes the new high point.

That's the goal, right? Always have to be better.

Lizzie Mintus: Can't wait to hear more. I have one last question before I ask, I want to point people to your website at suckerpunch. com. The last question is a little hard, maybe I'm sure you've had a lot of advice in your life, but is there anything.

Chris Zimmerman: No, you're misunderstanding my personality. Nobody can tell me anything.

Lizzie Mintus: Okay, let me rephrase. I'm sure people have given you advice whether you have taken it or not is a different story. But is there any piece of advice whether you listen to it at the time or later that has really stuck with you in your career.

Chris Zimmerman: Oh, no, actually. No, honestly I'm broken in this way. I know you can tell me anything. Anybody who knows me knows not to tell me bank. Have there been people's things people suggested that I later was like, oh, yeah, they were right? Yeah, but honestly my brain doesn't work this way. I don't remember any of this stuff.

I'm much better remembering the advice I give other people and seeing whether that works out or not. Most people are smart enough not to give me advice because I'm really bad at taking and I'm horribly uncoachable. It's just not good.

Lizzie Mintus: You're just an entrepreneur. That's every entrepreneur. And I'm one of the entrepreneurs that have to lead. And everybody is this way. Everybody is such a pain.

Chris Zimmerman: I guess that's one of the challenges. It takes a certain level of arrogance to decide you're going to start your own company. And that's healthy to some extent as long as you're aware of it. But the people that join startups aren't the same as the people who start startups, right? And so figuring out as an entrepreneur, how are you going to realize this, and bridge that gap and build something lasting, that's the hard part, right?

Lizzie Mintus: We've been talking to Chris Zimmerman, co founder of Sucker Punch, Chris, we didn't even talk about your book, but where can people go to learn more about you, your games or read your book.

Chris Zimmerman: You can buy my book anywhere it's available. The book's called, The Rules of Programming, How to Write Better Code. It's basically a distillation of all the things that we teach new programmers at Sucker Punch. So if you're someone who's relatively new in your career, it's a useful book to read. You'll probably violently disagree with a couple things in the book and that's okay, but it'll give you some things to think about.

If you're like a 23 year old or at your first programming job, maybe you're getting to the end of your college career and you're trying to figure out what it's going to be like to actually work somewhere- how can you bridge the gap from doing the sort of academic stuff that you do when you're in college to the sorts of things that you'll do as a professional programmer, the book is useful. It gives you a bunch of different, easy to remember rules to keep in mind as you're going about the work you're doing. It was fun to write and people like it when they read it usually. It's good. You can buy it anywhere. It's on Amazon or whatever.

It's a book of advice for young programmers and it's what we teach the young programmers here. And it tends to be pretty successful.

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you so much.

Chris Zimmerman: Thank you, Lizzie. This was fun.

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week to catch all the latest from his Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.

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