Hugh Jeremy 🌎🌍🌏🌡📈

[Hugh Jeremy 🌎🌍🌏🌡📈 @hugh_jeremy]

@dhh Honest question, I truly mean no disrespect, I am genuinely curious: is English your second language?

This excerpt reads to me as absolutely damning, dripping with sarcasm and contempt.

[Hugh Jeremy 🌎🌍🌏🌡📈 @hugh_jeremy]

@briangcronin @Official_GDC cc @DamJess

[Hugh Jeremy 🌎🌍🌏🌡📈 @hugh_jeremy]

@steverockan I’ve just spat the dummy on Unreal and switched. Loving it so far. Haven’t touched GDScript though

[Charlie Cleveland @Flayra]

What is a Wave but a Thousand Drops?

I started my journey into video game development more than 25 years ago, back before there were any books or courses, back before there were engines to license, back before it even felt like a viable career.

My high school friends and I spent our summers in Burlington, Vermont not working for others, but working to try to create a video game. Every summer we tried and every summer we failed. Failed to have anything even remotely playable before the leaves developed their autumn colors and threatened to fall. But we kept trying, until the final summer after my college graduation in 1996, when just two of us worked through the fall and got our first game playable: an underwater (!) Star Control II clone called Aquarium Fighter. When I played it against my friend for the first time, and I evaluated the fun, controls and balance, I instantly became hooked. Hooked on making games. Hooked on making not-fun-things (but with potential), fun. That game helped me land my first professional game programming job which I used to pay off my credit cards, and I started iterating through the now-familiar cycle of making money to make games.

Now we’re halfway to 2026 and the world is a very different place. Anyone can learn how to make a game on YouTube using free engines. But making money off of making a game has become truly brutal. Like the world’s wealth distribution, it’s feast or famine. Game development is a career now, and it can be a very profitable one. And the artistic heights that games have reached is jaw-dropping: Starcraft. Braid. Limbo. Minecraft. League of Legends. Hades. Inscryption. I dreamed, but never thought, that the design, technology, art and business models of these games would one day be possible. Nor would I ever have believed that games could overtake Hollywood, even if they “weren’t art”.

Without realizing it, I started Unknown Worlds in 2001 by making the Half-Life mod Natural Selection. I worked with a distributed team back before a health crisis mandated it and we released not half-baked games, but documents describing level design and textures for making those levels, with the hope that the community would make maps. Lo and behold, they did. And we eventually hired some of those people, giving them careers at Unknown Worlds, however shaky the long-term prospects might be. I asked the community to send me $20 bills in the mail so I could keep working on the game, and you did. $18k was a tough salary to live off of, but I made it work and loved every moment of it. Like a design hook, but I was hooked on design. So hooked that I spent 10 years making the sequel.

There’s no way that could’ve happened without Max McGuire and his belief that the game was something special. With that, we made just enough money to get Subnautica into a stripped-down early access, which allowed us to find the fun. It didn’t have submarines, base-building, story or survival. But through the early access process, the community helped guide us forward until we found something we all loved. Something we loved to make and something that millions loved to play. There's no way it would've been as successful if we had waited until v1.0 before releasing it to the public.

I tell you all this because I want to tell you that game development is in my blood. So is iteration and early access. Our games have thrived because of it, and one of our games failed because we thought we knew better. I was most passionate about that game, and it fell flat. We worked on it 5 years before our early access, thinking that this time we were experts and we knew better. But fewer people played that game than even that humble Half-Life mod. Even though our studio had financial success in that period, and even though many fans fell in love with the game, it really wounded me and I needed time to heal. Sometimes it feels like I’ll never get over that one.

So with all this as background, I hope you can see why we were so excited to release Subnautica 2 into early access. Many of the folks that started the journey with us nearly 20 years ago have worked hard on Subnautica 2, and they're joined by some incredible new talent who were drawn to the studio by their love of the games and their passion for the way we've made them. We know (and love) that the expectations for this sequel are high. But the team has poured their hearts into the game and their dedication really shows. We helped pioneer early access and our community seems to love it just as much as we do. It’s the best way to develop a game like this.

So you can see why for Max, Ted, myself, the Unknown Worlds team, and for our community, the events of this week have been quite a shock. We know that the game is ready for early access release and we know you’re ready to play it. And while we thought this was going to be our decision to make, at least for now, that decision is in Krafton’s hands. And after all these years, to find that I’m no longer able to work at the company I started stings.

I want you to know that whatever happens to the founders, to the team and to the game, our priority is, and has always been, to make the best damned game we can for the best community in the world. With your Gorge plushies and your hand-drawn fish fan-art, and yes, your hard-earned dollars, you’ve supported us in every way, in every season, cold and warm, since Half-Life modding was even a thing.

And I also want you to know that this is not where the story ends.

-Charlie (“Flayra”)

[Hugh Jeremy 🌎🌍🌏🌡📈 @hugh_jeremy]

@nicbarkeragain the guy actually responsible for this stuff says it’s not true:

[Hugh Jeremy 🌎🌍🌏🌡📈 @hugh_jeremy]

@FishStix such good mems chatting Tribes with you Ben

[Hugh Jeremy 🌎🌍🌏🌡📈 @hugh_jeremy]

@moultano sandcastles exhibit A

[Hugh Jeremy 🌎🌍🌏🌡📈 @hugh_jeremy]

@shannonplante shannon they go in your ears not your

[Hugh Jeremy 🌎🌍🌏🌡📈 @hugh_jeremy]

@Noahpinion cooling it is the issue - and ion drive wildly ill suited, nuclear thermal rocket is what you’re looking for

[Hugh Jeremy 🌎🌍🌏🌡📈 @hugh_jeremy]

@DefenceU keep it up @RichardMarlesMP - more where this came from, please

[Hugh Jeremy 🌎🌍🌏🌡📈 @hugh_jeremy]

@Vahn16 no, if Biden loses, the *rest of the world* will blame every American who chose horror over “not good enough for me”, and the suffering that choice brings upon us

[Hugh Jeremy 🌎🌍🌏🌡📈 @hugh_jeremy]

@jonodeee @elonmusk life is great here, we live in a little bubble of purity and exceptional quality of life

but the world is *brutal*, it is full of shocking violence and barbarism and anger

banning people from seeing those brutal truths doesn’t make them safer. it makes them docile and ignorant

[Hugh Jeremy 🌎🌍🌏🌡📈 @hugh_jeremy]

@jonodeee @elonmusk i can’t even call a government minister a shitcunt here without being at risk of a defamation lawsuit and being put on a watchlist

why would we want to export that insanity to the rest of the world. can we have some self respect

[Hugh Jeremy 🌎🌍🌏🌡📈 @hugh_jeremy]

@DamJess @Sacriel the past tense here cuts me to the bone

[Hugh Jeremy 🌎🌍🌏🌡📈 @hugh_jeremy]

@DrPhiltill Having seen this Pew chart floating around before, I still can’t square it with day to day experience.

I can only guess that the survey methodology confused some other signal for “negative opinion”.

There are few places an American is more welcome than in Australia.

[Hugh Jeremy 🌎🌍🌏🌡📈 @hugh_jeremy]

@CubicleApril also, insane, because these big trucks are built on ladder frames that don’t crumple effectively

the only thing that can save you is crumple. These idiots fail basic physics

[Hugh Jeremy 🌎🌍🌏🌡📈 @hugh_jeremy]

@Flayra Emphatic yes, the core of the audience is ready, waiting to get behind this. And they will take it far and wide