Aléatoire: Le compositeur de Metroid Prime Hunters réfléchit aux moments de stress chez Nintendo

Lawrence Schwedler a passé plus de 13 ans chez Nintendo Software Technology en tant que directeur audio, composer de la musique pour des jeux comme Metroid Prime Hunters sur DS, Course de vague: Tempête bleue sur GameCube, Pokémon Puzzle League sur N64 et même le Chibi Robot série.

Alors qu'il était apparemment “super et heureux” la plupart du temps, dans une récente interview avec le Podcast Kiwi Talkz, il a reconnu que son travail chez Nintendo était aussi l'une des périodes les plus stressantes de sa vie – en raison des pressions, les attentes et d'autres facteurs en jeu comme le syndrome de l'imposteur.

On the other hand, Schwedler a également eu des moments où il ne le ressentait pas vraiment, et se sentait comme si son jeune moi n'aurait pas été heureux de son état d'esprit quand à l'époque, il avait le “le boulot le plus cool du monde”. Voici exactement ce qu'il avait à dire:

“the way I’ve talked about my career at Nintendo it sounds like it was great and happy, it was one of the most stressful times in my life, and it wasn’t all fun, and there was times when I just felt like “what am I doing here”…I’m sure you’ve heard of imposter syndrome, where you feel like, where you’re like “oh my gosh, what am I doing here, I can’t do this, they think I’m something I’m not”…almost all artists have to deal it…on the other end there was like “I don’t like this anymore, I’m just not being challenged, we’re just doing another sequel…” and you slap yourself because you realise if your former self from 20 years ago heard you now, would just say look I’m gonna take you out in the backyard and I’m gonna shoot you, cause you have the coolest job in the world, but it isn’t always the coolest job in the world…I think it’s a more organic process that we have to keep fighting for what we love and do have to keep reinventing yourself and learning new things.”

Dans un separate interview with Shinesparkers late last year, Lawrence shed some light on at least part of what made his job and time at NST so stressful, and it seems to be because he was working on such a “haut profil” IP with an established fanbase.

“It was stressful to work on such high-profile games with such a huge fan base, knowing that everything we did would be compared to legendary Nintendo games we all loved. Every game developer loses sleep before their game is released, worrying about all the things they didn’t have time to do, sweating over how their work will be received. But it’s also a lot of fun. I got to work with an amazing team of programmers, designers, et artistes, many of whom I still know and work with.”

As he mentions though, it’s still “a lot of fun” but it’s understandable why he felt the way he did when he was working with such iconic video game series. Nowadays Schwedler is a program director for the music and sound design program at Digipen in Redmond, Washington.