Trey Smith is leading from the front

Trey Smith is a rambler. Those are his own words, offered as a warning moments into our chat. And in fairness, he has plenty to talk about: the game developer has spent decades creating games, with stints at EA, Activision, and currently Blackbird Interactive – the developer behind sci-fi hit Hardspace: Shipbreaker, fellow spacefarer Homeworld 3, and strategy spin-off Minecraft Legends.

Right now, though, Smith is in his home office trying to mediate a dispute between Molly – his boisterous, beloved border collie – and their local postman. Molly can’t be trusted to play nice, so she’s being taken along for the ride as Smith talks us through his 20-year journey in the games industry.

Before Smith considered a career in games he moved to LA with theatre acting in his sights, working a telemarketing job with The Office’s Angela Kinsey (who played Angela Martin) while he sought a stage. While he liked the job because he could chase auditions, Smith admits to being “pretty depressed” with his situation. It was a rough time, but Smith’s cheery cadence never wavers – his constant grin suggests if this had happened last week, not decades ago, he’d still be smiling.

Eventually, Smith found his way into games by breaking one of them. In LA, Smith ran into school friend Matt Morton, who had already set foot into the games industry with a job at Activision. Before the two went for dinner, Smith was invited to play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 while Morton got ready. Smith took the game’s gravity-defying stunts too far – just as his pal re-entered the room, Smith’s skater froze, floating aimlessly in the air. Morton wasn’t frustrated – in fact, when Smith was able to easily replicate the bug, Morton was impressed. He offered him a job: why not hang up the phones to work in Activision’s quality assurance department — a branch of game development that looks for bugs and squashes them before a game launches.

Smith jumped at the offer. “It was never a job I thought I could ever get, especially in the Nintendo days,” he admits, referring to the years where Nintendo went unchallenged by the likes of Sony and Microsoft. “I was so focused on baseball and theatre that I never saw it as a career until I sat down in that seat for my first day of quality assurance.”

That first day at Activision grew into a year and a half, and was foundational for Smith’s career. “It was the wild wild West in many ways,” the developer recalls. “It’s hilarious that we were responsible for that. There were no production processes or game development frameworks – it was just get it done, do what you gotta do.”

Smith’s passion led to Activision asking him to pass on design notes for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 – or, as Smith puts it with a grin, “pester production”.“At one point they said ‘okay, if we give you a production position will you stop sending these emails?’”

Two decades after that offer, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 – Smith’s first game as a “wee little junior producer” – remains the highest-rated game to be released on PS2 consoles. Smith says he was “spoiled out of the box for learning how to [make games] the right way,” and explains that it was here that cemented his belief that passion is the key to creating a good game.

“The human element is the element,” the director exclaims. “For me, it starts and stops there, from the team making a game to the audience receiving it. You have to say people first. If you lose sight of that, and you chase money, ego or glory – I’ve seen it happen around me – it doesn’t work.”

As the years progressed, Smith’s childhood love of sports saw him tackle everything from a fourth Pro Skater game to titles on surfing, wakeboarding, and BMXing. Eventually, Smith left Activision to join EA, where his proven talent for sporting titles led to him stepping up as creative director for the revival of scrappy arcade basketball game NBA Jam, which Smith reveals was originally planned as a new, “very kiddy” game for the Wii called Bounce. On a whim, Smith asked if the NBA Jam license was available. It was. From there, NBA Jam was rebooted – but it was the team’s chat with legendary Mortal Kombat creator Ed Boon that helped things click for Smith.

“When they looked at Jam, they looked at it as a fighting game. All of a sudden my mind…” Trey trails off, finding his lost words with an exaggerated mime of his head exploding. “That just opened the door. We put what we had in front of [Boon] and he came back with the 10 commandments of Jam, and we’d gotten seven of them by dissecting things.”

Smith describes the Jam title as a “dream come true,” pointing to it as his first real position of accountability. “It was my first creative director position where I was ultimately accountable for looking out for the team and making sure we were doing everything,” he says. “I’ve been really fortunate that I’ve been able to work with the teams that I have because I don’t code – I can’t even draw! It takes a village to make a game.”

Even as Smith settled into his role as a leader, the developer never strayed far from his theatre roots. “I loved acting – I love theatre more because it’s such a beautiful collaborative art, and there’s a lot of similarities in putting on a show and making a game,” Smith explains. “You’ve got people coming from all different kinds of backgrounds with different skill sets, and you’re trying to get this motley crew together to pull the rope in the same direction. My theatre background helped me establish that you’ve got to put the ego aside.”

