He worked up to 17-hour days on DOOM, then lost his job before the expansion launched

Two months without a day off

Andrew Willis, a producer on DOOM: The Dark Ages, says he spent two months working at least twelve hours every day to finish the Revelations of the Dark Ages expansion. His account published by Insider Gaming includes a detail that cannot be softened: some days reached 17 hours, with certain weeks approaching 80.

Willis describes a three-to-four-month production in which the team kept accepting goals after the schedule made them impossible without sacrificing nights and weekends. He says there were days when he did not see his son awake. Colleagues with decades across Hollywood and games reportedly called it the worst crunch they had experienced.

This is his account. id Software and Microsoft have not publicly answered it, so we do not know how many people kept those hours or which instructions were written down. The absence of a response does not independently verify every detail, but it does not erase the named source, job or timeline either.

The layoff came one day before launch

Microsoft laid Willis off one day before releasing the expansion that had consumed those hours. His work reached the game, but he lost his job before he could see it released.

The account joins an industry that still treats accumulated knowledge as an easy cost to remove. We saw the same collision between sales, schedules and people in ZA/UM's layoffs, where a future project and the jobs building it became part of the same business decision.

Shipping the game does not make those hours acceptable

That Revelations shipped on schedule proves only that the team met its deadline. It does not prove the process was sustainable. A 17-hour day leaves less time to recover and less room to review decisions or catch mistakes. If management treats that outcome as evidence the system worked, the next schedule can be built around the same sacrifice.

Nobody needs to decide whether Revelations is good or bad before asking for an explanation. Microsoft should state what it knew about the hours, what safeguards it used and why the producer was laid off at that moment. After another year of closures and job losses around projects such as Mindseye, a generic promise to care for teams is not an answer.