Matsuno’s involvement in Unsung Story.
When we took on the project, one of the big things we wanted to do was bring the spirit of Matsuno’s original design to life. Many of you may have seen his
recent Twitter thread that went up after the game was released on Early Access. After seeing the series of tweets, I immediately reached out to Matsuno for clarification.
Here are the important points he and I agreed on:
- Matsuno produced seven sizable documents for Playdek that detailed high level game concepts, narrative timelines, story beats, prominent characters, screen layouts, combat mechanics, and other game design elements. All of these were used during the production of the game.
- Matsuno has not been involved day-to-day with my team - just myself during 2018 both in person and over email as we clarified his work and attempted to solve some missing pieces.
- We had hoped that 'from the imagination of' would characterize his involvement, but without the day-to-day control over the final product, he feels uncomfortable with his name being used so prominently in connection with the game.
- Moving forward, based on his feelings and feedback from players, we are going to remove his name from our marketing. Those changes have already been made on Steam, YouTube, our website, and other places.
- We agreed that absolutely nothing is changing with the game itself. Matsuno will still be credited for his various contributions, and the game is moving forward exactly as planned. This is purely a change for marketing.
Our intention was not to mislead anyone or unduly capitalize on his name, and I apologize if that occurred. Hopefully, this decision makes sense to all the backers and they don’t feel like they are losing anything.
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