Shots Fired: The 10 Most Hilarious Game Industry Disses

Image via Complex Original

Games get a bad rep for being juvenile playthings of small minds, a rep that most hardcore players are willing to fight to the bitter end. This can be a tough act when so many of our elite game industry professionals can be prone to cattiness, spilling fuming rants full of chastising remarks towards the public and towards each other.

Of course, game developers are people just like you and I; they’re not perfect and everyone is allowed a little meltdown every now and again. However, these are the 10 most irate and potentially irrational bitch fights ever to come out of the game industry’s most prolific talent. Sit back and enjoy the flames.

Jeff Minter

Worked On: Space Giraffe

Reason for Bitching: Frogger remake outsold his original title

Bicthiest Line: Not seeing a lot of reason to continue even trying to make games

Upon seeing his beloved and bizarre Xbox Live Arcade title flounder commercially whilst Konami’s re-release of Frogger did very well within the same week, poor Jeff Minter gave up hope. The llama loving – no, I don’t mean like that – developer put his heart and soul into his strange Tempest-inspired shooter, Space Giraffe, only to watch it get crushed by a pixilated frog.

The result was an angry tirade that started on his LiveJournal (like all good rants do) before spreading to various news blogs in interviews where he spout venomous jabs at consumers and the industry as a whole. The whole affair became one of the whiniest cases of poor sportsmanship in sales, full of defeatist comments and spite towards the public for not understanding his magnum opus causing Minter to give up development for a while to focus on his llama farm.

Thankfully he eventually got off his high horse (goat?) and started making games again, giving us the surprisingly good Space Invaders Extreme, which is more than a little ironic considering his distaste for remakes.

Tomonobu Itagaki

Worked On: Dead or Alive, Ninja Gaiden, Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball

Reason for Bitching: His daughter got bored of Okami, he didn’t like the creator

Bitchiest Line: We have a saying here in Japan – “the weaker dog barks more”

Despite being a Wii title aimed at the hardcore and artistic crowd, Okami was generally loved by a majority who played it. Apparently Tomonobu Itagaki’s daughter was not among them. In an interview with EGM, Itagaki went far enough bashing the game’s lack of creative fighting mechanics to insult its creator, Hideki Kamiya.

Calling him an uninspired developer in so many words, Itagaki continued his verbal beatdown by calling out Kamiya’s entire catalog and calling it repetitive to the point of tedium. For a guy who spends a lot of time smoking, drinking and womanizing, Itagaki can be a pretty uptight dude when it comes to games that make his baby girl bored.

Greg Costikyan (Designer X)

Worked On: Nightfall: Bloodlines

Reason for Bitching: Wallet-gouging business practices from platform manufacturers and publishers

Bitchiest Line: How often do they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo? 

When Nintendo revitalized the video game industry with the NES and a rigid set of standards for quality, they also began demanding royalty fees for manufacturing games on their platform, not just selling them.

Greg Costikyan, who has lived and worked as a thoroughly independent game designer, took issue with this and took the stage at GDC and tore the model to pieces. His rant extended beyond Nintendo’s money-grubbing and took to hating publishers in general.

It’s hard to argue with someone who’s saying the little guy on the team – the designers and developers who do all the real work – should be seeing more of the money the industry rakes in, but it can be hard to take you seriously when you suggest Satoru Iwata cut out a gamer’s heart and thrust it in his own chest.

Tim Schafer

Worked On: Psychonauts, Brutal Legend, Full Throttle

Reason for Bitching: Activision screwed his publishing deal

Bitchiest Line: He doesn’t have to be as much of a dick about it, does he?

Bobby Kotick isn’t a favorite amongst gamers or game developers, but as Tim Schafer saw his publishing deal with Activision fall by the wayside as they merged with Blizzard Entertainment we finally heard exactly what was on his mind.

Chastising the CEO for being too profit-minded, Schafer postulated that Kotick was sucking the lifeblood from the games industry by focusing too much on making games with higher and higher profit margins while not caring about art. He’s not the first to say such things about dearest Bobby, but he was the first to suggest he get out of the business and head into making bars of soap instead. 

Jeff Brown

Worked On: Respawn Entertainment

Reason for Bitching: Activision harassed the game developers his company poached

Bitchiest Line: Someone should have told you this is a competitive industry 

EA won a big coup when Jason West and Vince Zampella left their cushy jobs at Infinity Ward to escape the tyrannical fists of Activision and start a brand new studio called Respawn Entertainment.

Their exodus from Activision has been one of the most childish and petty arguments ever to be dragged through the streets of the Internet with members of both teams accusing the other of being real mean folk.

At Gamescom this year Activision publishing manager Eric Hirshberg called for a ceasefire, but Mr. Brown shot back with more snide remarks calling their rival weak for trying to back out of the melee.

Jonathan Blow

Worked On: Braid

Reason for Bitching: Too many Farmville notifications in his inbox

Bitchiest Line: There’s no other word for it except evil

We’ve all been there, usually a week or two after adding your mom’s friend from the PTA on Facebook; you open Facebook to find your wall absolutely spammed with requests for little piggies, or cow food, or corn fertilizer, or whatever. 

Facebook games have a really bad tendency to use their players like viral weapons to recruit more players and Jonathan Blow took issue with this. Going as far to call the practice a completely selfish detriment to the world, saying that for all the hype around social games there’s nothing social about them. He may have a point, but it’s hard to argue with the hundreds of millions of brain dead soccer moms who just can’t get enough clicking on animated sheep.

Mark Rein

Worked On: Unreal, Gears of War

Reason for Bitching: The unnecessary inflation of AAA game development teams

Bitchiest Line: They’re just covering up for their own management and incompetence

Mark Rein’s team at Epic Games has produced some serious technology that has defined the modern age of games. The Unreal Engine 3 has powered more of your favorite titles than you can count and Gears of War has become a multi-million selling franchise within a generation. The man knows a thing or two about producing really high-profile works.

When asked about the size of development teams at publishers like Activision and EA, Rein challenged their abilities as publishers because of their ever-expanding budgets and staff requirements. While he largely takes issue with the management style of assuming more is better, he simultaneously talks about hiring quality talent that can work well.

Denis Dyack

Worked On: Eternal Darkness, Too Human, X-Men: Destiny

Reason for Bitching: Game journalists preview his (bad) games poorly

Bitchiest Line: All I wanted to point out to people is that this is so ridiculous 

Video game previews are an integral part of the average person’s game purchasing process. They’re the only way consumers can know anything about games they’re interested in when publishers refuse to let journalists have access to early review copies.

Usually this only happens when a game is particularly terrible, which in the case of Dyack’s recent releases is more than a little true. With long development cycles for his studio’s projects, there’s more than enough room for unpolished or inaccurate game design changes making for previews that are less than favorable. Of course, the best way to persuade journalists to give your games a fair shake is to insult their craft and integrity. 

Bobby Kotick

Worked On: Activision’s Evil Empire

Reason for Bitching: His wallet is too full and it makes his butt hurt

Bitchiest Line: You know if it was left to me, I would raise the prices even further 

It seems like the entire gaming world hates Bobby Kotick, and with good reason.

He’s an egotistical, power-crazed maniac who seems to do everything in his power to crush the fun out of video games. In fact, he’s even admitted it was his mission statement, “The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games… We are very good at keeping people focused on the deep depression.”

To be fair to the guy, he doesn’t often take too many pot shots at individual folks but his overall comments and attitude towards the industry make him one of the biggest bitches in the industry.