Cutthroat practices aren’t anything new to the business world, but you don’t normally hear about them when they happen within a single company. That’s exactly what former Sega producer Mark Subotnick alleges happened at his former company in the latest episode of The Retro Hour Podcast. (Thanks for the reporting, NintendoLife!)
As part of the episode titled “Dreamcast: Where It Went Wrong”, Subotnick detailed the time he was working on a Star Fox-like game called Geist Force with Sega of America. Once thought to be cancelled because of a lack of confidence in the product and missed deadlines, Subotnick tells his side of the story:
That, Subotnick says, caused a chain reaction throughout the company of people jumping from a sinking ship, with his five engineers finding other jobs. That meant hiring again, training the new hires, and basically restarting the team, which would take months and ultimately doom the project.