Phil Fish canceled Fez 2 because he ‘wasn’t feeling it’

Phil Fish is the artist/designer who created the 2012 classic indie game. Fez alongside programmer Renaud Bédard, has spoken candidly for the first time about the cancellation of its sequel the following year.

Fez 2It was cancelled in controversial circumstances just one month following its June 2013 launch. Fish was a outspoken, sarcastic figure online as well as offline. He had been in an argument with Marcus Beer on Twitter after he said Fez 2Xbox was not to release the original game. Xbox 360 would not be released.

Fish announced abruptly that he was leaving public life after the Beer argument. He also cancelled the game. This surprised even the Polytron studio, which he co-founded. The assumption was that he’d done so in a fit of pique. “Fez 2 I am done. I am done. I grab the cash and run. As much as I can stomach. This isn’t the result of any one thing, but the end of a long, bloody campaign. You win,” he wrote at the time.

In fact, as Fish told journalist and author Simon Parkin for Parkin’s My Perfect Console podcast, his heart wasn’t in Fez 2The first.

“Obviously, I wasn’t feeling it to begin with,” Fish said. “It felt like the thing to do, strike while the iron’s hot and make a sequel. That’s what you do in video games, you make a franchise. It was becoming less and less satisfying to me as I worked on it more seriously. […] disillusioned with everything — even in my position of having just had a successful video game, having to follow up on that was a lot of pressure.”

As for the inciting incident, the spat with Beer: “Maybe it was a bit of an out,” Fish conceded. “[It] was the last straw, where I was already thinking about doing all those things and there was just this one moment where, you know what, fuck it, I’m not doing that.”

Fish was revealed by Philippe Poisson, his real name. Fez 2It was very early in its development which meant that it was easy to cancel. “We weren’t that advanced, we didn’t have a whole lot to show other than the logo we showed,” he said. “I certainly had concepts and concept art and things like that, but we didn’t have anything playable. When we made the announcement, it was still in its pre-conceptual stage. It was easy to decide that we wanted to leave because the game didn’t require any investment. It hadn’t really cost us anything in time or money or energy, and there was nothing really to be super attached to.”

Fish said he had previously “fantasized” about cancelling the first Fez during its tortuous five-year development, “but it was obviously not a realistic thing to actually do.”

Cancelling is possible simultaneously Fez 2Fish voluntarily removed himself from all social media platforms and public life. Fish was catapulted into stardom along with other celebrities like Super Meat Boy’s Edmund McMillen and Braid’s Jonathan Blow — thanks in part to their appearances in the documentary Indie Game: The Movie — Fish had become a divisive, argumentative figure, and he struggled with managing his fame well.

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“There’s no opt-out for the sewage pipe that gets opened up into your living room when you’re a public persona on the internet,” he said. “And just making that cut, that severance, of just like — you know, I’m just going to go back to just being private me, I don’t have to tweet every dumb thing that goes through my brain all the time? At first it was just like kick any addiction, but once the worst was over you can see that this thing drove me insane. That was poison.” He certainly sounds like a calmer, more measured person now.

“To decide to go back to work in a completely quiet, secretive way, can be very hard but can be freeing also,” Fish added. “You don’t know the things that I didn’t finish, that I ended up canceling, these projects that I worked on. There’s no big drama around it.”

All this begs to ask the question, “What Fish?” It hashave been involved in for nine years, besides helping with the VR game release SuperHyperCubeParkin said that it took him six months to lose himself, but it was a fair amount. Skyrim). True to his commitment to privacy, he was unwilling to share details of his next project — but he hinted it might not be a video game.

“That was very liberating to break away from [Fez 2]And then I realized that there is another way. And it doesn’t even necessarily have to be a video game. I don’t want to say what, cause I’m still working on it, but… let’s go in a completely different direction.”

It may be a long time before we see the sequel. But Polytron is making sure it happens. Fez itself remains easy to find: it’s currently available on Steam and other PC stores, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and iOS. And it’s still as brilliant as it was a decade ago.