The real reason Phil Fish canceled Fez 2? ‘I wasn’t feeling it’
Phil Fish, the artist and designer who made the classic 2012 indie game Fez alongside programmer Renaud Bédard, has spoken candidly for the first time about the cancellation of its sequel the following year.
Fez 2 was canceled amid controversial circumstances, just one month after its June 2013 announcement. Fish, an outspoken and caustic figure both online and off, had been involved in a Twitter spat with journalist Marcus Beer after saying Fez 2 would not be released on Xbox. (The original game had debuted on Xbox 360 to great success, but Fish had fallen out with Microsoft over the patch certification process, among other things.)
When the argument with Beer went south, Fish abruptly announced his withdrawal from public life and the cancellation of the game, surprising even his colleagues at the studio he founded, Polytron. The assumption was that he’d done so in a fit of pique. “Fez 2 is cancelled. I am done. I take the money and I run. This is as much as I can stomach. This isn’t the result of any one thing, but the end of a long, bloody campaign. You win,” he wrote at the time.
In fact, as Fish told journalist and author Simon Parkin for Parkin’s My Perfect Console podcast, his heart wasn’t in Fez 2 in the first place.
“Obviously, I wasn’t feeling it to begin with,” Fish said. “It felt like the thing to do, strike while the iron’s hot and make a sequel. That’s what you do in video games, you make a franchise. And the more I started working on that seriously, the less I was feeling it, and the more I was getting [...] disillusioned with everything — even in my position of having just had a successful video game, having to follow up on that was a lot of pressure.”
This week's guest is Phil Fish, co-creator of Fez,
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