Squirreled away in a secret room within Monstro Town, a cliffside hamlet in Super Mario RPG, there’s a purple-skinned warrior named Culex. You can go the whole game without ever meeting this man; finding him requires you to backtrack to an earlier town, purchase a pricey set of fireworks, and…
It wasn’t even supposed to be called Anthem. Just days before the annual E3 convention in June of 2017, when the storied studio BioWare would reveal its newest game, the plan had been to go with a different title: Beyond. They’d even printed out Beyond T-shirts for the staff.
Last autumn, nearly a year after the release of Red Dead Redemption 2, top Rockstar executive Jennifer Kolbe sent out an email to staff with a list of bullet-pointed initiatives to improve Rockstar’s culture.