Phil Fish: Gaming's Most Hated Developer

Phil fish was easily the most hated game developer ever despite creating an extremely popular award-winning indie game from scratch the public apps apps buys tan that was until in a fit of rage he quit forever but was he really so bad and what made him quit Phil's career in the games industry started soon after he graduated from the Montreal nads design and digital art for video games program that is a mouthful but it wouldn't be long before he wanted to give up he took his first job at Ubisoft and later called it the worst experience

of his life he hated how games were made there there were hundreds of people on your team you didn't know anyone's name and it just felt like one big Sweatshop I mean no wonder he hated it he was a level designer for the video game adaptation of the animated movie Open Season yeah those types of games are always fun and well made to try and not hate his life Phil got into some side projects like other games and founded a yearly video game festival called gamma most important of all was a game he was working

on on with game developer Sean McGrath Sean had this idea to create a puzzle game where the world was 3D but would be viewed in four 2D points of view that you would switch between that sounds overly complicated so just check out the tech demo on screen Sean would code the game and Phil would do the art unfortunately creative differences led to the two splitting up before the game could be completed ultimately adding all this extra pressure and time commitment didn't help much with Phil hating his life Less in fact it made it worse leading

to Phil having a mental breakdown during a meeting at Ubisoft being removed from the team and then fired Phil soon found another job at another game development studio called artificial mind and movement but in the background he was pursuing the previously mentioned 2D but 3D game idea on his own he put up a post on deviantART looking for a programmer and the first guy who responded Renault Bernard hopefully I said his name right was the guy Phil ended up working with in 2007 Phil began posting about the game now named Fez to the tig Source

forums where it very quickly gained popularity the first goal for fez's creators was to enter it in 2008's independent games Festival Awards or for short igf as soon as screenshots of the game began getting posted Forum members were instantly enamored and wanted to see more over the next few months Phil and Renault put some serious work into Fez and managed to get a demo finished in time for igf even releasing this short trailer playing in the background there wasn't much yet but it was seriously impressive looking for a demo well all the crunch time was

worth it as Fez was nominated for two awards at igf now igf was held at the yearly game developers conference Phil's employers were sending many of the company's employees to this conference but Phil was not one of them Phil begged and pleaded with his bosses to let him go not to pay for his trip like the other employees but just let him go either way they still said no so Phil quit his job on the spot which nine out of 10 times would be a horrible choice that I don't recommend to most people but it

paid off for Phil because at igf Fez ended up taking home the Excellence in Visual Art Award a week ago nobody knew Phil fish or Fez outside of a small online following but now he was blowing up in the media over the next few years Phil and Renault continued to work on the game on a shoestring budget they ran out of money a few times but made it work even getting a grant from the Canadian government they showed a playable demo of the game paxed East in 2011 and despite the game crashing every playthrough it

was a success sometime before Pax a documentary crew had reached out asking if Phil wanted to be in a movie they were working on called indie game the movie he agreed and when it premiered in early 2012 we got a taste Phil is actually like underneath to summarize in the movie he seemed like a very driven and focused guy who perhaps didn't have the best social skills in the movie he threatened to murder his ex-partner kill himself if he didn't finish the game nearly has a panic attack at a hotel lobby and tells his critics

to off but if you give the movie a full watch none of these guys really have amazing social skills every one of them more or less gave up everything in their lives to do nothing but make games every hour that they were awake after all the only parties game developers go to are Lan parties oh brother this guy I stinks at the end of the day I still found Phil to be a likable quirky character who was under a lot of pressure much like a lot of the internet thought but that all changed when he

was part of a q a for the movie at that Year's GDC essentially a Japanese game developer asks Phil are there any modern Japanese games that inspire you like how Mario and Zelda clearly inspired Fez and he responds with this I suck yeah I'm sorry like you guys need to get with the times and uh make better interfaces and like update your technology uh we're totally kicking your ass back then you guys are the king of the world but time has passed I'm so sorry did you look at look at his face look at what

you did Phil yeah it's pretty bad you can actually see this poor man's heartbreak but if I were to play the rest of the clip a lot of the other panelists agreed with him but I'll admit in nicer terms Phil's comment itself was something a decent chunk of Gamers would agree with but how he said it turned him into a villain and the media would run with it the next morning Phil woke up to hundreds of Articles written about him and thousands of people screaming at him on social media it didn't help when a lot

