Creator Breakdown / Video Games

• The final boss of EarthBound (1994) was inspired by a traumatic experience Shigesato Itoi had during his childhood, of seeing what he thought was a murder scene in a movie as a very young child. The final boss's dialogue ("It hurts... I feel... happy...") was based on dialogue Itoi recalled from the movie (even though this dialogue was not actually in the movie in question). Since Itoi couldn't program, he had to read off the dialogue he wrote to a friend, who typed it in. They were driven to tears while writing Giygas.
• In Mother 3, as revealed by Itoi in an interview, the final battle in the unreleased Nintendo 64 version was going to be far darker than it is in the released GBA version^note And considering how dark that version is, that's really saying something.. The ending was also going to be far more ambiguous and sad (which is saying something on both counts). He accredits the happier feel of the released game to "becoming a good person", and he was horribly stressed and depressed during the development stages of Earthbound 64.
• Walt Williams, head writer of Spec Ops: The Line had to experience the kinds of horrors the player faces for three years. It's even made him wish that he was desentisized to that sort of horror.
  Jordan Garland: In creating something so compelling and, to some extent, distressing, did you ever find yourself in a position where the creative process had desensitized you to the horror it depicted?
  Walt Williams: In many ways, I wish it had desensitized me, but unfortunately, it did not. To be honest, Spec Ops was emotionally a very hard game to write. You don’t simply come up with horrible scenes, you also have to live them through the eyes of your characters. You have to get inside their heads, see these horrors through their eyes. Then, you have to destroy them on every level. This would be hard enough to experience just once. But, writing a project like this takes time. About 3 years, to be exact. That is a very long time to be immersed in a game like Spec Ops. There were definitely times when I wanted to walk away from the project, because it was taking a serious toll on my life. But in the end, I couldn’t walk away from a story and project that was so personal to me and the team at Yager.
• Apparently, while chapter 6 of The Way (RPG Maker) was in production, Lun, its creator, was going through some rough times. Arc V of Master of the Wind was also reportedly made while writer Volrath was in a deep depression. It's much sadder and more pessimistic than the series as a whole.
• Hideo Kojima:
  • Hideo was originally pressured into co-directing Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots due to a severe fan backlash, which included death threats, and his original script for the game was rather depressing. He originally wanted Snake and Otacon to be tried for war crimes and executed at the end of the game, but the development team protested, and it got changed to a happier ending showing them retiring (which could be interpreted as another product of Kojima's frustration).
  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain was a Troubled Production from the start, with Hideo attempting to protest against his own company for their mistreatment of the Video Game Division, especially its developers, and was eventually banned from attending E3 by Konami. This was seen in the prologue as a bonus mission which involved erasing logos of Kojima-developed Metal Gear games (the spin-offs that he wasn't involved in were preserved as an insult), and fueled the controversial plot-twist that cheapened the player's accomplishments in the main game. Finally, he just quit Konami altogether, fueling most of his team to follow him, to make his own weird games.
• According to Masato Kato, the head writer for Chrono Trigger, Radical Dreamers was influenced by feelings of frustration he had harbored while working on the previous project - this, he claims, influenced the darker tone of Dreamers and subsequently Chrono Cross when compared to the (relatively) lighthearted Trigger.
• In-universe example: in The Magic Circle the player gets to watch the game's fictional head developer completely fall apart through recordings and commentary strewn about the "unfinished" game world, culminating in a massive, pitiful "The Reason You Suck" Speech to the player and all of gaming.
• The New Tetris for the Nintendo 64 contained many hidden texts and rants. But most notorious was a long, hidden rant by lead programmer David Pridie. The rant reeks of a creator breakdown from what sounds like a frustrating development cycle for the game. Pridie started off by viciously lashing out against a producer named "D*n" (quite obviously "Dan"). About how D*n was useless as a producer, spent most of his time playing other video games, only did mindless busywork which antagonized the programmers and didn't contribute to the project at all, and that once the rest of the company found out how useless he was, he would be out of the job. He next calls out a designer who he says passed the blame off of work that was rejected by the higher ups, and let another employee take the fall for his mistake. He then names a music composer who, while making some outstanding music, was also lazy, and could go much further had he applied himself. He then announced his departure from H20 Entertainment after the New Tetris project was completed to go work for 3D0. And how while he loved the people he worked with, he hoped it would be a good move. He even says that the game itself "sucks" because it was not how they wanted it, and needed more time to polish it.[1]
• Scott Cawthon managed to turn his first Creator Breakdown into a Career Resurrection. Cawthon received harsh backlash over his children's game Chipper & Sons Lumber Co. due to the characters looking unintentionally creepy, fell into a depression and nearly quit game development entirely. Then he had a revelation: If people thought his characters were creepy-looking, why not go all the way? Thus was born Five Nights at Freddy's.
