on a bookmark-clearing spree atm and just got done reading this interview with Yusuke Kurita, creator of the not-really-a-puzzle-game Q, which originally released on smartphones in 2015 and did modestly well but inexplicably blew up within the last ~ 12 months after some vtuber orgs caught wind of it. This interview was conducted in tandem with the imminent release of Q2: HUMANITY via Early Access, and a big thrust of the interview is not just about the original game and its unexpected resurgence but how that messed with their direction for the sequel—and, specifically, how they'd been designing Q2 to directly address all the supposed deficiencies of the original, only for the original to suddenly blow up and force the team to question whether all the "issues" they were trying to "correct" were actually what gave the game its appeal.
What really caught my attention were the more relatable anecdotes on Kurita's part, like how there are a bunch of stages in Q that he weren't even sure were beatable but made it to the final game anyway just to see if anyone could clear 'em, and how he decided to put himself in charge of manually reviewing and authorising all the user-made content, only to just... stop doing it, for multiple years, without telling anyone, until it came to a head after the game blew up and he had no choice but to confess to his colleagues and they brute-forced their way through the backlog of tens of thousands of submissions by hand.