of the Articles blew things way out of proportion with titles like Phil fish slams Japan on a forum called neogaf Phil's critics had created a 35-page discussion of how much of an he was for what he said at GDC little did they know they were about to get another reason to hate him a few months later Phil and Renault entered the game into igf again and it won again but this time it won the Show's main award on the same day Fez won Phil tweeted about the previously mentioned neogaf threat about him someone responded saying

oh it's just about some arrogant schmuck Indie Dev talking smack yet has released zero games great read though to which Phil responded I just won the grand prize at igf tonight suck my dick choke on it he'd continue tweeting saying they also won 30 grand and that Fez was the first game to win an igf award multiple times as you can imagine this made a lot of readers very upset here was this arrogant Game Dev getting all this attention praise and money for something that might not even be released and he's seemingly gloating about it

all over Twitter much like what Phil said to the Japanese man the media took this story and ran with it now much to Phil's haters dismay Fez did end up releasing very soon after in April of 2012 as in Xbox Live arcade exclusive it was an immediate success with 20 000 copies being sold in the first day which may not sound like a ton but for an indie game in 2012 that was huge the graphics were beautiful the gameplay was relaxing and interesting and the lowest review from a major publication I could find was an

8 out of 10. even though Phil was now seen by much of the public as an a-hole he also had created Something Beautiful Fez was so good it would go on to sell over a million units a year and a half after release but it wouldn't be long before Phil fell out of the Public's favor again a patch was submitted to correct some bugs in fez's code unfortunately the patch came with a new major bug that would cause a little under one percent of the game's players to lose their save data so Phil withdrew the

patch and planned to submit a new one but Microsoft would charge him a fee to submit the new one Microsoft gave developers one free patch for their games but after that they would allegedly charge forty thousand dollars per patch why I don't know probably just because they could so Phil canceled the new patch put the one with the major but rare bug back up and just never fixed it but most people just read headlines and didn't know about the fees and just saw this as greedy developer won't patch broken game and to be fair if

I was one of the people who lost my saves I'd be Phil's number one hater too but we're just getting started over the next year Phil would continue to get in trouble for his takes on Twitter in April of 2013 Fez released on PC and after some complaints about it he tweeted nine dollars for a game like Fez is a steal I should be charging you ninety dollars you in greats now Fez was originally designed to be a couch game played with a controller so there'd be no PC Port of the game because in Phil's

words PCS are used for spreadsheets but as you just saw Fez did later come to PC when asked about why Phil allegedly said for profit what like why would you say that another great tweet from around then was when someone said that fez's main draw was just a 2d 3D gimmick Phil responded with says the person who has zero followers but all the hate didn't stop him from working on his next big project Fez 2. it was announced at E3 in June of 2013 with this short teaser trailer well the game was being worked on

Phil continued to get himself in trouble on Twitter with perhaps his most hated tweet yet before I show it to you a bit of context right around 2013 is when the gamergate movement began to keep it simple it was a group of Gamers who protested the idea of things like political correctness and video games they wanted ethics and games journalism and wanted to protect the gamer identity from normies and bandwagoners their subreddit was so bad its own Creator shut it down with this honestly sort of chilling message one of gamergate's biggest targets was Anita sarkeesian

a feminist critic who pointed out things like sexism and problematic tropes in many people's favorite video games Anita had some solid points and in insightful commentary but whenever she missed the mark she missed it hard I've been playing games for most of my life I'm not a fan of video games I would love to play video games I don't want to go around shooting ripping off their heads and it's just gross a lot of people didn't like her especially gamergate supporters but Phil did and tweeted out Anita sarkeesian is a hero this tweet and his

pushback against gamergate is the one that would plant the seed that ended his career but we're not quite there yet in 2013 Microsoft announced that indie game developers would finally be able to publish their games on their own on the Xbox One this was pretty huge news as previously getting a game on consoles was both difficult and costly remember that forty thousand dollar patch fee so the media obviously wanted to get the opinions of indie game developers who better to ask than people from indie game the movie Phil fish and braid developer Jonathan Blow well

neither wanted to comment on it and win Marcus beer also known as the annoyed gamer heard about that it just set him off he wasn't just annoyed he he was pissed she should be grateful that these guys still consider what you say uh something of use me I think that both of you are a pair of top spots having seen these wankers over and over again among Phil fish in particular he could just he does come across as whiny he why so most of the time you may make good games well blow mix you know

