As we come to the final days of 2022, it appears the video game industry still has some interesting stories for us to look into. This one is in regards to the just released Sports Story, which was actually shadow dropped onto the Nintendo Store. Since then the game has been subject to criticism bugs and glitches. While the studio has promised a patch to fix these in the future, someone apparently decided to do some sleuthing around in the game’s files. What they ended up finding was a hidden room, complete with avatars of some of the employees at the development studio, Sidebar Games.
Putting hidden rooms into the game’s code is nothing new, but this room had a specific message for those who discovered it. If you walk up to the characters and talk to them, they’ll utter certain phrases such as “troubled development” and “kept requesting new features” as well as “original vision no longer exists.” Other characters in the room speak of unusable menus and being forced to add in additional features. The message that we’re seeing here is that the development process at Sidebar Games was severely troubled, and the developers may have endured a toxic working environment in the process.
The characters also mention the forced features being added, which in video game development terms, is called Feature Creep. Creep is when an excess of new additional features are added to a project, usually before the final product is shipped. This in turn changes the very nature of the game’s original design, and can sometimes make it unrecognizable to the development team when it’s finished. Creep is often a subjective term, but for the majority of those in the industry, it’s often looked at in a negative distinction, and is often considered an undermining aspect of the development process.
If these hints from the hidden room are to be considered true, then this is not just a message of random phrases, this is the developers protesting the very game they helped create, perhaps the most silent video game protest we’ve ever seen. Neither Sidebar Games nor the developers that the characters in the room embody have made any official statement on this, but now that the room is public knowledge, it’s only a matter of time until things come to a head at Sidebar Games. Hopefully the situation will be resolved with cooler heads prevailing.