• danbo, one of the developers behind BLUE REVOLVER, delayed adding leaderboards and replays to the game for 8 months partly due to technical issues but also mostly due to a serious case of "impostor syndrome", in which someone who achieves something feels like they didn't and fears that they'll be exposed as a fraud at some point.
• That Dragon, Cancer is completely autobiographical, with this trope in full display. It chronicles the journey of the game's Creator Couple as they deal with their infant son's terminal cancer and his eventual death during the game's development. What began as the two creating a game to showcase their personal experience evolved into a tribute to their late son and the brief life they had together.
• Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes was as much of a vessel for director Suda51 to sort out some of his personal issues as it was a wacky new Hack and Slash entry of the No More Heroes series, and it manifested in a few distinct ways:
  • The game was the first time Suda51 had taken the director's chair in over a decade (ironically, his last project as director was the first No More Heroes), and much of his anxieties in reassuming the ultimate fate of his projects is reflected by the state of the protagonist, Travis Touchdown, who had went into self-exile from his family in desperate search for peace and guidance in his own life.
  • A lot of the character of Dr. Juvenile — a game developer with a history of being constantly exploited and screwed over from making games in her vision — is very clearly reflective of Suda's own past traumas as a game developer, whether they be technical difficulties or actual emotional damage. The most explicit reference to this is with the in-universe video game, Serious Moonlight, which due to heavy Executive Meddling was reworked into Damned: Dark Knight, a fake Stealth Sequel to a very real video game, Shadows of the Damned, which Suda co-produced but similarly suffered from extensive Executive Meddling. The fictional character of Damon Riccitiello — a Hate Sink of a CEO responsible for wrecking Serious Moonlight (who would later become a primary antagonist in No More Heroes III) — is directly based on John Riccitiello, then-CEO of Electronic Arts, the publisher of the game that would become Shadows of the Damned^note The bigger story is that Suda wanted to make a Franz Kafka-inspired Psychological Horror game called Kurayami, but EA refused to support any idea that wouldn't fit into their "western style" with mass money in mind, and kept forcing in newer concepts to "fit in" such as guns, forcing him through five total iterations of the game before accepting it, but still finding it too weird to bother ever giving any support, subsequently leading to its nonexistent marketing and crash. Suda's interactions with the real Riccitiello aren't in the books (hopefully there wasn't a brutal physical assault like what Damon Riccitiello gave to Dr. Juvenile), but it was evidently a scarring experience.
• The creator of One Night at Flumpty's became very burned out by it as a series, as he came to despise how a joke game he made to learn new software had somehow become so much more amazingly popular than anything else he'd worked on and reached a point where he basically refused to talk about it and even had his email set to automatically delete anything Flumpty or Freddy related. When he finally came back to finish it off once and for all with the third entry, Flumpty's statement at the beginning that if you "make it to the end he'll finally let you go" was just as much aimed at poor Jonochrome as it was us the players.
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask features much more dark and existential themes than usual for the series, largely motivated by the stress its entire development team faced as a result of its highly truncated production schedule. The core themes of apocalypse and despair were inspired by Yoshiaki Koizumi's daydreams about the moon crashing down onto the earth and wondering how people would react. The opening segment of Link falling into Termina and transformed into a Deku Scrub came to Eiji Aonuma from a stress-induced nightmare — by coincidence, the scene director would end up pitching the exact scenario, leading to its push for inclusion in the final game.
• Fez creator and Polytron studio head Phil Fish had historically been a controversial and polarizing figure due to his caustic behavior on social media and incendiary takes on current events. Things came to a head during a highly publicized breakdown after Fish was insulted by game journalist Marcus Beer. This proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back, and Fish erupted into a furious Twitter tirade during which he angrily announced that Fez II was cancelled and that he was quitting the game industry, citing that the hate and abuse had become too much. A year later hackers compromised both his personal accounts as well as Polytron's. In response he reiterated that he was done with the video game industry and was putting Polytron up for sale. Fish has since only worked on SuperHyperCube in 2016 but admitted that he didn't have the desire or energy to make Fez II anyway.

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