braids a good game my you know Fez I'm just not into at all but I I'm sorry I'm not into it I would like to say to every Outlet who got dismissed by Blowfish them next time they have something to Shell say yeah not so much interested it is a two-way street it's a symbiotic relationship you guys are out there you have to suck it up this was the straw that broke the camel's back Phil went to Twitter to defend himself saying he was simply waiting to hear more before commenting in typical Phil fashion instead

of just defending himself he went too far by calling beer a media leech middle-aged parasite and then said compare your life to mine and then kill yourself but Phil wasn't done yet his next tweet was I'm done Fez 2 is canceled goodbye he went on to clarify that he didn't cancel Fez 2 because of what beer said but because he's supposedly wanted to get out of the games industry either way Fez 2 was over and the polytron account confirmed it with a tweet later in this whole situation Phil was really just trying to defend himself

against Beer's comments but obviously went way way overboard in June of 2014 he would make the news again when he tweeted out that YouTubers playing his game without giving him a cut of the profits was basically piracy a pretty horrible take if you ask me but I'm totally not biased in typical Phil fashion he of course had to respond to people who hated this idea Phil just kept letting the internet get to him he would continue to go on tweet storms like when he defended another gamergate Target Zoe Quinn during that event he got so

frustrated that he claimed to cancel a project he was working on and another and another one he even went as far to call Quinn's attackers essentially racists but deleted did the Tweet just moments later things weren't looking good for fish but they were about to get a lot worse in August of 2014 Phil and Zoe Quinn were both hacked by a gamergate supporters Phil was doxed had his public information leak online polytron's website and Twitter were hacked his Dropbox was compromised and so on Phil took to Twitter soon after and said I would like to

announce that polytron and The Fez IP are now for sale no reasonable offer will be turned down I am done I want out to every aspiring game developer out there don't give up it's not worth it soon after deactivating his Twitter account despite radio Silence from Phil a year later he was in the media again when he was accused of stealing Fez from Sean McGrath that first collaborator I mentioned at the beginning of the video allegedly Fez was supposed to be canceled when their partner ownership broke up and McGrath was filled with rage when it

won that award at 2008's igf but that turned out to be entirely false but because Phil was seen as an a-hole and most people focus on headlines plenty of people today still believe that Phil stole Fez although Phil later reactivated his Twitter account he's pretty much stayed out of the public eye almost entirely since then the only appearance I could really find was him appearing in a trailer for a game that he helped develop in 2016. although I don't think polytron or The Fez IP were ever actually sold Phil has been done with games since

then sort of in a brief interview earlier this year Phil said that he still works on games but cancels every single one of them before they're ever announced my guess is because he's now almost afraid of the public tearing it apart Fez was a near-perfect game and if his next one isn't I'm unsure if he'd be able to handle the criticism but when it's all said and done did Phil really deserve all this hate let's rewind to indie game the movie Phil says people say I don't care about what people think about this and that

I care about what people think I wish I didn't but I do I'm a little bit annoyed by how much I care about that stuff I wish I didn't care that much I think this was the ultimate downfall of Phil's career he cared too much about what others thought this made Phil an easy target especially when he would respond to seemingly every piece of criticism made against him even when someone just randomly pinged him on Twitter No matter how dumb it was Phil would always fire back and always be portrayed as the a-hole for example

let's take this Reddit thread arguing about Phil fish's personality someone posts I've never heard of him but look at these awful tweets he's posted what an a-hole 216 up votes the first tweet is Phil telling someone please lose weight which sounds really mean but if we scroll down to see the context which only has 52 upvotes Phil was responding to someone telling him Phil you looking crazy dude please shave from the second Phil said what he did to that Japanese developer it was over he became the internet's new punching bag and it was pretty easy

to hate him when even the tiniest thing would set him off people now hated Phil fish and articles that confirmed yes hating Phil fish is the right thing to do would get thousands of clicks that Japanese developer actually later thanked Phil for what he said because it motivated him and motivated other Japanese game creators to work harder but nobody knows that because that's not a story that gets clicks not to mention Phil has apologized for what he said first seconds after he said it and multiple times since then but this is a moment that no

matter what the internet would not forget and would double down on every time Phil said something controversial as somebody who had never played Fez and had only heard of Phil fish for supposedly being an before this video I can confidently now say I'm a fan was Phil fish completely innocent and all the hate he received no way but he didn't hurt anyone or commit any crimes and celebrities in the last decade have done a lot worse than that and if Fest whoever does release I'm buying it but not for ninety dollars [Music]