“My job is to get the best out of everybody on the team and in order to do that, they have to be healthy,” the director continues. “You have to look out for their health and happiness, and in turn you’re going to get their engagement and investment. You’re not here making games if you don’t love games to begin with, and I think you can smell when a project has the potential of being truly special. When that happens, it’s magic.”

As we talk through Smith’s own career, he frequently touches back on that sense of collective effort. Whether he’s talking about his time at Activision, EA or his current studio, Blackbird Interactive, Smith prefaces every single achievement with the names of those who helped. When asked if that collaborative, human side of development is the key to quality games, he immediately agrees.

“The human element is the element,” the director exclaims. “For me, it starts and stops there, from the team making a game to the audience receiving it. You have to say people first. If you lose sight of that, and you chase money, ego or glory – I’ve seen it happen around me – it doesn’t work. It starts and stops with the people. That’s kind of a no-brainer for me but I’ve definitely been in some circumstances where I’m like, ‘you probably shouldn’t be doing that.’”

Currently, the games industry is facing a cultural reckoning, in part caused by the issues that Smith touches on. Activision Blizzard is struggling with lawsuits surrounding workplace misconduct, and has unsuccessfully tried several times to prevent unionisation at the company, often from quality assurance workers who feel their time and health are not being valued as they should. Many of these problems are widespread, as NME explored at length last year, and often seem to boil down to a culture that takes advantage of the passion developers bring to their job.

Though Smith says he’s been very fortunate in his own experiences, he admits that the very process of creating games requires paying a “soul tax”, which refers to losing a bit of your soul with every game you ship due to development’s intensive nature.

“It takes a lot out of you when you’re investing your heart, soul, sweat, blood and tears. I’ve missed weddings, graduations and funerals because of games,” admits Smith. While he knew what he was signing up for, the industry is now “definitely” changing for the better. “You have to respect people and what they need to do, you have to put people first or you’re going to lose your top talent. I put myself in that category. I’m never going to work in a place [that doesn’t] again.”

“I’m so thankful for that, and grateful that the industry is [changing],” Smith continues. “There were times in my career when I had a sleeping bag under my desk because that’s what you do. I’m really glad to see that and I’m glad to be a part of the current conversation around what we’re doing as an industry.”

Now, Smith is a game director at Canada’s Blackbird Interactive, which is currently working with Mojang on one of its biggest projects yet — real-time strategy game Minecraft Legends. The independent studio prides itself on tackling many of the industry’s uglier norms — including being open to supporting unionisation efforts. A four-day work week and optional work-from-home arrangements take aim at the game industry’s unhealthy work-life balance, which means Smith’s sleeping bag is banished – the four-day work week means another date with his wife, another hike with Molly.

Yet following our first conversation, news of layoffs – numbering in the tens of thousands – started to emerge from the likes of Google, Meta and Microsoft. Blackbird wasn’t immune. While still reeling from a publisher cancelling one of Blackbird’s unannounced projects, a second publisher pulled the plug on another. To stay afloat, Blackbird had to cut back.

“We had no choice but to let 20 people go — and it fucking sucked,” says Smith, after a choked silence.

“The fact that we had two projects cancelled within six or seven months, unexpectedly…it’s not really something you can plan for,” he explains, speaking to NME a second time following the layoffs. “Especially because they were going so well — if they were in trouble it would be different, but everything was great. Then all of a sudden the plug gets pulled, and there’s not really much you can do about that when you’ve got an operating cost for a studio and a responsibility to keep it going for everyone that works there.”

“There’s an honour in being part of something bigger than yourself and contributing to building a skyscraper, or laying tracks for a railroad, that we wanted to pay homage to and respect,”

As an independent studio, Blackbird’s cancelled projects meant the studio was coming up to a cashflow problem. Layoffs were necessary, but the studio attempted to cut costs elsewhere in the hopes of saving jobs. Some were major – Smith and other executives have taken a temporary 15 per cent pay cut, and Blackbird let go of the lease for its original studio, space that it was keeping largely for sentimental value. Other cuts were smaller — as we’re talking, Smith admits he was meant to be in San Francisco for the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) that night, but even that had been cancelled.

