Years before she worked on top-drawer point-and-clickers Return To Monkey Island and Thimbleweed Park, Australian game developer Jenn Sandercock was a junior designer on Team Bondi’s historical open world game L.A. Noire. Eventually published by Grand Theft Auto developers Rockstar in 2011, L.A. Noire took seven years to make and is an especially notorious example of crunch culture and mismanagement. Sandercock joined in the middle of one such crunch period, and wanted to make life a little easier for her exhausted colleagues. “Everyone looked so miserable after literally years of hard work & crunch,” she wrote on Twitter in 2018. “So late one night after work I baked 2 cakes for the office. I sent out a mass email & we all took 30 minutes to eat cake and talk.” Sandercock began hosting weekly “Cake Days”, baking a fresh batch in her own time to share around the office.
Rockstar were unimpressed, however. They thought Cake Day was evidence of poor productivity and, according to Sandercock, badgered Team Bondi leadership into forcing her to only share cake during official lunch hours. “Apparently the higher ups thought our entire office slacked off ALL the time because we had cake once a week,” Sandercock wrote. She herself was told “that I was jeopardising my career”. Sandercock hasn’t let the demise of Cake Day cramp her creative interest in food, however. In fact, she’s found a way to combine baking with game design. Sandercock is now the author of Edible Games, a book of recipes and instructions for concocting games out of food, and food out of games.
The games in question cover a large and colourful range. Some are about rejoicing in the physical properties of certain foods, like the self-explanatory Flip ‘n’ Stick or J-Wobbler, which is sort of pinball with pieces of jelly. Others are brainier – there’s hidden role game High Tea Assassin, in which the roles correspond to the flavoured innards of interchangeable-looking baked treats, and The Order Of The Oven Mitt, a waistline-expanding take on chess.
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