Reading Games Writing: Forgotten Gems: Shadow Complex by Peer Schneider
The consequences of refusing to acknowledge anything bad or displeasing
I have had a bookmark on Forgotten Gems: Shadow Complex by Peer Schneider for awhile now. I knew I wanted to point out the seemingly willful negligence of mentioning the blowback the game received due to Orson Scott Card’s involvement, especially given how many times he gets mentioned. And due to Infinity Blade’s status as abandonware going unmentioned in the same breath as where you can find and purchase Shadow Complex nowadays. I ended up coming to a realization on how IGN might have solidified into the softball coverage website it is today, and how I don’t believe it is helpful to the culture and is indicative that IGN remains unequipped to handle hate movements online1.
So it was with much excitement that I read on IGN back then that designer Donald Mustard and the ChAIR Entertainment team were planning to make a game based on Orson Scott Card’s dystopian novel, Empire. The two had previously collaborated on the underrated Advent Rising, and early coverage on IGN in 2006 – including whispers that it was going to be a bit of a love letter to Metroid – sounded promising.
Ender's Game author Orson Scott Card (left) and game designer Donald Mustard (right) discuss their then unannounced project, Shadow Complex, in 2006.
When Shadow Complex released in August of 2009, the reception was unanimously favorable. Not only did players love the game, it brought back fond memories of an increasingly underserved genre.
The first reason I wanted to write about this piece was that during my time revisiting the conversations happening in 2009 the involvement of Orson Scott Card became an early example of good art coming from a shitty source or adjacent to a shitty source. Some really took issue with the fact that ChAIR chose to continue collaborating with Card, someone who was very well known for his crusade against the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States. This led to each individual approaching it in their own way: some refused to purchase the game, some would counter their purchase with a donation to a charity, and others didn’t care or didn’t know anything about Card’s involvement. A boycott was called for, and articles covering the various arguments were published. It stands now alongside the reaction to questions regarding Resident Evil 5’s racist caricatures of native Africans, released earlier that same year, as an example of opposing ideals meeting and arguing online that would explode in 2014. Leaving this aspect out of your retrospective/interview/advertisement for Shadow Complex Remastered is understandable when you want to create a website that focuses on how games are great, the people who make games are great, there is no friction, everything is awesome.
And this is the online presence IGN maintains and has been long gestated by its Chief Development Officer, Peer Schneider. To be clear, I do not think this is a malevolent and maybe not even an intentional change that was sought. As someone who had been a fan of IGN during my adolescence, I found the site from the late 2000’s had entirely changed by the time of 2015. The edges had been shaved off, the irreverence of Three Red Lights and off-topic stories that dominated Game Scoop were removed. Discussions stayed on topic and became heavily segmented to serve the YouTube algorithm, and cursing was removed to reach a larger audience. It became boring. Not to say the website before was a bastion of moral integrity, I have not forgotten Game Scoop episode 28.
Peer was a co-founder of IGN and has remained in executive positions since that time in 1997. Regular comments during podcasts in 2009 specifically mention that Peer listens to the podcasts and will comment on their content to the participants. Peer would occasionally guest on shows as well, creating the awkward situation of having to balance your own opinions and behavior up against your boss. This presence inside and outside of the recordings led to a slow homogenization that synced with Peer’s own. The genial nature and softball handling of every game by him eventually became the modus operandi of the site at large. Not that they don’t give low scores or have individual and varied opinions on games2, but the overall feeling–vibe–is similar to Geoff Keighley’s for The Game Awards: games are great, things are great, layoffs are sad but hey the industry is exciting and full of stellar people let’s talk about the great games instead! All the things I wrote when I reviewed IGN as a games media site last year. It was not until reading this article and noticing the snubbing of a large conversation piece caused by the game’s release that things snapped into place. From both my personal history, my revisiting of specifically the 2009 period for another project, and last year’s review of IGN, all combined and led to a recognition of where this overarching attitude and approach came from.
This article’s avoidance of anything that might be distasteful or reflect badly on the subject is representative of an undercurrent of editorial attitudes that I think has long been governing the overall IGN outlook on the industry, regardless of the individual opinions of its staff, and has been guided largely by Peer, as someone who actively monitored and participated in its content that makes up the site’s voice as well as actively dictating certain aspects as well from an executive position. This is not a, “I hate Peer,” or think he is a bad person. Most all who worked with him remain seemingly on good terms with him long after departing IGN. It is natural for a website to align with its leader(s), especially one who has been present since the beginning. I just don’t agree that ignoring problematic topics is the best approach, especially in a post gamergate world. You can’t just bury your head in the ground. If you can’t take an easy oppositional stance against Card in 2024 how are you going to help writers, developers, and others when they become subjected to the latest harassment campaign?
