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Posted on July 27, 2013, Mark Burnham Did Phil Fish Just Angrily Cancel Fez 2 Via Twitter?

It's with a heavy heart that we announce that FEZ II has been cancelled and is no longer in development. We apologize for the disappointment — Polytron (@Polytron) July 27, 2013

UPDATE: We should note that in no way are we taking anyone’s side in this matter. Personally, I hope that this is a temporary setback, and that Fez 2 gets back on track.

UPDATE: Joystiq obtained a comment from Phil confirming the news. “It’s true,” he told them.

There we were enjoying our Saturday morning. Then, Fez creator Phil “Phish” Fish and GameTrailers host Marcus “AnnoyedGamer” Beer decided to get into a pissing match on Twitter.

The culmination of said pissing match is that Phil Fish sort of ragequit from Twitter, and apparently canceled Fez 2 (yeah, right…)

Here’s a short timeline of what happened:

1. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that the Xbox One would allow indie developers to self-publish. Game Informer broke the story, which Microsoft was apparently none too pleased about. While we’re on that, can you kind of see why? If you’re Microsoft, do you really want to have to hurriedly explain yet another feature you weren’t prepared to talk about? Don’t misunderstand, I rather like Game Informer, and they were doing their job. I’d have done the same thing. Just saying, I think you can understand why MS wouldn’t want to start explaining themselves, again.

2. Anyway, in response to this news, some gaming outlets decided to reach out to both Braid creator Jonathan Blow and Phil Fish, to basically ask what they thought. Both Blow and Fish, referred to by Beer as “BlowFish” (which, excellent) have published their rather successful indie titles on Xbox Live, so they’d be good to ask, right?

3. Fish in particular didn’t want to talk about it.

4. Marcus Beer called out Phil Fish pretty hard on this GameTrailers podcast. It’s an hour-long podcast, but the goods are right at the beginning. Beer has some very strong words for both Fish and Blow.

5. Phil Fish got very upset, ragequit on Twitter and then apparently canceled Fez 2.

I recommend that everyone involved read Jim Sterling’s take on this right here, as he’s a smart guy and he’s basically recommending that cooler heads prevail. Despite what anyone thinks of Beer or Fish, I don’t think anyone wants to see a potentially cool game get canceled in response to a Twitter fight (god even typing that is making me wince with how dumb it is).

Here, we took some screenshots of Phil Fish’s stupid Twitter account. You can follow the meltdown for yourself. But I recommend instead you go see The Wolverine, or something.

Below timeline in reverse chronological order.



