The Dream Architects: Adventures in the Video Game Industry

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 which revitalized the Clancy brand in gaming.

In The Dream Architects, Polfeldt charts his course through a charmed, idiosyncratic career which 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 week-long 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 five hundred employees on a single project with a production budget of over 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.

Author: David Polfeldt
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 09/01/2020
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9781538702611


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 07/01/2020
Publishers Weekly 06/29/2020 pg. 54
Booklist 08/01/2020 pg. 16
Library Journal 09/01/2020 pg. 78

About the Author
David Polfeldt is the Managing Director of Massive Entertainment, a world-leading video game studio and part of the Ubisoft family. At Massive, David has worked industry-defining, AAA games such as Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Far Cry 3, and Tom Clancy's The Division, which together have generated billions in revenue worldwide. Massive is currently developing a series of Avatar video games in collaboration with James Cameron and Lightstorm which will be released in conjunction with the forthcoming Avatar movies.