Do not confuse Alex Ahad and Mike Z
Alex Ahad is an artist and still has his reputation intact. He'll probably work in the industry again (if he even
wants to after this shit).
Mike Z is a programmer, game designer, director, etc. who's had his reputation and career ruined.
They were among the founders of the studio (co-founders? It's been awhile), but their partnership of "celebrated speedrunner and fighting game pro turned game programmer x fan-favorite cult artist" was what got the studio the hardcore niche fanbase that ultimately kept it alive for all these years.
Sumez wrote:I just think it's weird to attribute the failings of a game to a single person being pushed out from a company.
Z and Alex were the gameplay and artistic heart and soul of the company, there's no arguing otherwise.
Alex was responsible for the unique art style and character designs of Skullgirls and Indivisible and what gave it such a unique look, and it's incredible telling that after he was booted the character redesigns and writing both took enormous artistic dives into the trashbin. Mike Z was behind everything that made Skullgirls play the way it did. It absolutely sold itself on being a fighting game designed and balanced by an veteran and community favorite tournament pro and it was completely honest in that claim: he built the engine it ran in from scratch and spent almost 8 years feverishly patching game balance to perfection. He'd leave his own comments and dorky little puns on the patch notes. He was absolutely the gameplay soul of the company.
It's not an exaggeration to say there's almost nothing interesting interesting about the company without those two, which is being evidenced now by FutureClub having no idea what they're doing and trying to broach Virtual Youtubing / Streaming instead of making games.
That being said, I think Mike didn't know what he was doing with Indivisible's design and it still would have played poorly regardless. But if Alex had been on board it might've at least had a charming story and risen to the level of "flawed but likable".
Sumez wrote:If he was really as big of a POS as everything seems to point to,
I'm going to be honest: from all the snooping I've done and personal interactions, I don't think he was.
I think he's a pretentious, socially awkward weirdo with OCD who doesn't know how to interact with people, which made him prime target for defamation after putting his foot in his mouth one too many times. A friend of mine put it best in a convo we had about him:
Yiggles wrote:
what I recall of your theory of how it all went down is likely quite near to the truth: years of working with an autist builds up a lot of awkward moments which, when given the "I can't breathe" joke and the right push from a few powerhungry people, starts to snowball
plus the high off of successfully booting ahad
people naturally try to get their Truth from those around them, and when those around them start saying more about how this guy's no good, people will, subconsciously and without realizing they ever truly felt another way, adjust their interpretation of reality to be more in line with their peers, and thus they start recontextualizing every interaction
was that awkward conversation the other day really just a socially awkward guy trying his best to socialize, or was it some unwanted advance? was that weird flirting something you were fine with but uninterested in, or was it totally uncomfortable and he should have known better?
and the human brain doesn't store memories as like recordings, it stores them as feelings and associations of ideas and abstract concepts, and when a few key elements enter the mind, it reconstructs the memory as best it can. And if your opinion of a person changes, how your brain reconstructs the memory changes. No longer do you remember the awkward guy you're friends with saying something weird and you shrug it off, now your brain thinks this guy is no good so it constructs the event as something more sinister and creepy
and the next thing you know, you have a studio full of friends who've elected one friend from within them to be a former friend, and eject him from the group