I like Ron Gilbert. I don't like all of the games he's worked on but I like most of them. I think it's great that he's making this new game and he's doing it how he wants to. I will likely check it out when it's released and there's a good chance that I'll enjoy it.

all of that said, I have a hard time understanding this situation. when you've been making games for decades and you've watched the Internet grow from nothing in that time, how can you possibly release a trailer for your upcoming game showing an art style that you don't have to hire a focus testing company to tell you that the Internet will knee-jerk react negatively to... without knowing that there would be The Usual, Expected Amount of "toxic" backlash? how could you not see this coming, and why would you then go on to take it personally?

I fully understand the human angle where like, if I released a trailer for a game I was working on tomorrow, and for whatever reason the Internet Hate Machine started churning against me, I would have a very hard time handling it, because I have never been in a situation like that before, and the human mind is ill-equipped to deal with the onslaught of criticism, both fair and over-the-top, that is just part and parcel of putting things on the Internet these days. in the past ~15 years of the indie game scene there have been countless examples of this exact scenario playing out time and time again, and I have complete and total empathy for anyone in that situation—it has to be hard.

but this is a guy who's made both games that are considered classics, as well as games that have been critically panned. why is he taking the perfectly predictable response to the art style shown in this trailer so personally?

the only conclusion I can reach—and it's a mighty cynical one—is that this must be part of the planned PR cycle for the game. the game was announced earlier this year, as being planned to be released later this year, meaning that at the time of that announcement, the art style was almost certainly already settled upon... yet the decision was made to withhold from revealing the art style at that point in time. now, awhile later, we get a trailer that shows and demonstrates the art style. again, the Internet's reaction writ large was wholly predictable. now Ron Gilbert says this wholly predictable reaction makes him sad and makes him not want to share any more of the game until release, and various "journalists" and commentators in the space get to write up think-pieces about the event heralding this act—not sharing any more of your game until it's released—as one of moral bravery in the face of the innately toxic and reprehensibly evil Internet Comment Section saying mean things about the latest game from a respected and celebrated creator of some of the most cherished classics in the history of computer gaming. Entitled Toxic Gamers get shamed for being Toxic and Entitled and Gamers, as though we haven't learned anything over the past 20 years about how anonymous comment sections inherently work in the everyone-has-an-Internet-connected-smartphone-in-their-pocket-at-all-times contemporary society we now live in. blogs get something juicy to write about. everyone wins!

is there any reason for me to not believe that some version of the above is what happened here? or am I completely off-base here and perhaps Ron Gilbert is just mentally stuck in the 90s, where your publisher sends promotional prerelease screenshots to a gaming magazine and you don't have to directly see any criticism, as someone else at the company reads all the (e- and snail) mail for you? or something else?

tl;dr I can't understand getting mad at the Internet for being the Internet in 2022, it will never get better, if anything it will only get worse—this is the price we collectively had to pay when we decided everyone should be online at all times.