#aots

Getting featured on TV: my first knee-jerk reaction was frustration. I did not know my game was going to get featured. They did not tell me. To tell the truth, I had quickly fallen out of love with G4TV and I definitely did not like Attack of the Show. So I was completely unaware until a friend told me he saw my game on the show. Luckily, they aired each episode of AOTS twice: once live, and then they'd show a rerun of that day's episode later that night. So the second time around, I had a VCR ready and recorded it to VHS.

It was frustrating because I'm pretty sure I had my email listed in the game's readme file. They could have contacted me and been like "hey, tune in tonight." No such luck. This would have aired and completely passed me by.

It's honestly still hard to watch the recording. Impostor syndrome kicks in very, very hard watching this. Maybe worse than I've ever felt it in my entire life. The only time it feels right is when he complains about how hard the game is. Kevin Pereira complaining about how my game kicked his ass cast a long shadow on my entire game development career. Because I'd had some long arguments with my testers that MarioWeen was too difficult, particularly the true ending final boss and the Pumpkin King.

I dug in my heels. "These bosses aren't too hard," I said. "If I can beat them, anyone can beat them."

One of my testers was Mystic, in the days before he became the lead developer of SRB2, and before he was later ejected from the SRB2 team due to all the drama surrounding his tenure. Mystic loved very difficult games. The harder the better. At the time, he was making a hack called Sonic the Hedgehog 2Z, which primarily just made the game exceedingly difficult. The first versions of The Mystic Realm were also starting to take shape, mostly as an extreme-difficulty level pack for SRB2.

Mystic was the loudest voice that MarioWeen DX was too difficult. And even though I was confident that "if I could do it, anyone could," I knew that if Mystic of all people was raising red flags about the challenge level then maybe something was up. So I actually made Pumpkin King and the true Final Boss a little easier. I made hitboxes more forgiving, loosened up the timing of certain phases, that kind of thing. And Kevin Pereira still complained that the game was really difficult, on live television, broadcasting to a six figure audience. It felt kind of humiliating.

This is why, sometimes on this blog, and sometimes out there on the internet, I argue with people making hacks and fangames about difficulty. It's easy to get trapped in a toxic mindset of not wanting to reduce the difficulty too much because you want to prove something about yourself. Because you want to make a "real game" for "real gamers."

I was in those shoes. No, your game is too hard. Especially nowadays, when people have such huge backlogs and so many distractions. It's easier than ever before to quit a game and go back to Fortnite, or Roblox, or Warzone, or whatever. All it takes is one moment of frustration and they're never coming back.

On the flip side, people agree that most Kirby games aren't very difficult, and not only is that an ongoing franchise that's been around for over 30 years, it also lands near the top 50 best selling game franchises of all time. Similarly, people moan about how easy Symphony of the Night is, but it is also a deeply beloved game that co-founded an entire genre. When people say "Metroidvania," the Vania in question is Symphony of the Night. And I have consciously quit a lot more games for being difficult than for being easy.

I could keep going. I was going to do a video about this, actually. But all of this was crystalized by what happened with MarioWeen. If any developers are reading this: your game is probably too hard, and easy does not always mean "boring."

My stance on Mario and Sonic fangames: Well, I mean, I've been interviewed about this. First by a website called Cultured Vultures, and a second time by the longest running newspaper in France, Le Monde. Both times, I was allowed to post my replies in full here, so you can read the Cultured Vultures interview here, and the Le Monde interview here. The Cultured Vultures interview is shorter and less rambly, I think, but the Le Monde interview goes into a lot more detail about fangaming culture.