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The Dream Architects

Adventures in the Video Game Industry

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The Dream Architects

By: David Polfeldt
Narrated by: Matt Wolfe
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About this listen

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 that revitalized the Clancy brand in gaming.

In The Dream Architects, Polfeldt charts his course through a charmed, idiosyncratic career that 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 weeklong 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 500 employees on a single project with a production budget of more than 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.

©2020 David Polfeldt (P)2020 Grand Central Publishing
Business Video Game

Critic Reviews

"Readers expecting a history of gaming will be pleased to discover this entertaining autobiography....A great storyteller, Polfeldt comes across as truthful and self-effacing...[He] is a dreamer indeed, and gamers are lucky to be invited into his creative worlds." (Booklist)

"In the film industry we would call David Polfeldt an auteur. Someone who possesses a as unique vision and also has multi-disciple skills to pull it off. This book showcases clearly David's uncanny ability to do just this. THE DREAM ARCHITECTS is a phenomenal, behind-the-scenes look into the making of today's video games. It both entertains and enlightens in equal measure." (Jon Landau, COO of Lightstorm Entertainment [Titanic, Avatar])

"Detailed and witty autobiography." (Library Journal)

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