One Developer’s Grueling Journey Making Video Games as a Single Parent
Lisette Titre-Montgomery has been a developer since 2002, and has decades of experience with the way the video game industry makes life miserable for parents.

When game designer and artist Lisette Titre-Montgomery was getting started in the video game industry in the early 2000s, she wouldn’t disclose that she was a parent while applying for jobs.
“I knew that I would be discriminated against for that, on top of everything else,” Titre-Montgomery, a black woman, told me in a recent interview.
At 46 years old, Titre-Montgomery is a gaming veteran, and her development credits run all the way from being a 3D modeler on Electronic Arts’ extreme motocross racing game Freekstyle (2002) to art director on Psychonauts 2 (2021). (She also appears regularly in the tremendous, must-watch Psychonauts 2 documentary PsychOdyssey).
Titre-Montgomery learned she was pregnant in her last semester of high school.
“It was my high school sweetheart,” she said. “I was looking at colleges. And then when I got pregnant, for a while, I was like, ‘Well, I'm just going to be a mom and get a job and do that.’ But after a year, my daughter was about a year old, I was like ‘if I don't go to school, I'm just going to be working part time jobs, and I'll never see my child.’”
Titre-Montgomery had always been drawn to art, and around the time she conceived, Pixar’s Toy Story arrived in theaters. The movie “blew [her] mind” and also set off a light bulb for a possible career. Driving 90 minutes back and forth every day from her parents’ house, she went to school in Miami studying computer animation, juggling school and being a young parent.
Upon graduating, she packed up her daughter, two suitcases, a PC she’d built herself, and headed to California with every intention of getting a job in film—hell, maybe at Pixar itself! But in reality, her first job, and the one that would direct her—and by extension, her daughter—toward games was Electronic Arts looking for a character artist with a job listing on Craigslist.
Video games were not inevitable for Titre-Montgomery. Her first brush with the medium was when her father brought home an NES, but his reasons for buying an NES were pretty specific.
“I think one of the reasons why is because there was a boy next door who had the first Nintendo on the block,” she said, “and all the kids go over there. And so I think my dad was like, ‘I don't want them going over to that boy's house.’ [laughs]”
She remembers playing a lot of NES Tetris and, for some reason, Jeopardy.
“I think I'm just a quiz head,” she said.
But game development never occurred to her until she answered that want ad. Soon, she was forced to confront the challenges of making games and raising a child in an era before the industry was having serious conversations about mental health, crunch, and work-life balance.
“It's never been easy,” she said. “Both jobs require full time attention. [laughs] You're constantly pulled back and forth. And sometimes I've gotten the balance right, and sometimes it's been terribly wrong and bad for my child, especially when you're crunching. It's a hard balance. I don't know if I know anyone who's been able to really find that balance working in this industry.”
(Arguably, much of that later conversation would start as the result of the famous “ea_spouse” on LiveJournal, published in 2004. This “disgruntled spouse” of an Electronic Arts employee asked the publisher to wonder “When you make your profit calculations and your cost analyses, you know that a great measure of that cost is being paid in raw human dignity, right?” It’s still worth reading today.)
Titre-Montgomery’s approach early on was to get her foot in the door, and then work to establish some kind of work-life balance. Daycares are called daycares for a reason—they close and your kids have to leave. It might be time to crunch to hit a development milestone, but daycares don’t suddenly stay open for crunch. Plus, Titre-Montgomery constantly found herself having to sacrifice the social moments of a job simply to keep pace with the work being demanded of her.
“I wasn't coming in and hanging out and going out to coffee, and then shooting the shit,” she said. “And then it's gonna be two hours at my desk, and then going to play games for four hours. That's what the dudes who were at the studio were doing. They weren't necessarily getting the kind of work done. They weren't getting more work done than me. And so I was just always more focused because my time was very, very limited.”
Titre-Montgomery may have been efficient and effective, but her experiences showed her that those traits were not valued nearly as highly as being available to hang out and socialize with the right people. She found herself getting regularly passed over for promotions and pay increases, and the only path towards a better job or more money was to leave the company.
“There were a few years that I was trying to work my way up to the top when I was at EA,” she said. “I was there for six or seven years. And then at some point, I was like, ‘you know what, they're also doing the same thing, so I'm gonna move on.’ And so I've always had to change jobs. I think I've gotten maybe one promotion internally.”
The culture of the company she worked for mattered, but so did the team. She tried to identify teams with an older staff, because it usually meant they were some parents. This was the case while Titre-Montgomery worked on art and animation for The Sims 4 and art director on Psychonauts 2, but “was not the case” while a character artist on Dante’s Inferno.
That period during Dante’s Inferno was especially rough for Titre-Montgomery. On one hand, EA was a company that, at least in its Redwood Shores offices in California, had an in-office daycare for parents with young children. Other employees who worked for EA at the time told me it was a godsend and their children adored it.
Unfortunately for Titre-Montgomery, her child was too old for daycare. And furthermore, her time on Dante’s Inferno overlapped with the 2008 financial crisis, a period when, much like today, the games industry experienced big and regular layoffs.
“I distinctly remember [former EA CEO John Riccitiello] doing an all hands,” she said, “and he's doing this talk in front of this image of a burning oil rig, and essentially saying, ‘this is EA, we're too big, we're a burning oil rig, no one's getting raises, no one's getting bonuses, we're all lucky to have a job. Meanwhile, there's a layoff happening randomly every two or three months.”
“I had to really, really evaluate ‘was this job worth it?’ And the answer I came up with was [that] it wasn't. That's the strain that happens to parents in this industry. You're working overtime just to survive. Meanwhile, someone who's driving a Maserati to work every day is telling you you don't get paid for it?”
