Developer’s GDC billboard pokes at despised former Google Stadia exec

It’s been nearly two years now since game industry veteran Phil Harrison left Google following the implosion of the company’s Stadia cloud gaming service. But the passage of time hasn’t stopped one company from taking advantage of this week’s Game Developers Conference to poke fun at the erstwhile gaming executive for his alleged mistreatment of developers.

VGC spotted a conspicuous billboard in San Francisco’s Union Square Monday featuring the overinflated, completely bald head of Gunther Harrison, the fictional Alta Interglobal CEO who was recently revealed as the blatantly satirical antagonist in the upcoming game Revenge of the Savage Planet. A large message atop the billboard asks passersby—including the tens of thousands in town for GDC—”Has a Harrison fired you lately? You might be eligible for emotional support.”

Google’s Phil Harrison talks about the Google Stadia controller at GDC 2019.

Credit:

Google

While Gunther Harrison probably hasn’t fired any GDC attendees, the famously bald Phil Harrison was responsible for the firing of plenty of developers when he shut down Google’s short-lived Stadia Games & Entertainment (SG&E) publishing imprint in early 2021. That shutdown surprised a lot of newly jobless game developers, perhaps none moreso than those at Montreal-based Typhoon Games, which Google had acquired in late 2019 to make what Google’s Jade Raymond said at the time would be “platform-defining exclusive content” for Stadia.

Yet on the very same day that Journey to the Savage Planet launched as a Stadia exclusive, the developers at Typhoon found themselves jobless, alongside the rest of SG&E. By the end of 2022, Google would shut down Stadia entirely, blindsiding even more game developers.

Don’t forgive, don’t forget
After being let go by Google, Typhoon Games would reform as Raccoon Logic (thanks in large part to investment from Chinese publishing giant Tencent) and reacquire the rights to the Savage Planet franchise. And now that the next game in that series is set to launch in May, it seems the developers still haven’t fully gotten over how they were treated during Google’s brief foray into game publishing.

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