If you follow TSSZ on Twitter, you may have noticed a series of bulletins from us yesterday that reported BigRedButton may have suffered significant employee departures months before Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyricreleased this week. We initially believed those departures to be layoffs; we later sought clarification and learned many, if not all of those departures may have been voluntary.
Here is what we have pieced together about the story to this point. Much of the information can be traced back to two sources on Twitter, one of which is writer Tamaki from research site Unseen64. His Tweets bringing the matter to the world’s attention are below.
Looks like @BigRedButtonEnt had begun to fall apart long before the release of Sonic Boom. Many employees left in July. Not looking good.
Another something - the original producer of Sonic Boom left BRB in September 2013.
@tssznews @BigRedButtonEnt Some of the people who left include senior designers and artists, the project manager, production assists, etc.
You can read some more tweets at the link here http://www.tssznews....ic-boom-launch/
It’s hard to know exactly what happened without being in the BRB halls ourselves. If the exodus occurred in July, that would, in theory, have been at the very tail end of development, where little could have changed. Still, many have speculated something did happen in between builds shown early in the year and the final product released this week, where texture and general graphic quality declined significantly. Given the current reaction to the Boom release, we’d certainly like to get to the bottom of it. Can you help? If so, please send us a news tip.
