Update: The title has been changed to accurately reflect the contents of the article.
Jessica Curry, director and composer at The Chinese Room, is scaling back her work at the company, citing her poor state of health, a “desperately toxic relationship” working with Sony Santa Monica on Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, and systemic industry sexism as her reasons.
Curry has been ill for some time with a degenerative disease that she says she cannot recover from. She does not name the disease in this blog post on her departure from the company, but says it “is not like cancer, or a stroke or a heart attack.”
“People are left at a loss because they can’t proclaim, ‘you’ll beat this thing’ or ‘you will get better’ and they can’t tell you to just ‘whoop its ass,’” she wrote. “I am going to get worse- that’s a simple fact and no amount of medication, wheatgrass, mindfulness, positive thinking or acupuncture is going to change that.”
This past June, Curry says she hit a breaking point, a moment where she realized she couldn’t escape the disease that was killing her.
“I was in LA working on the final mix of the game and I got so poorly that I genuinely thought I was going to be brought home in a coffin,” she wrote. “It forced me to re-evaluate what the hell I was doing to myself, and more importantly the effect I was having on my husband and son. I can’t keep running and it’s time to admit that to myself and to everyone who loves me.”
Curry went on to express her feelings on The Chinese Room’s collaboration with Sony Santa Monica as publisher of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.
“Working with a publisher made me extremely unhappy and very ill,” she wrote. “In the end I didn’t even recognize myself anymore – I had turned from a joyful, fun-loving, creative, silly, funny person into a short-tempered, paranoid, unhappy, negative heap. So much of the stress that I experienced was caused by what I see as the desperately toxic relationship that I was in.”
In closing, Curry turned her blog post to the games industry itself and her experiences as a professional video game developer in the games industry, who happens to be a woman.
“On a personal level I look back at my huge contribution to the games that we’ve made and I have had to watch [creative director]Dan [Pinchbeck] get the credit time and time again,” Curry wrote. “I’ve had journalists assuming I’m Dan’s PA, I have been referenced as ‘Dan Pinchbeck’s wife’ in articles, publishers on first meeting have automatically assumed that my producer is my boss just because he’s a man, one magazine would only feature Dan as Studio Head and wouldn’t include me. When Dan has said, ‘Jess is the brains of the operation,’ people have knowingly chuckled and cooed that it’s nice of a husband to be so kind about his wife. I don’t have enough paper to write down all of the indignities that I’ve faced.”
She continued, “There is a famous quote that behind every successful man there is a strong woman. Well sod that. I’ve realized that the only way I’m going to get credit for the work that I do is if I take a step away from Dan. I love Dan so, so much. He is a talented, intelligent, shining-souled man. This is not a rejection of him but of the society that still can’t cope with the fact that a woman might just be as talented as the man she shares her life with.”
Curry said that she is still a company director at The Chinese Room, still holds an office at the company, and “will still write music for our beautiful games.”
“I’m about to embark on a large-scale music project with Carol Ann Duffy, our wonderful Poet Laureate and If you’d like me to write some music for you then please do get in touch,” she wrote. “I may well find that my travels lead me back to the company sometime in the future; we’ll see. But in the meantime I want to spread my wings and see where the next adventures lie.”
Source: The Chinese Room
