So this reads as if he is reading everything people are writing and trying to respond back. The thing that sticks out most is he is trying to claim more credit on stuff he did for the game, as it is seen Alec is the guy who coded, wrote the score for, wrote most of the game, etc.
-"In June of 2013 I was a typical struggling freelance animator, designer, and artist. Alec saw my tweets, which he thought were funny ..."
-Alec offers to collab on a project
-"I was a 32 year old artist who had struggled to make a living since I was 18."
-"we messed around with some uninspired ideas for a few months, then one night I wrote the basic ideas that came to be Night In The Woods, and Alec liked them."
-"Alec trusted me with a lot of creative decisions on the game. This terrified me, as I had never ever made a game before. "
-"I pitched him on a central mechanic and story, and we pulled it off in maybe 10 days, if I remember correctly. It became the first real installment of the Night In The Woods project. "
32 and still struggling to make a living should tell you what kind of guy we are dealing with (especially later when he talks about those super hard 7 hour days). Alec, a self made developer who seems like he may be a little bit on the tism spectrum likes this guys animation and offers him a chance to be an adult. Scott shows contempt for the freedom Alec gives him to do his job, but seems to be guiding him with the broad strokes. Scott then tries to make it sound like Night in the Woods is 100% his brain child and he 100% created all the mechanics of the game that were coded in.
If you ever worked with the asshole like this before, he's the guy that claims he helped create that new car design because he suggested changing the color or the prototype.
-"When he suggested a kickstarter, I thought it would fail miserably, and then it didn’t. "
-"I was a full time game developer with a legal requirement to deliver a game with someone I barely knew. "
-"Alec suggested we take 6 months to make a prototype of the game. "
-"we’d made a quick not very good demo that we showed off at GDC. Our publisher Finji, who we’d hooked up with shortly after the kickstarter, got us invited to E3 that year. "
More Scott whining about having responsibility and being scared. However this is the equivalent of a master craftsman taking you on as an apprentice. Rather than focus of Alec teaching someone who never made a game before how to Finance, prototype, secure further finance, and network through Cons, all Scott focuses on is how scary everything is.
-"That fall, a little over a year into NITW development, Alec’s behavior began to become more erratic.
-"As a fellow meds-taker I knew what skipping doses might do to your headspace and moods. "
-"The work snapped Alec out of his funk. He would talk then about how he didn’t need work/life balance, that work WAS his life. "
-"I told him I’d sort of lost that mindset when it was imposed on me by jobs I’d previously had. “Oh god, I had a job once”, Alec said. “That was the worst 3 weeks of my life.” I laughed. He explained to me that he wasn’t kidding. I said ok. "
We see Alec is hard to work with a bit. Moody. Angry. Demanding. Ya know, basically your standard issue boss/co worker, but at least he takes meds for it. We also learn why Alec believed he lost too much after he was accused. When Scott jokes (but not really) about what a lazy fuck he is, Alec opens up about how he can't stand working under someone else and doesn't pick up on the social cue that Scott was joking and he is being serious and opening up.
-"Alec would say things like this sometimes. He’d talk about how he didn’t care about money, didn’t understand why people who didn’t like their jobs just didn’t leave them. He was baffled that more people weren’t quitting their jobs and following their dreams. After all, one could make lots of money if they just made a good game. At the time I felt like his downer know-it-all of a coworker, constantly telling him that this just wasn’t the way the world works. Bethany and I got it into our heads during this time that Alec had grown up in a mansion or something. But he hadn’t. He was just a guy who was clueless about the world who had gotten rich young. "
And this is why I think Alec might have had Aspergers. Scott comes off as resenting Alec for having a 'get off your ass and do it' attitude. I know Alec was a lefty, but he comes off as an Atlas Shrugged Rand fag. Scott's role becomes a bit clearer, he was Alec's autism whisperer. He explained the shit that Alec didn't get social cue with to him, and animated (who knows wtf Beth did). It also seems like Alec wasn't very sensitive to peoples excuses because he had a fucked up up bringing to and became successful.
-In 2015 more mood crazy shit and eventually seeks professional help on his own will.
-Blamed others for his actions, threatened suicide, etc. (how convenient)
-"Soon after GDC, Alec was asked to leave the place he’d been staying in Vancouver. People didn’t feel safe around him anymore. " (More why I think he had Aspergers)
-"He eventually made his way back to Winnipeg where his family could help him. He’d been burning every possible bridge it seemed, or at least from what I could tell from my distant vantage point. He seemed unwell. He disappeared for long stretches. He stopped working on Night In The Woods altogether. When we talked he’d barely say anything, or suddenly get extremely angry. At me, at the world, at an ex girlfriend, at his former housemates, at anything. "
-"The guy I’d met in 2013 had transformed into this nightmare to be around. Just pure toxicity. "
-More me me me shit about how Alec wasn't there to hold his hand while he was having a psychotic break
If we take what was said before about work driving Alec mental, it looks like Alec snapped. He went home to what seems to be only his sister who seems to hate him. It seems the work he put in before securing the publisher and funding broke him, his social akwardness and iritability ruined some relationships at the time, etc. All Scott can think about is how inconvienent Alecs mental destruction is for him.
