Sports Story was shadowdropped as part of a series of indie Nintendo Direct during the holiday season last year, and it’s had quite the interesting life since then.
The reviews for the title were middling to say the least, with most reviewers feeling that the spark in Sidebar Games’ first title Golf Story was absent from Sports Story. It also didn’t help that quite a few people were experiencing bugs and glitches, some of which completely locked them out of finishing the game.
I will say that I played a bit of the game and had fun with it, but I did find myself quickly moving onto other gaming ventures. Who knows, maybe I’ll return to the Switch exclusive sports-like someday. Its writing was as charming as the first game, and the graphics were cute and detailed, but it just didn’t dig its claws into me.
And yet, one of the most interesting tidbits to come out about the game was the “secret developer room”. Many games in the past have included areas where developers have included self-inserts that players can interact with, perhaps to learn more about the game or even to fight to the death. However, Sports Story‘s secret dev room was a bit different. A bit sadder, actually.
In the Sports Story secret dev room, which is accessible through some in-depth fiddling, you’re met with a development team that is stressed. A team that is angry. A team that has been facing blockade after blockade when it comes to the development of their game and has nothing nice to say about it or each other. YouTuber tendog posted a video of the room a few weeks ago, which you can view below.
And then just this morning, as spotted by DidYouKnowGaming’s Liam Robertson, the most recent patch notes for Sports Story included a point mentioning that the update had ‘blocked access to the secret dev room’, the first time that the Sidebar Games team had publicly acknowledged its existence.
Sidebar Games has patched out the “game dev room” hidden by rogue developers in Sports Story to protest the company’s working conditions. https://t.co/R3qkPfKepB pic.twitter.com/9dQzns9pah
— Liam Robertson (@Doctor_Cupcakes) January 29, 2023
Note that Robertson says “patched out”, while the actual patch notes say “blocked access”. In a normal situation, if there were something in the game that shouldn’t be in the game, a patch note would simply say that it had been removed, right? Why exactly would they “block access” instead of removing it from the game entirely?
That’s because the room wasn’t patched out at all. Access was literally blocked. By a washing machine.
A washing machine that can be walked around.
Tendog, and later Robertson, actually acknowledge that the room had not been removed at all, but that it had definitely changed. In a new video of the room, tendog accesses it in the same way as before but is met with a washing machine in front of the door that does absolutely nothing. Upon speaking with the development team NPCs, they find that the dialogue has been changed completely.
The new lines of dialogue show a team that is happy to be working on their game, reporting that they are facing absolutely no issues whatsoever. The tone, despite being text, feels almost sarcastic. There is one NPC, the programmer, who speaks in smaller text so as not to be heard by the CEO, and airs their true grievances.
So what is going on here? Is this a protest against meddling higher up the chain? Is this an ARG within the game that speaks to a larger narrative around game development? Or maybe it’s a second sub-narrative within Sports Story that isn’t about sports at all but instead about a game development team that has grown to hate what their game has become due to it being out of their control?
Hard to say, but it’s certainly fascinating!
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