The German portal Game Two interviewed former employees of Fntastic to find information about the development of the failed “MMO”, The Day Before, which caused chaos at the end of last year…

 

 

The Day Before has now gone down in history as one of the most disastrous cases in the video game industry. The fact that it was a hodgepodge of development resources bought from the Unreal Engine store is really the least of it. After the release, we learned a lot of unpleasant things about the Fntastic team. Apparently, that’s not all! The Game Two channel shared an extensive report on YouTube, which delved into the matter and collected the reports of those working on the project.

According to their findings, after speaking to at least 16 former employees, as well as one “volunteer” and seven members of distributor Mytona, brothers Eduard and Aisen Gotovtsev (from Yakutsk, Russia) were “charismatic” and conveyed a desire to make the world of video games be the equivalent of rock stars.

They were able to tackle a game the size of The Day Before by recruiting many young people from rural areas of the country with no industry experience, as well as natives of Kazakhstan and Armenia. This offered them a gateway to the gaming world.

Recruitment has been fast, and the person in charge of recruiting volunteers says he has no idea how many people he has recruited. Because his order was to attract as many interested parties as possible. According to the idea, they had to create “one big family”. However, the vision of the directors was constantly changing. Just as they tried the latest cool games (e.g. Spider-Man 2, Baldur’s Gate 3 and the like), they also tried to copy their system. As a result, there were up to three different creative versions, and the ending was not clear. One person involved claims that he was unaware that the game was going to be an MMO – which it never was – until he saw a trailer.

Below are some quotes that reflect the “working conditions” of those interviewed, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their identities and futures in the video game industry.

As an illustration, the first comes from someone who has been working for Fntastic for two years now:

 

• “Unfortunately, the whole time I was working, I didn’t get any time off at all”.
• “I’ve never worked less than 16 hours a day. In the last year and a half, I haven’t had a single Sunday off, and in the last two months, I haven’t had a day off in general”.
• “There were days when I worked until 9 o’clock in the morning […] And I got up at ten o’clock because the phone rang and they demanded my presence for some reason”.
• “Overtime wasn’t a problem at first, until finally I worked for a month and a half without a single day off. We could only sleep five hours a day”.
• “Holidays, weekends, days off – they don’t exist! Sometimes, I had to beg for a few hours off to take a shower or eat.”

 

The future of the Gotovtsev brothers after The Day Before

 

It is worth watching the original Game Two report in the video below. Extremely instructive. Although it is in German, English subtitles are acceptable. All this is the result of very serious research. It offers a super detailed reconstruction of Fntastic and Gotovtsev’s past. Believe it or not, even to this day, they still come up again and again to blame the failure of The Day Before on “bloggers” who gave the game terrible press. Meanwhile, the Polish media claims that they are returning with an ambitious mobile project. (If they can…)

Source: YouTube