-"I redesigned the entire game in full about 7 times that year, trying each time to get Alec excited about working on it. He’d look at a plan and say “that looks too difficult” or “whatever” and I’d redesign it again. My amateur game design notebook scribbles from back then are very funny to look at now. "
-"Muh panic attacks got worse. I had always thought that panic attacks were just feeling overwhelmed, but it turns out they’re physical things" (oh poor baby)
-"I’d stopped taking responsibility for Alec as a person, and started taking responsibility for the game, for making our team function."
-"I had a hard time saying the word “abuse” then. Still do, a bit. I’ll talk about my hatred of capitalism or the faith I grew up with "
YUP EVERYONE, THIS IS WHERE HE BEGINS TRYING TO TURN THIS INTO HE TECHNICALLY IS AN ABUSE VICTIM! Scott also tries to make it sound like he stepped up and finally filled the role of leader, when he was the partner from day 1 and should of been filling in when his co creator was dropping the ball. I also love how Scott continues to try and suck up more credit beyond animator and idea guy where he redesigned the entire game 7 times and Alec shot it down and was mean and didn't listen.
HEY exceptional individual, YOU'RE THE FUCKING ANIMATOR! While redesigning the game 7 times (I like to imagine he pitched it as changing it to an FPS, then a 2d fighting game, then a 3d fighting game, then an MMO RPG, then a Diablo style ARG, then a puzzle game, and finally a completely text based musicless html novel about depression) seems like work to Scott 'I work greuling 7 hour shifts' Benson, to a person who isn't a lazy exceptional fuck its 7 times of multiple hours wasted humoring someone who has no idea wtf they are talking about and is flinging shit at a wall hoping something sticks and they can justify being seen as important. Scott doesn't get he's wasting the time of someone worked too thin and takes it as Alec being a meanie who gave him "muh anxiety attacks"
-"Right around then something happened that was in hindsight miraculous. We’d later joke it was a Christmas miracle. Bethany had had it with Alec. One morning she created a private twitter account to vent to some friends about it. She did not hold back. Over a couple dozen tweets she laid out, emphatically, how much Alec was ruining our lives. How he was cruel to me, and how I had needed to step up and do most of the work, and how Alec was this, and that, etc. Afterward having vented, she took a walk. I woke up not long after to a Slack message from Alec. There was a screenshot of her tweets with his message: “OK.”
Bethany had forgotten to make her private account private. In her tweets she’d mentioned another game he’d been working on and I guess he had a google alert notification thing set up for it, so he was immediately alerted to this 3 follower account that was yelling about him. I panicked, called Bethany asking her what the fuck happened, jumped in the car with no shoes on, and floored it across the neighborhood to pick her up. I thought I might actually have a heart attack and die right there. My heart had been feeling weird lately. It fluttered and pumped weird. This plus the overwork led to health issues down the line. Bethany deleted the account. Bekah and Adam talked to Alec. Within a few days he… changed"
I don't know how Scott wrote this and thought it was a good idea. What he's admitting here is Beth and Scott never directly address problems to Alec. What they do instead is talk behind his back. The moment Scott has to step up because his co-worker has mentally broke, all Scott did was cry to Beth that he was working too hard (those grueling 7 hour days), then Alec sees the passive aggressive snark and hate toward him and his shitty behavior.
BUT HERE IS THE KICKER. Rather than yell at everyone, replace the team who is dead without him, and tell them to eat shit Alec accepts the criticism and takes action to correct it. If he was willing to make a change this sudden it means they NEVER even tried to address the issues to him before and he was accomidating.
-The game releases. Muh panic attacks, but things are fine
-"I’d been gently encouraging him to reach out and make amends with people he’d hurt during his bad years." (I wonder if this fucked him in the long run)
-"Over the next year I think I can say I really became friends with Alec. Or rather he’d become my cousin or something."
-"Shortly after at an industry event Bethany and I met up with some friends we rarely see for dinner. They asked me about the game launch, and how it felt now. Almost without warning, without me even knowing it happened, I broke down completely and told them the whole story of the past few years. "
Holy shit, you had a rich game dev FIND YOU and pull you out of poverty and teach you the basics on how to create a business from the ground up, he changes uncomfortable behavior because he accidently sees what you never had the balls to tell him, you have a successful game launch that changes you from 30 something who never had a stable living to indie game co creator success story, you call this man your friends, NAY YOUR COUSIN, and when a friend you hadn't seen in a while asks you how does it feel to finally come up in the world and be successful you take a moment to shit all over the guy who got you there cause he made you work a little too hard or might of not liked your ideas a little too much or had a medical issues that inconvienenced you? Get raped you wanna be #MeToo victim faggot, pop 30 Xanax with a bottle of champaign at a gaybar and have the greatest panic attack you can, maybe someone will rape your corpse and you will be the beautiful victim you always wished you were.
-"We’d decided not to work with Alec again back in 2015."
-"I warned friends who asked me back then not to work with him."
-"I confided in a small group of people what was happening to me, to Bethany."
