“If you aim for the king, you better not show up eight years late.”

Something different for today: a one-hour episode of a podcast A Life Well Wasted from 2025. (I can’t link to it directly, but it’s the most recent episode, called “Game Over.”) It’s a human story whose beats might be familiar to some of you: a long software project that ultimately failed despite the enormous effort. And it did so in an industry – high-budget videogames – where failures might feel particularly brutal: the projects take multiple years but the defeat can be swift, the servers get shut down and the game instantly evaporates, and instead of employees being reallocated to other games, the studio gets disbanded and people let go. There are some nice moments in the podcast’s interviews with about a dozen people, hearing about personal pride and responsibility, working together with others, and a certain camaraderie not just with other people, but with their software that develops: I think the best part about it was being able to play with my coworkers and then cutting loose,…