Farewell Phil. We'll miss you.

How can you hate a person who created something so awesome?

So that's it then. The trolls have won. Phil Fish has cancelled Fez II and is leaving the industry. All because of a sustained campaign of hate by a vocal minority who for some unknown reason, see fit to call themselves 'gamers'. Why do we allow the worst of our community to have the loudest voices and ruin it for the rest of us? Not only that, why do we allow these people to perpetuate the negative stereotypes of people who would rather partake of something interactive for a couple of hours after work rather than switch off their brains and watch gloom and doom soap operas all night?

I love Fez. It's one of my favourite games of this generation. No title that I have played in the last five years has given me such a wide eyed sense of discovery with every new screen or been as full of genuine whimsy as Fez. Nor has any other game had such a unique central mechanic. I was excited to see where Polytron would take the sequel. I was excited about the prospect of new worlds, new discoveries and evolved play mechanics. Now, thanks to a few self righteous asshats, I'll never have the chance.

Sure, Phil Fish was abrasive. But personally I found him entertaining. He's brusque, forthright, and unfiltered, and he was, up until last night at least, perfectly happy to stand up to his detractors. If you don't like that, then so what? Stay away from his Twitter feed. It's not difficult. I was bought up to just not associate myself with people I don't like, not persistently hound someone anonymously over the internet until you force them to stop doing something they love just so they can escape the constant abuse. We had a word for that at school. Bullying. And just because you're not in school anymore, it doesn't mean the description doesn't apply.

Depending on your perspective, Trolls live under bridges and eat goats, or they're a species made of rock who get a bit thick when it gets hot because their brains are made of silicon. They don't fill the internet with anonymous hate. It's time we stopped associating self righteous, hate filled, abusive assholes with fictional creatures and started calling them what they really are. Bullies.

They're winning and we shouldn't be allowing them to. And now they've forced one of the few genuine innovators out of the games industry because they've taken umbrage over his personality. So here's what I have to say to them.

Thanks for killing a potentially great game. I hope you're real fucking proud of yourselves, wankstains.