The Mandate - Dead in the Water?

After not paying me the money he owed me for my 6 months of work on @mandategame he emailed me saying they were going to pay me and then promptly disappeared off the planet.

Isn't that right, @MatsukoCompany?

Not like they have any twitter presence to leverage by tagging them but if you're unfamiliar with the horror story that was The Mandate, here you go.

There have been a few posts running around about crunch and about Game Dev horror stories and this one won't be new to many of you so here we go.

In December of 2016, something was very wrong at Perihelion Interactive / Matsuko.

For 3 years I broke my back working on The Mandate with a lot of people who I have a ton of respect for. We had deadlines, milestones, things to do and we got them done. Over 1000 individual assets.

Since Matsuko is in Slovakia, they were several hours ahead of us, and the end result for me was that I was never "off the clock". I would get messages all times of the day and I would work on whatever needed to get done in an effort to make sure we were making the best game we could.

I believed the people who were in charge had the best of intentions, and that they were striving to build something fantastic.

But after spending years making art and struggling to meet the schedule that had been presented to us, an ever increasing scope of work; 9 factions, 6 military branches, 5 ship classes. 4 planetary types, 3 unit types per faction and 1 massive space station per faction, people started to leave and they were unhappy. But I believed the game was going to be great and that we were making something that would be talked about for years. We had started talking about expansions.

And then payments started coming in late. My art director at the time talked about it like this: "A late payment is like a cat, you can have a cat. But if you have 5 cats? That's a lot of cats."

The game would be great. I knew it.

In September of 2016 Matus, the CEO of Matsuko asked me if I wanted to come to Slovakia with my art director for 3 months and I jumped at the opportunity. I made so many friends but the payments were late still. Lots of payments. $8,000 that was just up in the air.

During one meeting my art director passed me a sticky note covered in drawings of cats. Dozens.

He was gone within a week and all that was left was me. They asked me to stay. To come back and work at Matsuko permanently. And because our game was going to be great I agreed.

After 3 months I went home. I expected to come back. We were art complete and we would finish the game and it would be amazing.

I never returned to Slovakia and I remember speaking with Matus on the phone when he said it was over. And I remember calling my mom and sobbing on the phone because I didn't know what I was going to do. There was no game. It would never be released. We were 100% art complete and 30% feature complete. The game was never going to be finished.

It's taken me years to financially recover and I still have that drawing my AD drew of the cats and what each of them took from me.

It took $8,000 from me. A job offer from Telltale, an offer from Hi-Rez, it cost me my relationship, it took 4 years from my career.

And they suffered no repercussions. Matus and Matsuko are still in business and they got away Scott-free without a single fuck for the people they took advantage of or the fact that they damaged the lives of so manv devs.