No Man’s Sky developer Sean Murray: ‘It was as bad as things can get’
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2...-hello-games-sean-murray-harassment-interview
Some quotes...
“The internet is really good at knowing when somebody has made a mistake,” says Murray. “It’s not necessarily the best at determining the most appropriate response, but it’s really good at knowing when somebody has messed something up. We definitely messed up a whole bunch of communication. I’ve never liked talking to the press. I didn’t enjoy it when I had to do it, and when I did it, I was naive and overly excited about my game. There are a lot of things around launch that I regret, or that I would do differently.”
He is reluctant to relive the particulars of what happened in the weeks and months following No Man’s Sky’s release in August 2016 (“I find it really personal, and I don’t have any advice for dealing with it,” he says), but it involved death threats, bomb threats sent to the studio and harassment of people who worked at Hello Games on a frightening scale. They were in regular contact with Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan police. “We didn’t talk about it, but it was as bad as things can get, basically,” Murray says. “There’s a smorgasbord of things that the angry mob can do. It is a crowdsourced thing of how bad you can make someone’s life."
“I remember getting a death threat about the fact that there were butterflies in our original trailer, and you could see them as you walked past them, but there weren’t any butterflies in the launch game. I remember thinking to myself: ‘Maybe when you’re sending a death threat about butterflies in a game, you might be the bad guy.’”
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“We did something that I think I’ve always done, when I look back at my life,” says Murray. “When I’ve dealt with s***ty situations when I was kid, moving between lots of schools, or when I’ve had s***ty bosses later in life … I basically just get my head down, and I work, and I avoid. I just focus on making games, making cool creative things, and that’s an outlet for me. I think the team just wanted to do that.”
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“That’s what you make games for,” he says. “You’re stood there, and there is admittedly an angry mob in front of you, but behind that there’s a crowd of others. I just want to communicate with them directly. I want to make things for them.”
More at the link above.