At the very top of Phil Fish’s List of Things to Do in 2013 is probably ‘make a swear’. After that, it’s “FEZ will finally be ported to other platforms”.
“Yes, I’ve heard you, dozens of people emailing me everyday telling me how much of an idiot i am for not porting FEZ to everything,” said the Polytron auteur in a blog post on Monday.
PC is “other platforms”! That’s one thing to note. Another, however, is this June interview with NowGamer.
“Fez is a console game, not a PC game,” said Fish at the time. “It’s made to be played with a controller, on a couch, on a Saturday morning. To me, that matters; that’s part of the medium. I get so many comments shouting at me that I’m an idiot for not making a PC version. ‘You’d make so much more money! Can’t you see? Meatboy sold more on Steam!’ Good for them. But this matters more to me than sales or revenue. It’s a console game on a console. End of story.”
Story ended. But surely there’s room for an epilogue – or at the very least, a footnote written by a later academic?*
There’s also this tweet, dredged up from 2011. Now that’s just a bit rude, isn’t it?
Thanks, PC Gamer.
*In this strained metaphor, the ‘academic’ represents ‘an outsourced PC developer to port the thing’.