I was about to goto bed but I made the mistake of clicking the header over at PixlBit after reading their review of satan’s resurrection. And there it was, breaking news, David Jaffe leaves the company he co-founded, sacking 20% of the staff as he walks out the door.
We’ve spoken about David Jaffe before on Pietriots. Specifically, the time he compared the PS Vita to a virgin vagina. After a while of following the guy around the internet like some deranged muck racking journalist, I was inspired to make the twitter account @FakeDavidJaffe to mock the guy. The truth is though, I just couldn’t compete with the real thing and was always two steps behind the man. I’d still be making fun of the fresh pussy comment and then the real David Jaffe would say people who don’t listen to rap music are racist. Or I’d find an old interview of him where he stops talking about his latest Twisted Metal game to directly address his internet critics and what they think of them. Then there’s his blog which is borderline unreadable due to his lack of traditional English grammar and total disregard for proof reading. In short, David Jaffe is a man without a filter.
Now, usually I actually admire that. I like a straight talker who’s not afraid to say what he thinks and will clearly state his views when asked. Some people call this arrogance but I like to think of it as being self assured and confident. It’s the kind of attitude a successful, talented person might have. How David Jaffe gained this aura though is a complete mystery. The guy is a hack. He is a talentless, self serving hack who’s never come up with a good idea. Here’s the David Jaffe resumé.
- Twisted Metal
- Twisted Metal 2
- Twisted Metal 3
- Twisted Metal 4
- Twisted Metal Black
- Twisted Metal Small Brawl
- Twisted Metal Head On
- Calling All Cars
- Twisted Metal Head On: Extra Twisted Edition
- Twisted Metal (2012 Reboot)
For those of you who don’t know, Twisted Metal is a game where you drive a car around and shoot at other cars, featuring characters who look like rejects from a hypothetical Slipknot comic strip. It was published by Sony for the original Playstation back in 1995 a month after a game called Destruction Derby was released, where you drove a car around and crashed into other cars, instead of shooting them. Obviously it was the guns and the fact that nothing else was available for the PSX at the time that saw Twisted Metal become a nine game, 17-year-old franchise and Destruction Derby a failed IP with as many publishers as entries in the series. But just to re-iterate. David Jaffe has spent 17 years making a video game about crashing cars…
There is another game he made though: Calling All Cars. Around about the time Eat, Sleep, Pray was all the rage in the film and literary worlds, Jaffe co-founded a new company, Eat Sleep Play, showing his creativity extended even further than car chase movies. Of course he wanted to make another game about cars shooting each other, but he didn’t hold the licence to Twisted Metal so he named it after an Australian punk rock outfit. Jaffe broke new ground creatively with Calling All Cars, the game featuring video gaming’s first homosexual antagonist. Despite the fact that the game was basically Twisted Metal without the name, the game received the kind of reduced critical and commercial reception that comes in the gaming world when you don’t have the backing of a multinational conglomerate.
So anyway, after negotiating with Sony, Jaffe scored the license to make a Twisted Metal branded game again! Hooray! And after almost five years of painstaking development and after receiving a day one patch a month after Jaffe criticised games that ship unfinished, Jaffe has celebrated by walking out on the company and shooting the eight guys who stood between him and the door. Presumably, they were the eight who were familiar with PlayStation 3 hardware because Eat Sleep Play announced they’ll be focusing on mobile games from now on.
What a fucking cunt.
He’s on Twitter right now, just trying to calm down any fears that his next game will be ‘casual’, in case anyone thought he was going to branch out from his road rage shtick. He’s even audaciously begun recruiting for his new, unnamed gaming company. Shit yeah! Who could knock back the opportunity to make the next mobile game about throwing angry cars and piles of twisted metal! There’s only a one in five chance of losing your job when it’s done!
Pietriots 
You forgot about his God of War series, though it’s understandable that you’d want to forget it…
LikeLike
He was only involved with the first one and honestly, I’d be surprised how much influence he even had over the title considering the rest of his career.
I was thinking though. How is this any different to Bobby Kotick sacking a bunch of guys? It isn’t. Jaffe founded a company, plundered its staff for all they were wroth and then walked off with the money.
