Insert credit: Games still struggle to credit the people who actually make them

The industry needs to get better about crediting its workers; Demonschool does it right.

By Catherine Masters  |  November 26, 2025 | 11:00am
Images: Necrosoft
Games Features Credits
Insert credit: Games still struggle to credit the people who actually make them

When the hotly anticipated tactics RPG Demonschool came out earlier this month, what caught my eye the most wasn’t the vivid artstyle, the tongue-in-cheek humor, or the college setting. It was the credits. Alongside the usual list of names are a few sentences written by the game’s director Brandon Sheffield that outline exactly what Necrosoft’s team and contractors did for the game.

Thanks to these detailed credits, we know that Technical Director Shane Marks was “responsible for stitching everything together, developing and implementing underlying technologies […] and created the technique menu flow and accessibility options,” among other contributions. Similarly, Technical Audio Designer Vincent Diamante “implemented all music and sound effects and devised all sound effect and music systems.” Hayden Scott-Baron “refined minigame pacing and flow” and crucially “created fish outlines in fishing minigame” as a Designer. And so on. Without this level of depth, we could only guess what a “Designer” did on the game, as is the case with most credits.

It’s hard enough to get your name into a game you worked on, let alone have your actual contributions detailed to this extent. Many studios only credit those around at the launch of a game, regardless of the work those contracted or let go from the studio did for it during development. If you’re not around when it ships, you may as well not have been there at all. Some studios have the decency to go back and update credits if developers have changed names, but in most cases, a game’s credits stand as a monument to whoever was on the payroll at the time it shipped. What’s more, games with external partners are dependent on those partners providing their own list for the credits, with some only giving the company name.

In the past companies would even obscure credits for their internal teams, like when Capcom reduced the work of Yoko Shimomora on Street Fighter II: The World Warrior to the anonymised “Shimo-P.” This was often done to prevent their developers being poached by rival game companies, but also served to minimize their contributions and visibility—a particularly sore point in an industry where people are often assumed to be male. Atari’s reluctance to credit its developers infamously lead to Warren Robinett hiding his name within Adventure, making it one of the first easter eggs in games. Hiding names in games even became policy at publisher Atari when they saw how their players enjoyed the pursuit.

When the contributions of the many people working on a game get obscured in this way, often people gravitate to “auteurs”—the recognizable names who frequently get top billing and are front and center during the press cycle of a game. Think producers like Sakurai or directors like Kojima. When people critique or compliment an aspect of a game an auteur worked on, often they attribute it solely to that lone recognizable person. Naturally this can lead to power imbalances in the workplace or those who worked hard on a game being forgotten, like how The Last of Us is associated with Neil Druckmann as much as it is with lead characters Joel and Ellie, despite Bruce Stanley directing the first game, leaving Naughty Dog before the sequel.

As games continue to ape films more closely, we now regularly see developer credits in games. Even that has its drawbacks, though. A film tends to be two hours in length and watched in one sitting, so pretty much every viewer has the chance to see the credits. With games taking anywhere from 10 minutes to 200 hours, and varying for every player, the chance anyone will see the credits is a lot lower on average. Some studios get around that by allowing players to view the credits from the main screen—as with Demonschool—but it’s far from a standard practice. And we still see weird situations like when Nintendo introduced a new Mario voice actor in Super Mario Wonder and refused to announce or confirm who it was until players played the game and learned through the credits that it’s-a Kevin Afghani.

Even if games properly credit their workers, it’s not like many people will intently watch them and understand what every job title means. We’ve all sat through film credits before and it isn’t long before the endless stream of names loses its meaning. Still, people should be credited for their work, and a credit is vital for finding more work within the industry. And in a move to get players to pay attention to their credits, some games prefer to add a level of interactivity to them. Take Undertale’s backer credits that you can dodge to unlock a secret fight, or the waves of punchable names in Astro’s Playroom. The interactivity lets players engage with the credits like they did with the game itself. All the same, I don’t think anyone could tell you what the third executive producer listed in a row did on the game.

And so we come back to Demonschool. The credits go a long way to demystifying game development for its players. What did Brent Porter do on the game as 3D Art Lead? Why, he “did most of the 3D modeling and rigging as well as creating most backgrounds,” of course! Not all of Demonschool’s credits have this level of depth, but this does a lot more for those who worked on the game than most other studios, and should be seen as a model for the industry at large going forward.

Catherine Masters is a games intern for The A.V. Club.

 
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