In the face of job losses, Smith knows those decisions are a no brainer. The director touches on the pain of lay-offs with a sad familiarity, and when pressed he admits that he’s been on the receiving end before.“This isn’t the first layoff I’ve been through, and it probably won’t be the last,” he says. “I fucking hope it is.”

While layoffs are terrible in every workplace, Smith says they are particularly painful in the game industry as for many developers, gaming is both a hobby and a job – they’re often inseparably intertwined, and co-workers commonly forge bonds that go beyond the office. Prior to working at Blackbird, he has seen layoffs that were made “just to make numbers meet” for higher-ups, and the times he has been on the receiving end of layoffs, it was particularly painful when it was “out of the blue”.

“One day you’re loving it, the next day all of a sudden it feels like part of you is taken away. Immediately there’s the financial stuff – mortgages, families – but then I felt lost,” he admits. “So much of what I built up about who I am, and my sense of self, was making games. When that goes away all of a sudden, you have to check yourself — you’re like wait a minute, I’m more than just my job! But there is that moment where you fear that maybe this is it, maybe my career is done and I’ll have to move on to something else.”

Smith says that like many victims of lay-offs, he eventually came through “stronger and wiser” than he was, with more awareness of the industry’s realities.

It makes sense, then, that Blackbird Interactive’s 2022 game Hardspace: Shipbreaker took aim at the predatory nature of capitalism. With Smith serving as creative director, Hardspace is a futuristic satire of our modern-day workplaces that tasks players with dismantling decommissioned spaceships and scrapping their parts for money.

In space, nobody can hear you scream to HR: hypercapitalist employer LYNX buys and clones its employees, and expects them to die grisly deaths in the name of its profit margins. In the eyes of LYNX, you are wholly replaceable, and unions are banned. While Hardspace’s setting skewers everything wrong with our current corporate overlords, it presents the manual labour of scrapping ships as noble and skillful. The game’s folksy soundtrack is reminisce of music from the United States’ Gilded Age, a period in the late 1800s that saw a boom in manual labour at the cost of worker mistreatment, leading to music that – like Hardspace – often praised labours and damned employers in the same breath. Though Smith says Hardspace’s original concept was “Kubrick-ian” and didn’t even have the game’s signature cutting mechanics, one of the game’s founding pillars has always revolved around “delivering on the blue collar fantasy.”

“There’s an honour in being part of something bigger than yourself and contributing to building a skyscraper, or laying tracks for a railroad, that we wanted to pay homage to and respect,” he explains. “When you have a pillar like that, it informs the music and industrial design of the ships and the bay, and some of the things you do. But there’s a heart and soul – a respect – to it that was very important to us. That anchored some of the heavier stuff in the story, like exploited workers and putting the dollar ahead of human lives.”

The game’s satirical tone means that when it cuts close to the bone, it never slips its casual appeal. “That cutting-edge humour was there in the early days,” says Smith. “I was fortunate to hang out with the team, and I said ‘don’t lose that – that’s super important’. Space is a cold, lonely place, and we needed that warmth or it could get too dark and heavy, especially with what’s going on in the world.”

The anecdote says more about Smith than the game. As we discuss his career and the wider games industry, he never shies away from confronting its issues, but addresses them from a place of warmth, compassion and optimism — faltering only when it comes to the topic of lay-offs, a wound that’s still fresh. Yet one of the things he’s most passionate about is Skunkworks, an initiative at Blackbird that encourages employees to pitch their game to Smith and the rest of Blackbird’s leadership team, with the chance of having their game made.

At the mention of Skunkworks, Smith yelps loud enough to rival Molly, who occasionally grumbles at being kept from her rivalry. “I get all gushy and mushy when it comes to Skunkworks,” he laughs. Skunkworks allows anyone from any profession at Blackbird to pitch a game, and successful ideas are taken to the prototype phase. There, Smith and other leadership figures at Blackbird guide and support the team into fleshing it out. If a prototype doesn’t work out, the idea is returned to its creator – if it does, it’s taken to the next stage. “Unofficially, Hardspace: Shipbreaker was kind of the first one that went through that process,” recalls Smith. “It started from a game jam, the team went through a prototype phase, and it slowly ramped up until we got to full development, found a publisher in Focus Interactive, and shipped it.”

There are a number of reasons why Skunkworks is so exciting for Smith. He explains that while he and Blackbird CCO Rory McGuire have been fortunate enough to pitch new IP throughout their careers, an “unfortunate side” to the process means that due to games industry contracts, employers own that idea as soon as it leaves your lips.

