EFFORTPOST [Effortpost] Old vidya drama - Leaf developer gets in feud with NeoGAF

I'll make this an effort post since I know you zoomies know nothing about the Internet or gaming before 2015.

Dyack in the middle

Silicon Knights

Silicon Knights was a Canadian developer who made a few decent games, like Legacy of Kain and the Gamecube remake of Metal Gear Solid. They're mainly remembered for the classic Gamecube horror game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, which is quite good for its time and is notable for being the only rated-M game ever published directly by Nintendo. They were lead by a guy named Dennis Dyack, a whiny manchild who doomed his company to fail.

Zoomers: This was considered scary in 2002

To give you an idea of their management, here's an image of games in production, games that were cancelled or abandoned before release are marked in yellow. Note the staggering ratio of unreleased/released games:

Anyways, Dyack's passion project for decades had always been a game called Too Human, but every effort to make it had been abortive. After the successes of Eternal Darkness and MGS, Dyack decides the Wii doesn't have shiny enough graphics and makes the bold choice to unshackle his company from a lucrative position as a Nintendo third party so he can truly fulfill his vision on the superior XBawx Please Fix Me. Silicon Knights shacks up with Microsoft and Epic Games and produce an E3 demo (zoomers: people used to go to an annual convention for video game trailers) which is received overwhelmingly negatively.

Dyack is NOT HAPPY and goes on the IGN forums to whine about how the critics will regret their words and deeds:

Unedited clip from Too Human

NeoGAF

Once upon a time there was a gayming website called Gaming Age, with their forum called the Gaming Age Forum (or GAF). Eventually Gaming Age imploded, but the top two jannies (Evillore and Bishoptl) were able to move their community to a new forum, appropriately called NeoGAF. You wouldn't know it these days with GAF being a shambling corpse and its spinoff ResetERA being what it is, but pre-G*merGate GAF was chill and a place where industry figures would show up and sperg out while everyone laughed at them.

Dennis Dyack makes a bet

Once such figure was our hero, Dyack. With his new slop getting trashed by GAFfers, he makes a thread to bet on how it'll turn out:

Right now the man just appears confident in his project. But his next post is a bit more... unhinged, and seems to be setting the bar rather low by making alreay-forgotten games Lair and Haze the standard to beat:

He then goes for an interview on 1up (Zoomers: Now-defunct gaming journo site) and whined about how people saying mean things online is ruining America and how if the NeoGAF mods don't start respecting Denis Dyack and Too Human he's going to call the Internet Police and shut them down!

Dyack then does another interview where he declares that not only is NeoGAF the worst forum in the world, but forums in general are evil and this is why the US military no longer uses writing:

Too Human comes out and scores lower than Haze. In classic GAF fashion the top janny punishes Dyack for losing the bet by writing lots of words and then perma-banning him. Dyack copes by saying g*mers are too stupid to understand his genius.

By this point the capital-G G*mers are pissed at Dyack in a way that prefigures G*merGate in a way. Seething articles are written speculating that angering the G*mers has resulted in him not just being banned from NeoGAF, but divorced from his wife, kicked out of the house, abandoned by his employees, his car towed, banned from every website ever, banned from the city of Niagara and tossed over the waterfall.

He messed with g*mers. G*mers.

The Saga Ends

Denis Dyack has brought Silicon Knights from one of the more respected devs in the industry to basically a joke. Following the failure of Too Human Dyack blamed the Unreal Engine and Epic Games and made the genius decision to sue them. This didn't go their way and by 2012 they owed Epic millions of dollars, had less than five employees, and were legally obligated to destroy all of their unsold games and source code.

In the meantime they had six more projects (including two sequels for Too Human) which were cancelled before they finally released another game, the absolutely awful X-Men Destiny, which turns out to be their last. In desperation, Dyack crawls back to Nintendo and pitches a sequel to their last hit, Eternal Darkness. NeoGAF insider reveals that Nintendo is agreeable until SK loses the lawsuit against Epic, and they decide they'd rather not fork over $10 million in legal fees so SK can survive, which Dyack denied. Former SK staff reveal that this was the case and part of the reason the X-Men game sucked was because Dyack was taking money given by Activision for that game and instead putting it toward Eternal Darkness II.

Years later Dyack attempts to kickstart his own Eternal Darkness successor and makes $300,000 out of the $700,000 target. He has yet to make another game. The end!

Dyack, left

tl;dr