One of the most intriguing video game stories came about right at the end of 2022 with one of the most unique ways possible. After being shadow-dropped, Sports Story was quickly excavated through, with the discovery of a secret developer room. The dialogue from the characters in the room suggested troubled development with an emphasis on what is known as Feature Creep, where the title has forced features added in order to make the game more enticing. We were waiting for a response in some form or fashion, and it looks like we finally got one. An update was patched into the title that has completely removed the hidden developer room, and in the process, silenced the silent protest that the room was exhibiting.
As we already mentioned, Sports Story was shadow-dropped late last year in a fairly unfortunate state. The game was riddled with bugs and glitches, something that the developers were more than aware of. In a silent protest, the developers of Sidebar Games secretly put in a hidden developer room in which the characters inside spoke of the game’s apparent bad development process. This included some of them saying in dialogue bubbles that the “original vision no longer exists” and that someone “kept requesting new features.”
Considering the initial backlash, the long development time, and the random shadow drop, this only adds to the mystery and allegedly unsettling atmosphere at Sidebar Games. The removal of the room itself was no surprise and was more than likely something that the higher-ups told the developers to take out as soon as they were able to. On top of all that, accessing the room required the player to glitch the game in a specific way, which was a likely reason in order to even remove it at all. While the room may be gone, you can still view the original in its entirety thanks to some people who have preserved it on YouTube, such as this one.