“Rory and I both had chats,” recalls Smith. “At some point, I just stopped pitching because I didn’t want to burn any ideas. Rory and I were like ‘oh man, I wish I could have that back, or wish I could get this other one back’. That was a key piece in getting [Skunkworks] set – if you pitch your game, and we don’t pick it, you get it back. We don’t own it. You can take it wherever you want, or you can re-pitch it. Returning the IP was a big piece to us – like hey, it’s yours. If we don’t pick it, that’s on us. You take it somewhere else and it ends up being a great, big game? High five!”

Smith says new hires come to Blackbird specifically for Skunkworks, and the “next generation of game developers” get to pitch ideas he could “never” come up with. Additionally, Skunkworks offers the chance for developers the same opportunity he was given at Activision and EA: to step up. “We do our very best to make sure that the original pitch team ends up on that development team, so they get the chance to be there,” he explains. “If someone from QA is pitching, all of a sudden they’re a junior designer or concept artist. One of the games we have, he was a producer and now through this process is a killer game director.”

What’s the secret to Skunkworks’ success? According to its creative director, there isn’t one. “It’s a really cool opportunity on so many fronts for a studio. We talk about it constantly so it’s not like we’re keeping the family secrets – any studio could do it, but I’m really glad we did. Unlike the four-day work week, I don’t know anybody that [would] do something like this. I love every second of it – it speaks to our pirate ship of a dev studio. There’s always a billion reasons to say no or not do something, but it takes the bold and brave to go for it.”

Skunkworks, and working at Blackbird, offers a chance for Smith to become the sort of person he had looking out for him throughout his career. The director says there were three or four points during his life where he could have “bounced off and left” the industry, but was saved by a number of seniors with his best interests at heart.

“I always had someone look out for me, or provide me with an opportunity where they took a risk on me, saw something in me, and put their own reputation on the line and vouched for me to be able to do this thing,” says Smith. “There’s a responsibility for me to do that. It’s one of the reasons I’m here: I want others to be as satisfied with their career as I have been, and have those moments of having a team ship a game that you know is going to be good. That’s something I want everybody that wants to make games to experience, because it’s amazing. We all have that responsibility – we have to look out and, more so than ever, be open to opening the doors to anyone that has this passion.”

On that note, Smith says the games industry needs to double down on creativity – not just by welcoming more diverse creators, but by re-evaluating the type of games it produces. It’s an opinion he shares with Double Fine founder Tim Schafer and while it’s easy to say great minds think alike, the reality is that both leaders recognise tangible benefits in pushing out the boat.

“We have to make different kinds of games – games have to continue to evolve,” Smith argues. “Innovation is everything – we’re not here to do clones of games. In order to make the kinds of games that we want to make in the future, we have to bring in new people from different backgrounds and from different places to tell different stories.”

Smith adds that while it’s cropping up in games and other forms of entertainment, there’s “a long way to go in telling the diverse stories that need to be told through games. There are a handful of them out there that are starting to get that off the ground, but we owe it to folks to open up those doors and keep them open for new waves of game developers.”

With Blackbird’s layoffs, that sense of responsibility was tested. “It’s easy to be a leader when things are good,” Smith says, “but leading when things are challenging is hard — harder still to do it the right way.”

Yet in the position that Smith now holds, he feels a keener sense of duty to get it right for those developers following in his footsteps. Looking back on his journey, the topic of soul tax resurfaces. Was it worth paying — the missed funerals, sleeping in offices?

While Smith doesn’t regret his own lifestyle “for a minute” because of where it’s taken him, he believes a better way of living is possible if more studios tackle the problem head-on, rather than just pay lip service to ongoing problems. “You can make great games and be healthy at the same time,” he says. “Healthy, happy teams make better games.”

Optimism is a rare trait in an industry riddled with crunch and lay-offs. Smith, whose career has been punctuated with both, would have every right to wave this away and lead through number-driven nihilism now he’s made it to the top. Yet he doesn’t — or perhaps can’t, as the cracks in his voice suggest when he’s discussing Blackbird’s layoffs. On his journey from quality assurance tester to creative director, Smith has seen the industry’s ugliest realities. Now that he’s found a home at Blackbird, he’s keen to help the industry reckon with a new reality: “There doesn’t have to be suffering involved with making something great.”

find out more about Blackbird Interactive here.

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