On another note, how are they on the game release crunch? Normal 1-2 month crunch if behind schedule and normal otherwise, or is it a constant state of emergency that ramps up to a worse emergency?

I think knowing your stuff is more important than how you know it, but game servers are essentially soft real-time, maintaining thousands of connections and arbitrating 3D movement and actions and physics with predictions to compensate for network lag for all of them, and if all you know is stateless HTTP, that's not going to cut it. Video games have been dealing with the C10k problem for a lot longer than web developers.

In addition, if you're only slightly better than someone who plays games or has game industry experience, I think they'll get the job over you, no question. I'm not much of a gamer, and there just isn't anything else some people here talk about, so I miss out on a lot of water cooler talk.

I don't know how the other offices do it, but the Austin office does SCRUM, and there's always some team that's crunching during any given milestone (this time it's us). Since we're making an MMO, our release date doesn't mean we stop working or making content, but the office is mostly cleared out by 7pm or so, most nights.