In my quest to educate myself more about video game design, I recently finished reading Harold Goldberg’s All Your Base Are Belong to Us. The book doesn’t touch on everything, and that’s not the point: it’s a slim one-volume guide to the people who had the key insights that created the video game industry, moved it forward, and brought it to where it is today. And if you want an understanding of which problems in the game industry have been there from the beginning, it’s an essential introduction.

Take the problem of profit-sharing and crediting. After turnover at Atari in 1979 Golberg writes, “They weren’t getting credit for the games the way the cast and crew did in each movie’s credits or the bands and their sidemen did in the liner notes of records. Nor did they receive a percentage of the profits, even though Atari was making hundreds upon hundreds of millions as one of the world’s fastest growing companies.” Similarly, when Tod Frye secured one of the first royalty deals, he only got 10-15 cents per game cartridge.

The same’s true of crash, which Goldberg describes as happening everywhere from Nintendo, where “the teams preferred to work late into the night during the increasingly brutal crunch times. They would go home past midnight and fall exhausted into bed, only to get to Nintendo again by eleven a.m. and do it all over again,” or at Naughty Dog when the company was developing Crash Bandicoot where one of the founders “was tired of holding the hands of game designers who would freak out and lose it during crunch time. Gavin understood that the tight schedule could lead to breakdowns. In video games, breakdown was the new black. But Naughty Dog was a team…’How dare anyone we brought in to work try to break up the team at deadline time?’ he thought…That’s just how it was. Long hours were what you signed up for.”

Those companies have very different artistic cultures — as Goldberg wrote me:

Electronic Arts was inspired by the passion of Charlie Chaplin and those who created United Artists. EA even today considers many of its workers artists, at least on some level. Nintendo’s culture is a Japanese culture, and by that, I mean it’s all about the company person and loyalty to the boss. That’s one reason why we only see the face of Shigeru Miyamoto promoting Nintendo games, when, in reality, hundreds of people make games at Nintendo. To a large extent, PopCap (recently purchased by EA for at least $750 million), likes to place its games on every device imaginable, so the culture is as much about, say, putting Plants Vs. Zombies on the upcoming Wii U or iPad 3 as it is about creating new games. Rockstar cares very much about American arts and popular culture, perhaps more than any other video game company. And Valve very much cares about its community and it downloadable games service, Steam.

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One of the arguments that came up frequently in our conversations about unionization of the video game industry (about which more to come as I do some reporting this week) is that it would be impossible to organize the industry because too many people want jobs developing video games, and so folks who currently have those jobs wouldn’t risk them to stand up to management and organize. The invaluable Zack Stentz and others pointed out that a lot of people want to work in movies and television, and that hasn’t prevented those industries from staying organized, though I think it’s an interesting and related question about whether it would be possible to organize those industries today, and whether the people who work in them would think of themselves as the kind of people who belong to unions if the actors’ and writers’ guilds weren’t already so established.

With all of that in mind, I think it’s useful to consider the example of the Onion News Network, whose writers were just organized by the Writers Guild of America, East, and who have already negotiated their first collective bargaining agreement. This is exactly the kind of position that you’d think would be hard to organize — a job that’s creative, highly desirable, in a contracting industry (to be fair, the fake news industry seems to be doing better than the real news industry), and relies on talent rather than on specialized skills that would limit the applicant pool some. But it didn’t prove impossible to organize it. The video game industry is bigger and has much more, financially, at stake if its employees were to unionize, and I don’t want to minimize the idea that it would be difficult. But I don’t know that it would be impossible, if people wanted it. And these are the kinds of events that should give advocates of better treatment of video game developers hope and maybe some confidence.