In early 2015, Alec had largely come out of his low times from the year before. We’d heard him mention people he was dating here and there, once again never really knowing who they were or what their relationships were like. None of us talked. None of the people in these disparate parts of Alec’s orbit talked. Why would we? We were in different countries. We weren’t sitting down comparing notes, in the same way you don’t usually track down everyone a coworker knows in different areas of their lives to ask about them. As far as we could tell, Alec was this freewheeling, occasionally childish and moody guy in a somewhat chaotic house where people came and went, and he dated around a lot but never for long. The people on the other end of this can tell their own stories when and if they ever want to. But messages throughout the workweek with someone don’t paint a full portrait of their lives. Their tweets don’t show what’s happening in their houses, and in their rooms. After all, no one knew what was happening to us either, on the other side of the chat window.

During GDC 2015, Alec had a complete breakdown over several days. He was physically threatening to those around him. For the first, but not the last time, Alec threatened to kill himself if I didn’t do what he wanted. He wanted me to make this all better somehow. He was angry at the idea that people would be scared by his behavior, which over the days had gotten worse and worse. Everyone else was just teaming up on him. It wasn’t his fault, he said. He wasn’t the first person in my life to do all this. I was a fixer then, a bad habit to get into, where you take on responsibility for someone else’s well being, or for their actions and moods. It had been ingrained in me since I was young. This made me a mark for abusive people earlier in my life. I would drop everything to help out. I would stay up all night talking people off the ledge. When I was in ministry I did literally exactly that many times. Over the years I’d worked with Alec, without my noticing it, I’d begun to take it on myself to explain or fix or smooth over all those /things/, those instances of anger, or strange things he’d say, or his worsening moods. The rest of that year of working with Alec would largely break me of that lifelong tendency.

Soon after GDC, Alec was asked to leave the place he’d been staying in Vancouver. People didn’t feel safe around him anymore. I know I wouldn’t have. He eventually made his way back to Winnipeg where his family could help him. He’d been burning every possible bridge it seemed, or at least from what I could tell from my distant vantage point. He seemed unwell. He disappeared for long stretches. He stopped working on Night In The Woods altogether. When we talked he’d barely say anything, or suddenly get extremely angry. At me, at the world, at an ex girlfriend, at his former housemates, at anything.

In the summer of 2015 I began having panic attacks just about every day, out of nowhere. I’d never really had that before. I started having sleep paralysis, which was also new. Alec had been a nonentity on the project for a while, and was straight up abusive when he was. The guy I’d met in 2013 had transformed into this nightmare to be around. Just pure toxicity. More threats of suicide contingent on mine or someone else’s actions. He’d say something cryptic about that and then disappear, popping back up sometimes days later, to our relief. Made it hard to talk to the guy about his actions. He’d just disappear again, with the promise that if something happened to him it was our fault. And beyond that, we were now in a position where we were on the hook for a videogame, and I’d stopped whatever career I had been building elsewhere to do it, and Bethany and I were going more and more into debt despite our publisher’s miraculous ability to find us funding. And because of this I had to keep a sunny face about the entire thing in public. Alec held our future in his hands. And he’d become a nightmare.

In June of that year, a few months into Alec’s nightmare period with us, I decided that if he wasn’t going to do this, then I was. I could fix this. I could pull this project along. I had to learn very quickly how to even think about directing a game. I redesigned the entire game in full about 7 times that year, trying each time to get Alec excited about working on it. He’d look at a plan and say “that looks too difficult” or “whatever” and I’d redesign it again. My amateur game design notebook scribbles from back then are very funny to look at now. But his absence meant I had to step up. And as I did, so did Bethany. My panic attacks got worse. I had always thought that panic attacks were just feeling overwhelmed, but it turns out they’re physical things that happen even if you don’t “believe” them. They aren’t just getting freaked out. They’re pain in your chest, freezing cold, your brain yelling at you that you’re in danger. Bethany started hating Alec for what he was doing to me on a weekly basis. I was just scared to death that our game would fall apart and we’d be broke and in debt and starting from square one. I’d stopped taking responsibility for Alec as a person, and started taking responsibility for the game, for making our team function. Both nearly killed me.

I began going to therapy weekly. I got on anxiety meds. The therapist was shocked at how much responsibility for Alec’s moods and actions I’d taken. He hammered home over and over how I’m not responsible for what Alec did. I knew that. I did. But I still feel that I am responsible for all of what Alec did, I feel it somewhere, quietly, even now, as I write this. It’s absurd. That’s one of the things abuse does to you.

I had a hard time saying the word “abuse” then. Still do, a bit. I’ll talk about my hatred of capitalism or the faith I grew up with, but I don’t talk much about things done to me by someone specific. Part of that is just dumbass masculinity- I can’t be abused, abuse is something that happens to other people. When it happens to me it’s just tough luck or life not being fair, so I should just toughen up. Or maybe it’s because everyone else thinks whatever is happening is fine, and I’m just being oversensitive. Weak. Early in life I’d been regularly reminded that I was oversensitive. When my dad taught me how to throw a punch in 4th grade I had reason to use it the next day. I was bullied in school to the point of broken bones. I learned to get tough about it, or to laugh about it. Yeah, people fucked with me or were assholes. Some people needed to fix their shit. But I was certainly never abused. Impossible.

Later that year Alec said that he’d enrolled in a 5 week, intense therapy program. We were overjoyed. He got put on new meds, which he said were helping him. Again, overjoyed. But for the remainder of that year Alec was still basically non-communicative. When he did work on the game, it was because I’d taken to making animations of how large parts of the game would work so he could picture it and get it working. I still have those videos. I was watching them tonight. I scored them with songs I thought would cheer Alec up. One of them was Rozi Plain’s “Actually”. That was the background music to the part where Mae and Bea go grocery shopping and have a fight. This was sort of my theme song for that year. To this day I can’t listen to it without becoming anxious. 2015 was one of the worst years of my life.

December came. Alec was still moody, angry, and barely working on the game. He was as likely to fly off the handle at me as just not respond. I had begun working 7 days a week on it. My physical and mental health were failing. We finally wondered if we needed to find someone else to finish this game with. We talked with Adam and Bekah, who are Finji, our publishers. We knew them but not very well at that time. We told them what was going on, and they were shocked, because they didn’t know. And why would they? We hadn’t told them. It looked fine from the outside. They quickly stepped in, reached out to Alec, and Adam started working out how we could get our team working productively.

Right around then something happened that was in hindsight miraculous. We’d later joke it was a Christmas miracle. Bethany had had it with Alec. One morning she created a private twitter account to vent to some friends about it. She did not hold back. Over a couple dozen tweets she laid out, emphatically, how much Alec was ruining our lives. How he was cruel to me, and how I had needed to step up and do most of the work, and how Alec was this, and that, etc. Afterward having vented, she took a walk. I woke up not long after to a Slack message from Alec. There was a screenshot of her tweets with his message: “OK.”

Bethany had forgotten to make her private account private. In her tweets she’d mentioned another game he’d been working on and I guess he had a google alert notification thing set up for it, so he was immediately alerted to this 3 follower account that was yelling about him. I panicked, called Bethany asking her what the fuck happened, jumped in the car with no shoes on, and floored it across the neighborhood to pick her up. I thought I might actually have a heart attack and die right there. My heart had been feeling weird lately. It fluttered and pumped weird. This plus the overwork led to health issues down the line. Bethany deleted the account. Bekah and Adam talked to Alec. Within a few days he… changed. He said he understood what he’d done. And within a week or so he was back to work on the game. And that’s how Bethany forgetting to make her tweets private saved Night In The Woods in late December, 2015.