At a runtime between five and 13 hours, according to HowLongtoBeat, the ability to create yourself your own platforms provided those who knew where to look a way to blaze through the game even faster.
When writing about IGN and GameSpot a contrast I made between the two is that GameSpot seemed willing and open to collaborating with other non-GameSpot YouTubers when creating their content. However IGN acted as a silo, only ever referencing itself. Here you can see that extends to other brands that IGN’s parent company owns. This has only troubling increased as the company absorbs more and more of its contemporaries, such as the recent Gamer Network buyout and subsequent layoffs. This is why he mentions HowLongtoBeat to showcase how players can cut down on the time required to complete the game, instead of the more obvious callout to Speedrun.com, which is dedicated to tracking speedruns of games in which players find fascinating ways to bend the game to achieve an optimum run.
Infinity Blade blew up – in part because it showed core gamers that mobile games could be for them – and was quickly followed by a sequel. The two games grossed over $30 million at a time when established publishers and developers alike were still trying to figure out a “there” for them on Apple’s expanding mobile gaming marketplace. Infinity Blade III was unveiled in late 2013 and launched at the same time, complete with an Imagine Dragons song tie-in. It rocketed to #1 in the App Store within hours. But there was an even bigger distraction on the horizon that made a return to the world of Shadow Complex very unlikely.
If there is a silver lining in the story of a potential game series cut short, it’s that Shadow Complex is easy to track down – and it still holds up well in both editions. The Remaster is available for $15 on the Epic Games Store and Steam and the PlayStation and Xbox Stores. Annoyingly, the original Xbox 360 game sells for the same price.
The second reason I wanted to write about this article is because, as Infinity Blade’s reddit succinctly puts it, “On December 2018, Infinity Blade was removed from the App Store. In 2020, it became undownloadable from the “purchased” section as well. Now, the only way to download Infinity Blade on Apple devices is from sideloading it.” Peer goes out of his way to mention the success Infinity Blade had was distracting the development team from following through on a sequel to Shadow Complex—a game explicitly mentioned as still being available—and fails to mention that this trilogy of games that “legitimized” mobile gaming with a hardcore audience has become abandonware out of neglect and the ever onwards movement of iPhones. It is another evasion towards acknowledging anything bad existing within the proximity of the subject.
Something I do want to point out is that in recent years at IGN we have seen walk outs, failure to hire actual talent due to low pay leading to major controversy, and stories of intimidation and harassment that dominated long periods of the website. Just this past month Stella Chung was terminated for reasons that remain unclear and hypocritical. Those involved in some of these events appear to remain on good terms with Peer Schnieder publicly which is why I don’t want to come across that I believe he is some great evil tyrant, but there is some responsibility that should be taken when these things have all happened under your tenure in a senior position. Peer is willing to spend much time talking about the business and history of the business, you can read the very lengthy talk he had with David Wolinsky for Don’t Die for deep insight into his thinking and approach to covering games and helping guide the giant ship that is IGN.com (back in 2017). Many years ago he even responded to an email I had sent about how to better shape up my portfolio if I ever hoped to one day work at IGN. I no longer do. I believe the neglect to engage or even acknowledge controversial topics such as Card’s involvement in Shadow Complex’s creation or development is indicative of his larger influence on the website and its approach to talking about videogames. This is a website where he has a position of power and influence but seemingly stays quiet in the view of those on the outside looking in. I had hoped a takeaway from the fallout from 2014 would be that remaining quiet publicly is not the correct or helpful route to take, but here we remain in silence.
earlier just this year IGN found itself in the unfortunate crosshairs of the ongoing “culture war” when its face-off results changed disfavorably for Black Myth Wukong. You don’t have to travel far online to see plenty of deranged hate and conspiracy theorizing about IGN’s woke agenda. I hope I have made it clear that my critique is for more work to be spent on acknowledging the bad within and surrounding videogames, to be better equipped to counteract campaigns that IGN and it’s staff are already subjected to despite their fairly neutral approach in news coverage and interviews such as these.
in regards to individuals I’d like to single out: Rebekah Valentine, Matt Kim, and Kat Bailey (who no longer works at IGN sadly) are all individuals I’ve followed more closely than the rest due to their ability to buck this pervasive attitude.