With its gripping revenge story, lightning-fast combat, and cinematic vistas of Edo-period Japan, Sucker Punch Productions’ new PlayStation 5 epic, Ghost of Yotei, has fans raving. Much like the game’s sweeping open world, where players can chart their own course, BA in Game Design graduate Maria Bourg had to forge her own non-linear path toward becoming a producer at Sucker Punch.
“Boy, what a journey!” Bourg says, reflecting on the long, winding road that led her to the peaks of Mount Yotei.
Bourg’s start in DigiPen’s programming-heavy BS in Computer Science in Real-Time Interactive Simulation program made for a bumpy beginning. “Coding and I did not get along. I failed calculus three times,” she admits. “After many painful lessons, I moved to the BS in Computer Science and Game Design program, failed a little more, and learned a few more lessons.”
Still getting her footing, Bourg found an early waypoint towards her destiny in her freshman game project course, where she discovered a knack for taking big ideas and breaking them into actionable tasks. “Other team members excelled in design and implementation, and I was more inclined toward communicating with professors about my team’s needs, tracking tasks, and analyzing data,” Bourg says. “At first, I had no real understanding of what a producer was, but since then, I’ve always been the assumed producer.”
Taking that cue, Bourg switched majors one last time to the BA in Game Design program. She quickly found her stride there, diving into design-focused coursework and sharpening her production skills in each successive game team project. Her zig-zagging path actually gave her an edge, as she turned her early coding experience into an unexpected asset. “I cannot stress enough how much those computer science classes I failed helped me be a better producer to this day,” Bourg says. “I know just enough to be dangerous!”
After graduating in 2019, Bourg landed a production contract working on Epic Games’ breakout hit, Fortnite. “It formed my foundation for my production style and my love of production tools,” she says of the experience. That production style, she explains, was heavily influenced by her passion for her psychology courses at DigiPen. “In my opinion, production is 95% people management,” Bourg says. “How do you build a process that really works for the team using it? What’s the best way to communicate six weeks of deadlines to writers versus artists? How do you get information from a very busy lead? That’s all psychology.”
When her Fortnite contract wrapped, Bourg spotted a job listing for a producer contract at Sucker Punch on the recently announced Ghost of Tsushima, already deep in development. “I got a call from the executive producer who said, very genuinely, ‘You are completely unqualified for this role, but your resume was so interesting I had to talk to you.’” Bourg laughs. “One way or another, I earned a contract as a production assistant, helping organize the final touches for narrative and a few other teams.”
When pre-production began in 2021 on Ghost of Tsushima’s follow-up, Ghost of Yotei, Bourg’s unconventional background had proven to be an undeniable asset to the studio. She was brought back on as a full-time producer, earning her first opportunity to shape a AAA title from start to finish. Building on her narrative experience from Ghost of Tsushima, Bourg oversaw Ghost of Yotei’s massive volume of spoken dialogue and cutscenes, collaborating closely with the writing, cinematics, dialogue, and tools teams.
“Each team has their own unique needs and their own communication styles, so my role changes drastically between them. Day to day is a wide range of possibilities, which is why I love production,” Bourg says. One day might see Bourg coordinating script reviews for directors or advocating for new features from the tools team to help the writers, while the next might see her ensuring cinematics props and locations are ready for motion capture shoots.
Thanks to its sprawling open world, one of Bourg’s biggest challenges on Ghost of Yotei was the time she spent in voiceover sessions, providing crucial context for its 60 hours of gameplay to the VO director. “My personal favorite challenge, or the one that keeps me up at night, is keeping an actor from talking to himself, or voicing multiple people in one close area,” Bourg says. “Actor 1 may be the bounty up on the hill, and on your way there you encounter a lone ronin who is also Actor 1. I hear them all over, but thankfully my friends and family don’t hear it like I do.”
In true producer spirit, Bourg created a graph that models how much recorded voiceover made its way into the game over the years. “It’s exponential!” Bourg says. “It took so many people to accomplish, and I’m so grateful to everyone who made that happen.”
Players seem equally grateful, with outlets like GameRant and even IGN Japan awarding the game a perfect 10/10 review, the latter acknowledging the major achievement of an American studio faithfully setting a game in Japan. “Unreal. Unbelievable. Insane. What?” Bourg says of the game’s reception. “Who did that? Not me! My friends, yes, they’re amazing and talented and deserve all the praise!”
With 15 fellow DigiPen Dragons at Sucker Punch working on the game, spanning programming, art, audio, and design, Bourg had no shortage of allies. And as a producer, she made sure that support flowed both ways. “They get away with large scope asks, don’t tell the others,” she jokes.
Bourg says learning to handle those large scope asks and every new curveball that comes her way goes back to her DigiPen foundation. “Those skills I built at DigiPen to handle new problems are the most useful of all my education,” she says. “Every project, every team, every week has a new set of unexpected challenges. Confidence is key, and you’ll end up on the right path eventually.”
That path recently led Bourg to northern Japan, where she got to visit the real-life Mount Yotei that inspired the game. “I grew up in a town like Niseko, the ski village right next to Yotei,” she says. “I visited there and fell in love with Mount Yotei and the small villages surrounding her. Now I’m afraid the game will do too well, and I’ll have to share her with more tourists!”