Titre-Montgomery said it was easy to know when it was a layoff day, because you’d come into work, and you wouldn’t have to scan your badge to get in, because the locks were turned off. There would be piles of boxes by the mail station, and those stacked boxes told you everything.
“As a single parent, and you're the sole provider, and that is hanging over your head, that is just really demoralizing,” she said. “And then on top of that, you're being asked to crunch unpaid overtime, while you're being told you're not going to get a bonus. I was crunching just to keep my job, to stay afloat. And that had really negative impacts on my kid. Me not being home was just really challenging for her.”
This would be challenging at any point in a kid’s life, but her daughter was a teenager, and the stresses of the job and prolonged absences was taking a deep, emotional toll on each of them.
“I had to really, really evaluate ‘was this job worth it?’” she said, tears building in her eyes. “And the answer I came up with was [that] it wasn't. That's the strain that happens to parents in this industry. You're working overtime just to survive. Meanwhile, someone who's driving a Maserati to work every day is telling you you don't get paid for it? That's the problem in this industry. The people who are running these companies have never made a game in their life. They don't know what it's like to be in the trenches, and they don't feel the impact of the choices they make.”

These days, Titre-Montgomery and her daughter are in a better place. She’s a grandma now, and co-founded a new studio called Cornerstone Interactive. For once, she’s her own boss.
The industry, though, is still behind the times in her eyes. She’s encouraged about the pivot to remote work, which provides families with flexibility when it comes to the balance of working and parenting. And she sees the lack of empathy for parents tied up in the same culture of burnout that sees many young game developers leaving early in their potential careers. All of this, at the end of the day, is tied up in “unreasonable expectations that executives make to shareholders.”
Being a parent and making video games was a challenge in the past, and remains one now. Other than fighting for more and expanded rights, Titre-Montgomery’s advice to developers who have families, or are considering having families, was to remember what matters: your family.
“I think my greatest piece of advice is: you can never get that time back,” she said, pausing briefly. “No game is more important than that. Find a way to do what you love without sacrificing the moments that matter to you. Because when you're sitting on your deathbed, you're not going to be thinking about all the games you shipped. You're gonna be thinking about the times you had with your kids, you're gonna think about the time you spent with your family. You're not gonna be thinking about "oh, what about that great launch party.’ Nobody's gonna give a shit.”
Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.
Also:
If you work in the games industry and have a story to share, whether positive or negative, about your time being a parent, my email is always open and listening.
I was incredibly lucky to have an empathetic workplace when I had kids. I was never made to feel guilty, ashamed, or lazy when I had to bow out over kid stuff.
A huge thanks to Titre-Montgomery for being so honest with a stranger. Being a parent is a deeply personal experience, and I’m grateful she spent time with me.
I'm not a game developer, but I definitely felt the "is it worth keeping this job" comment. I spent twelve years at GameStop, ending as a store manager. Those management years were hell, dealing with constant complaints that numbers weren't good enough, and expectations that we weren't working hard enough. They used to say working 45-50 hours in a week was a reward, but you were expected to do much more which led to me working 70+ hour weeks almost every week.
I remember we were given schedules that had to be worked during the Christmas season. The week before Christmas I took Sunday off because my parents were moving away and we wanted to have a last Christmas together. I had just started dating my now wife so it was extra important. I knew that was going to be the slowest day of the week, and I would be working the other six days, so it all made sense to me. But I was threatened if I didn't change the schedule around. This was back in 04, and I think the only reason they didn't fire me is because there was already rumblings back then of investigations into whether we were even legally managers.
I also remember, a few months later, my grandmother passed. My regional manager (the step above district manager, we were without a DM then) at the time was actually pretty decent about it and just told me to go and he would take care of everything. Someone from another store covered me, my employees all did a great job, it was thankfully very chill altogether. But a couple months later my new DM decided that we had gone over on hours that week and I needed to be punished.
I left eventually and started working at a grocery store. Years into that we had a daughter who was born with a heart defect. She had to be flown to another hospital for open heart surgery, so I went on FMLA knowing I would be living in another state for a few weeks. Things were ok for about a week, but then I started getting calls and texts wondering when I would be coming back, and suggesting things would go badly if I didn't come back soon. I also left this job shortly after.
This is turning in to a long ramble, but I guess I'm trying to say that this whole article and Titre-Montgomery's comments about the execs driving in to work in a Maserati while saying there's no money for raises really hit home. You really do need to decide when you've had enough, and only give just enough loyalty to keep the paychecks coming. I know the gaming industry is still in kind of a nightmare place for work-life balance, and retail sure is (can confirm still!), but we all have to remember that the executives don't care about the line employees. The days of companies taking care of their employees are long over.
I hear a lot of hopes that game devs unionize, and I share them. I also hope that retail and food workers do the same. It's one of the few ways we can try and eek some power back and ensure we can spend more time with our families without overworking ourselves to death.
Thank you for articles like this man. I am a motion designer in marketing and felt the exact same way Lisette has felt with the grueling hours and wanting to stay in the industry as a parent. I missed a lot of my first born's earlier years working on average 13 hour days. Only when I shifted to a late shift did I start to get to see my family more at least in the early afternoon. My industry doesn't really have room for families so much and stories of sleeping at desks or all nighters working on a trailer were bragged about.
Since COVID happened my department went remote, had another kid and since then I haven't missed a day of my kids life since and I couldn't imagine working like I did before. I missed quite a bit of my son's early days but thankfully I have been able to say goodnight everyday for the last 3 years.