From acclaimed novelist and veteran game designer Austin Grossman, a hilarious, unfiltered account of the people behind the games we can’t put down—a Kitchen Confidential for the video game industry.

In 1991, Austin Grossman had a Harvard degree, no direction, and rent to pay. He answered a newspaper ad and landed among a group of brilliant misfits who were building entire worlds inside a computer. Over the next three decades, he helped create classics like System Shock, Deus Ex, and Dishonored. He also helped make some spectacular disasters.

In Beast Mode, Grossman tells the inside story of how entertainment’s ugly stepchild took over the world. Grossman has seen the industry’s wildest ambitions up close. His career took from a small independent gaming studio in a nondescript office park to DreamWorks, where Hollywood hoped to conquer gaming, and Magic Leap, where investors bet billions on reinventing reality. He introduces readers to the brilliant programmers, impossible designers, and unforeseeable breakthroughs that produced games people still play decades later. Through it all, he recounts the failures as frankly as the successes, especially when the mistakes were his own.

With caustic wit and a novelist’s eye for character, Grossman captures the pleasures and pains of making video games for a living. Beast Mode shows what drives the people building our virtual worlds and describes a culture whose influence extends well beyond anything we play. Whether you play or not, video games are changing your world. Beast Mode introduces you to the people making it happen.