How To Kill Your Tech Company

There’s an element of Schadenfreude to hearing stories about how large companies and institutions crumble from within. Such tales are manifold, but few are as carefully and thoroughly reported as this piece by Megan Farokhmanesh for The Verge. Her subject is the video game industry—in particular a developer called Telltale Games.

Telltale has been growing since 2012, when it received the award for best game of the year by the Spike Video Game Awards for The Walking Dead. After that point, growth was fast. But “its growth came at the expense of the creativity and originality,” according to former employees, who left one by one over the years due to an increasingly toxic workplace environment.

Co-founder Kevin Bruner gets the brunt of the blame in this parable of promising-company-gone-wrong. Bruner’s insistence on his own authorship and insecurity about receiving enough credit led to jealousy and internal competition. Long and “brutal” arguments often couched as healthy honesty took a toll. Obviously a jealous boss is a bad manager.

Despite housing some of the most talented minds in the video game industry today, Telltale lost its grip. Anyone running a rapidly growing creative business, or just curious about what’s going on in that world, should read this cautionary tale.