-"The woman who cuts my hair was in roller derby and she also offered to kick his ass. " HOLY SHIT I CAN FEEL THE SOY FLOW FROM THAT
-"A lot of local friends were ready to throw down. Good friends offer to throw down."
So after he changes, the game is finished and he is like a cousin to you and changed your life forever you bad mouth him so bad PEOPLE WANT TO PHYSICALLY BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF HIM? WTF is wrong with you Scott?
- More poor me faggotry
-"I’ve spent the last week tracking down and talking to people close to Alec, people who knew him years ago, people who knew him now. It’s shocking how many of us had eerily similar experiences."
I wouldn't be surprised if Alec was a moody dick to work with who could be an angry asshole. So was Steve Jobs. No where do you describe sexual abuse. No where do you describe physical abuse. You describe a guy who expected you to know what you were doing and let you have at it, told you bluntly when your work sucked, and expected you to be competent enough to take over if he was sick. He was open about his mental issues. Rather than leave, you chose to stay because who he taught you was worth the bad you put up with which you could of not put up with if you had the balls to tell him directly like a fucking man.
-"Allegations about Alec’s behavior from right before we knew him came out last week. They were backed up by other people I trust, people who were around at the time. Suddenly a lot of what Alec said back then about his exes, his bile about the subject, back when I barely knew him, made sense. "
Wait, but I thought he was a different person now?
-"This is how he could entrap multiple women over the years and still think they were all out to get him. "
-"When I’ve talked to people this week a thing that’s been common was his threats to commit suicide if someone didn’t do what he wanted. If someone held him responsible for his actions. " (LOL ZOE IS ON FB DM'S DOING THAT TOO LOL)
-"After a lot of very hard thinking and checking up we announced that we had cut ties with Alec. Some folks reported this as us “firing” Alec, when there was nothing to fire him from. Infinite Fall isn’t a company."
Holy shit, this exceptional individual doesn't understand how his own fucking buisness arangement works. I also find it funny that the theme of Alec reaching out and offering opportunity is "entrapment" because when he starts trying to give advice how to better themselves and gets mad at their shitty behavior or in ability to meet goals he set for them he no longer wants to deal with them. Sure there is also the threatening with suicide all the time. Alec was a mentally ill asshole, but you knew this was the price of admission and you are in no way unable to just walk away at any time, you just didn't want to cause then you don't get your reward you were sticking around for.
-I want to give the guy credit for the ways he did change, at least as far as I could see. I want to say he was a brilliant developer and musician. After his 2015 absence he never quite considered Night In The Woods to be “his” game.
Wow, you are trying to steal credit from the dead. What a douche. Seems like Alec never considered it "his" game either, it's why he made you co-creator and expected you to step in his role when he was unable to physically do his job.
-"While I praise Alec’s work, consider this- people left the industry because of what he did. "
Judging by the amount of shovelware in the indie scene and the garbage people that seem to roam in these weird cliques and orbit people with actual tallent, not enough people have left. You aren't entitled to a place in the industry just cause you really really like video games
-"People developed PTSD. "
Dear diary, today the autistic coder who pulled me out of obscurity from my life of minimum wage living pulled me on a project, taught me how to get funding, taught me how to set project mile stones, gave me freedom to do what I want in my role, named me co creator, showed me how to secure further funding via confrences, but he shot down 7 of my ideas to scrap the game entirely for new redesigns and was mean to me and makes me work grueling 7 hour days. I HAVE PTSD NOW. GIVE ME XANAX PLEASE! SO TRAUMATIC.
-"Alec had prestige and money. He had what seemed to be a ticket to making your game dev dreams come true. "
And he shared that with you, even if you were unwilling to take notes or be greatful
-"He had a long pattern of picking someone he was really interested in, immediately suggesting they make a game together, making them dependent on him, and then later abandoning it and them, often in really shitty and harmful ways to add insult to injury."
Given the type of people he seemed to be picking who see 7 hour days as long hard work, I see why he'd ghost them after trying to help and realizing that they thought 3 hour work days and occasionally tweeting was what being a game dev was. Even if he ghosted people who put their hopes too high on him, whose fault is that?
-"Childish. Abusive. And when he didn’t get what he wanted, he dropped them and their game dev dreams by the wayside on his way to find someone else. "
Huh, it's almost like he expected people in a partnership with him to deliver results. kinda like it was a business
-"Because you depend on them. Because they hold control on some aspect of your life. Because you’ve just been beaten down into silence. "
No, you chose to depend on him. He is not responsible for your well being, much like you reminded everyone again and again that you were not responsible for his mental health (ahhhh, I see what you did there. Keep telling your self the bloods not on your hands)
-"I cared a lot about Alec, despite all this. But covering for and enabling the harm someone does to the people around them isn’t caring for them. Sometimes nothing turns out well. Sometime everything’s fucked. Sometimes every outcome is bad. "
Yeah, like a guy who mentored you and changed your life getting stabbed in the back for it and you shaming him to his suicide which you knew he would be prone to if he ever lost the means of being able to be an independent game creator and be forced to work under someone elses thumb for less than he was worth.
