Edmund McMillen - The Examined Game: How Edmund McMillen Deals With The Binding of Isaac's Crazy Fans

Choice quotes:

  1. “For a long time I wanted to do this experimental Kickstarter project where people would pay money to have a say in a video game that was built from nothing, just to prove a point. You pay me, and I make this abomination of garbage. And I will prove to you that if you just go by what everybody wants you get crap.”

  2. “But, man. We’re just trying to get shit done, it’s like – there’s a team of people that are working their asses off to try to get translations done for Simplified Chinese and they made the mistake of, in a blog post saying that they hoped to have it done by the end of the month, and then literally on the hour in China that that ended and it wasn’t updated we started to get review bombed. And we were “liars”, “how dare we promise these things and not follow through”, it’s just like there’s no margin of error for just human error.”

  3. “You have to design from the perspective where you don’t want to give your kids candy all day, because all they want is candy. […] But you know they’re going to go crazy, you know it’s bad for them, you want to choose when you give it to them so they have that like memory of like, boom […] having to like explain like you have to be withholding to some degree in order for stuff to matter and you have to force people to do hard stuff for stuff to matter…”