Earlier this year, Double Fine founder and Psychonauts/Brutal Legend creator Tim Schafer had some unkind words for Activision’s Bobby Kotick, whose company first canceled Schafer’s project then later attempted to legally block it from seeing store shelves after EA picked it up.
Now, in an interview with Edge magazine, Kotick had this to say about the incident: “The guy comes out and says I’m a prick. I’ve never met him in my life – I’ve never had anything to do with him. I never had any involvement in the Vivendi project that they were doing, Brutal Legend, other than I was in one meeting where the guys looked at it and said, ‘He’s late, he’s missed every milestone, he’s overspent the budget and it doesn’t seem like a good game. We’re going to cancel it.’
“And do you know what? That seemed like a sensible thing to do. And it turns out, he was late, he missed every milestone, the game was not a particularly good game…”
Ouch. With a very public knock at Schafer’s credibility and professionalism, it will be interesting to see how this war of words escalates.
Pick up a copy of the UK rag for your filling of plenty of Kotick-isms, including delusions about the morale at Activision versus EA and quite a bit of backtracking about his own personal image.