LikeLike
I worked with Dave Jaffe on Twisted Metal PS3 for 4 years of my life that I will never get back, and listen, he IS a completely worthless hack! He DID work on God of War, but that Sony team refused to work with him again and therefore he was removed from the franchise. He will NEVER work on a GoW game again. His ideas were not the ideas that made GoW good and he was fought by the development team at every turn. To Sony Santamonica’s credit they somehow muted Jaffe enough to make GoW a decent franchise. Likewise on TM PS3 his ideas were always the ideas we wasted tons of precious time on and those ideas NEVER amounted to anything but wasted effort. Meanwhile, yes, nearly half of the developers on TM PS3 lost their jobs 2 weeks before the game hit store shelves – I wasn’t on the chopping block by the way, I left the studio before shit hit the fan. Those really talented, hard working, GOOD people lost their jobs so that this dirt-bag could take all the credit and make a ton of money. Dave Jaffe is very popular with soda-slurping fans, and ironically I understand that; he seems real, he seems like a fan himself… the reason is he IS a soda slurping fan who somehow snuck into the back door and installed himself as a respectable game designer. He has no more business designing games than any other basement-dwelling, cheese-fry-eating gamer. What a shameless self-promoting piece of shit.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Man, that’s rough. Thanks for telling it like it is, the honesty is refreshing. How’d things work out after you left, did you get a new job at another dev?
LikeLike
Well after TM I was incredibly burned out on the video game industry; about halfway through development I knew I needed a change, so for 2 years before I left Eat Sleep Play I learned Japanese and moved to Japan just before TM went gold. Now I’m working for a 3D company here. My company is thankfully not a game developer. I have completely lost all respect for the gaming industry and here’s a good example of why that is. Getting a job in Japan (doing anything other than teaching English) is hard, real hard, so before I found my current employer I was getting a little worried. I applied at Insomniac because I saw they were looking for environment guys. They had me do a skills test, which I passed, then they had me do a phone interview. The interview (despite being 5am my time) was going great until I mentioned that “oh by the way I live in Japan”. The attitude of the studio lead changed after that. I reassured him I would pay to relocate myself etc, but the interview went downhill. About a week later I emailed the HR contact for an update on the position, but I never even received a response. Total disrespect! I took my time to do their skills test (which is fine because I understand the importance), but then when my situation wasn’t 100% to their liking they cut communication. This is typical for an industry that does not value human beings as anything other than people who can operate Maya or write code. The hilarious and ironic part of all this is that video games aren’t even profitable anymore (traditional triple-A games anyway). Devs spend 4+ years and millions of dollars making regurgitated-content pieces of shit, and then if it doesn’t sell more than 1+ million copies they never make their money back. What a fucking joke, I’m glad to have washed my hands of that dysfunctional industry and the dysfunctional people behind it.
Good riddance, I’m enjoying my new job far away from video games.
LikeLike
What a fucking cunt. I can’t believe that someone can ride one game for so long is considered a developer. Parasite.
LikeLike
I’m reading reactions to this news at other sites. The comments threads are full of people blaming Apple and ‘casuals’. Like it’s their fault that Jaffe flipped out and left his company in ruins. Not Jaffe though! Noo! Just well wishes that he keeps making Sony exclusives, proud of him for snubbing Angry Birds on Twitter etc. etc.
Fucking sycophants.
LikeLike
I still really enjoyed the original God of War. It was easily the most tightly designed in comparison to the other two of the trilogy and Kratos was an actual anti-hero instead of just a raging dickhole.
David Jaffe might slip up here and there (he’s getting tremendous blowback about his most recent sexist comment) but his voice is a valuable one in the industry. He says some really good stuff.
LikeLike
Except 90% of time it talks out of his ass.
David Jaffe.
LikeLike
He’s not really part of the industry though. He just hangs around the front of the party with his cap on backwards and steak hanging out of his back pocket.
LikeLike
I already ripped into Jaffe once before (and Epic Games for good measure) on my first PixlBit article. Let’s just say I think I know why Nintendo only works with so many western developers.
IE: Most of them are sometimes egotistical close-minded asswits.
LikeLiked by 1 person
If you’re obsessed with stalking Jaffe like I am, he’s on Twitter now slagging off some reviewer (not the review) because they gave him 3.5/5.
LikeLike
He sounds like one of my customers at work. Misplaced priorities.
Is 3.5 meant to be good or bad? Sites are still stuck in the stone-age with the concept of review scores.
LikeLike
3.5 is meant to be between good and average. I personally detest review scores, but I have to use them regardless.
A good review doesn’t need a score to get its point across, it just has to validate its opinion and give the reasons why the game is both good and bad. Most sites like IGN, Kotaku and Gamespot still don’t get this idea (lol 7.5 for Skyward Sword lolololol is that because the reviewer was incapable of playing the game?).
LikeLike
I have known this for a while. I actually had a bit of an exchange with Jaffe on his blog about the evils of paid DLC.
He’s one of the worst, but the “hardcore” crowd celebrates him as some kind of deity. Which is fitting … demons should worship the devil. =P
LikeLike
No, they are like flies migrating to a turd pile.
LikeLike
Nearly 10 years later after this post, and boy, this has aged incredibly well.
LikeLiked by 1 person