The actual factor Phil Fish terminated Fez 2? ‘I wasn’t sensation it’

Image: Polytron

Phil Fish, the musician and also developer that made the timeless 2012 indie game Fez along with developer Renaud Bédard, has actually talked openly for the very first time regarding the termination of its follow up the list below year.

Fez 2 was canceled amid controversial circumstances, simply one month after its June 2013 statement. Fish, a forthright and also caustic number both online and also off, had actually been associated with a Twitter altercation with reporter Marcus Beer after stating Fez 2 would not be released on Xbox. (The initial game had actually debuted on Xbox 360 to excellent success, however Fish had fallen out with Microsoft over the spot qualification procedure, to name a few points.)

When the disagreement with Beer went southern, Fish suddenly introduced his withdrawal from public life and also the termination of the game, surprising even his colleagues at the workshop he started, Polytron. The presumption was that he’d done so in a fit of pique. “Fez 2 is cancelled. I am done. I take the money and I run. This is as much as I can stomach. This isn’t the result of any one thing, but the end of a long, bloody campaign. You win,” he created at the time.

In truth, as Fish informed reporter and also writer Simon Parkin for Parkin’s My Perfect Console podcast, his heart wasn’t in Fez 2 to begin with.

“Obviously, I wasn’t feeling it to begin with,” Fish claimed. “It felt like the thing to do, strike while the iron’s hot and make a sequel. That’s what you do in video games, you make a franchise. And the more I started working on that seriously, the less I was feeling it, and the more I was getting […] disillusioned with everything — even in my position of having just had a successful video game, having to follow up on that was a lot of pressure.”

This week’s visitor is Phil Fish, co-creator of Fez, that mentioned making note while playing Zelda with his papa as a young kid, exactly how starring in Indie: Game the Movie altered his life, and also why he terminated Fez 2: https://t.co/DdcCT63k9M pic.twitter.com/QFEwT8PSaF

— My Perfect Console Podcast (@myperfectcnsle) March 1, 2023

As for the provoking event, the altercation with Beer: “Maybe it was a bit of an out,” Fish acknowledged. “[It] was the last straw, where I was already thinking about doing all those things and there was just this one moment where, you know what, fuck it, I’m not doing that.”

Fish (whose actual name is Philippe Poisson; yes, truly) exposed that Fez 2 was incredibly very early in advancement, that made the choice to terminate it very easy. “We weren’t that advanced, we didn’t have a whole lot to show other than the logo we showed,” he claimed. “I certainly had concepts and concept art and things like that, but we didn’t have anything playable. We were in pre-conceptual phase for the game when we announced it. Deciding to walk away was pretty easy, because there was no real investment at that point. It hadn’t really cost us anything in time or money or energy, and there was nothing really to be super attached to.”

Fish claimed he had formerly “fantasized” regarding terminating the very first Fez throughout its tortuous five-year advancement, “but it was obviously not a realistic thing to actually do.”

At the exact same time as canceling Fez 2, Fish eliminated himself totally from social media sites and also public life. Catapulted to fame along with various other numbers like Super Meat Boy’s Edmund McMillen and also Braid’s Jonathan Blow — many thanks partially to their looks in the docudrama Indie Game: The Movie — Fish had actually come to be a dissentious, argumentative number, and also he had problem with handling his popularity well.

Image: Polytron

“There’s no opt-out for the sewage pipe that gets opened up into your living room when you’re a public persona on the internet,” he claimed. “And just making that cut, that severance, of just like — you know, I’m just going to go back to just being private me, I don’t have to tweet every dumb thing that goes through my brain all the time? It was like kicking any other addiction at first, but after the worst of it is over, you see in hindsight, oh wow, that thing was driving me crazy. That was poison.” He definitely seems like a calmer, a lot more gauged individual currently.

“To decide to go back to work in a completely quiet, secretive way, can be very hard but can be freeing also,” Fish included. “You don’t know the things that I didn’t finish, that I ended up canceling, these projects that I worked on. There’s no big drama around it.”

All of which asks the inquiry of what Fish has been working with for the previous 9 years (besides assisting with the launch of virtual reality game SuperHyperCube, and also provide or take, as he informed Parkin, some 6 months shedding himself in Skyrim). True to his dedication to personal privacy, he hesitated to share information of his following job — however he hinted it could not be a video clip game.

“That was very liberating to break away from [Fez 2], and then realize that I can do something else. And it doesn’t even necessarily have to be a video game. I don’t want to say what, cause I’m still working on it, but… let’s go in a completely different direction.”

We might never ever see its follow up, however Polytron has actually made certain that Fez itself continues to be very easy to locate: it’s presently readily available on Steam and also various other computer shops, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and also iphone. And it’s still as great as it was a years earlier.

 

Source: Polygon