"a VERY interesting DM conversation"

August 24, 2020 9:05 AM

A story about a cancelled game, a veteran team, and an eccentric creative director (SLTwitter / Threadreader) (via)
posted by May Kasahara (23 comments total)

This was such a fun ride that I was genuinely disappointed, rather than kinda annoyed, that this turned out to be made up.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:28 AM on August 24, 2020 [10 favorites]

A long climb for a short slide, if you ask me.
posted by Cash4Lead at 9:40 AM on August 24, 2020 [7 favorites]

Needed a Nate the Snake crossover. Otherwise, 5 stars, would forget about and read again.
posted by Anonymous Function at 9:42 AM on August 24, 2020 [1 favorite]

This is what we in the biz call a "s̵͙̎͒h̴̛̘̎a̵̮͑̆g̸̡͈͝g̸̺̓̈́y̷͔̐̉ ̴̢̻̓d̵̳͚̈́ő̸͖͕g̵͔̩͗ ̷̗̞͑s̸̡͌͂t̸̲͈̓o̴̱̓ŕ̸̝̓ỵ̸́̍".
posted by hanov3r at 9:44 AM on August 24, 2020 [4 favorites]

A helpful definition for a term that was new to me.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 9:54 AM on August 24, 2020 [2 favorites]

I love a good shaggy dog story and I love this.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:14 AM on August 24, 2020 [1 favorite]

It's funny how much learning the story is fake robs it of joy for me. I'd already started trying to research which studio this was based on the arson arrest. Joke's on me, I guess. Boy am I dumb for believing something I read. I should never trust again.

It is a good shaggy dog story, just wish I knew that going in.
posted by Nelson at 10:16 AM on August 24, 2020 [4 favorites]

Think of it as an ARG ;)
posted by rikschell at 10:25 AM on August 24, 2020 [1 favorite]

I thought it was real until the end, because the games industry is chock full of engineers making ~30% of what they would make in a real industry, so alleged "veterans" getting handed a giant check and then having someone in charge metaphorically and literally set that money on fire sounds just about right to me.

Actually, I should have caught on when the author got into the "um, actually casual games are failing to make money" stuff since that is 100% untrue.
posted by sideshow at 10:26 AM on August 24, 2020 [1 favorite]

> "s̵͙̎͒h̴̛̘̎a̵̮͑̆g̸̡͈͝g̸̺̓̈́y̷͔̐̉ ̴̢̻̓d̵̳͚̈́ő̸͖͕g̵͔̩͗ ̷̗̞͑s̸̡͌͂t̸̲͈̓o̴̱̓ŕ̸̝̓ỵ̸́̍".

A shoggoth dog story?
posted by I-Write-Essays at 10:49 AM on August 24, 2020 [9 favorites]

A shaggy Croft story.
posted by chavenet at 11:10 AM on August 24, 2020 [1 favorite]

I was awake overnight when this was originally posted one tweet at a time and was reading it unfolding in realtime, unable to even think of going back to bed until it concluded. The first forty or fifty parts seemed believable. Around tweet #65 I figured we were being led on a long walk that didn't go anywhere, but I held on until the conclusion.
posted by Servo5678 at 11:16 AM on August 24, 2020 [1 favorite]

This thread would be a lot more interesting if people were posting the way they usually do, without reading to the end. Very disappointed.

FWIW, I completely believed this up until the end, and I'm not sure I enjoyed it after I learned it was fake. But I respect someone for capping off a shaggy dog story with such a lame pun. A good joke would have ruined the mood.
posted by mark k at 11:51 AM on August 24, 2020 [5 favorites]

But I respect someone for capping off a shaggy dog story with such a lame pun. A good joke would have ruined the mood.

Having seen so many dad jokes since returning to MeFi on a regular basis, that pun was what ultimately led me to post this thread here.
posted by May Kasahara at 12:04 PM on August 24, 2020

As someone who was following this when it was posted, it's a good joke, but I think it woulda been cooler if the game, scenario, and other circumstances had been real.
posted by Quackles at 12:06 PM on August 24, 2020

Those who enjoyed this, as I did, might also like: "cripes does anybody remember Google People"

(Be sure to pay attention to the date of the last few posts.)
posted by teraflop at 12:06 PM on August 24, 2020 [5 favorites]

I'd play that Tomb Raider game.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 2:26 PM on August 24, 2020

1. That Tomb Raider game sounds brilliant.
2. I absolutely believed this until the end.
3. Because I've spent a lot of my life in TV production (and one of my closest friends is a lawyer for Indie game studios) and, like, last year I spent half the year on a crazy project that PBS and Netflix had purchased before settling on what the project would even be, and lead producers and the concept itself kept changing almost weekly as the deadlines were pushed back indefinitely and my job description became basically "take the train to the office and see what burned down." If anything, I understand that game development is magnitudes more insane than TV.
posted by Navelgazer at 3:15 PM on August 24, 2020 [5 favorites]

Non-standard game endings get named with dubious puns all the time, and the pun had already been set up as a weird coincidence, so I took it as true rather than the ‘hey wait a minute’ reaction I imagine the author wanted.
posted by Merus at 8:36 PM on August 24, 2020 [2 favorites]

Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug: I had the same problem. In the words of the great Frank Oz...

rikschell: You can't spell ARG without, well... ARG!!
posted by BiggerJ at 9:29 PM on August 24, 2020

Called it fake at post #73. (They're an autonomous, independent team of veteran developers, and they have morning stand-ups.)
posted by Cardinal Fang at 11:31 PM on August 24, 2020 [1 favorite]

I’m a former game dev (was in the industry for 15 years) and I believed almost to the end, heh. Crazy creative directors, man... actually, the worst is the crazy rich guy who owns the studio, funded by his own money, and helicopters in occasionally to blow up all your work so far, hands you a totally different direction, tells you that you’re bad at your job and you should have deduced the new direction on your own. And the new direction, same as the old direction, is just bad because he’s a crazy rich guy and not a professional game designer. Repeat a few months later.

That’s a loose retelling of situations I’ve been in and ones I’ve heard about from other devs.

I saw a meme the other day that said something like “when you don’t realize a situation was traumatic until you tell it as a funny story and everybody looks at you weird.” Perfect encapsulation of the industry.
posted by liet at 9:01 AM on August 25, 2020 [2 favorites]

I spent many years in the industry and also found it completely plausible up until the gag. This reads like things that have actually happened, just not maybe not all on the same project. The writer addresses this in a followup thread.
posted by subocoyne at 9:18 AM on August 25, 2020 [1 favorite]