Puzzle Quest dev received death threats

By Tom Bramwell Published 3 June, 2008

Six. And a bomb threat.

Infinite Interactive has said that some gamers were so upset about the PSP bug in Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords that the developer received death threats.

Speaking at Capcom's Captivate 08 event in Las Vegas during the unveiling of Infinite's new game, Neopets Puzzle Adventure, CEO Steve Fawkner joked, "One death threat in 25 years of game development. Puzzle Quest comes out and I had six death threats and one bomb threat."

Apparently one of the death threats was about the level cap, but the PSP bug, which stopped the player's AI companions having any effect in battle, drew the most anger. "We had a PSP bug and someone said, 'We're going to send you a bomb and blow the studio up!' But, er, we can track that email," he said, laughing about it.

Obviously we thought this was very exciting, so we asked Fawkner to elaborate when we spoke to him afterwards. "They were all emails, and I think at least two of them were possibly serious!" he told Eurogamer. "They actually left their email addresses on them, so we know who they came from."

Wary of standing too close to Fawkner in a public place, we quickly checked whether he had reported the senders to the authorities. "No. Most of them were people who were going to kill us who lived in the States, and we're in Australia, so unless they were actually serious enough to hop a plane flight over to Australia and gun me down."

Given that we were standing in the States talking to Fawkner, we promptly ran away. Assuming he isn't assassinated before he gets home, Neopets Puzzle Adventure, which mixes Othello gameplay, a Nickelodeon web-game licence and Puzzle Quest structures together in a promising Wii, PC and DS package, is due out this Christmas. Check out our hands-on preview for more.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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