Denis Dyack Responds to Allegations of Embezzlement

Formerly of Silicon Knights and now at Precursor Games, Denis Dyack has uploaded a video to YouTube in which he responds to a Kotaku article that brings into question the integrity of Dyack and the studio over the development of X-Men: Destiny. The piece claimed that Dyack was using money from the X-Men game to fund other projects from the much maligned designer.

Dyack’s reasoning for addressing this Kotaku piece (which was published in October 2012) is due to the fact that Precursor’s Kickstarter project for Shadow of the Eternals has stagnated due to his credibility being called into question. Initially, there was some excitement for the campaign because SotE is being touted as a spiritual successor to Gamecube cult-hit, Eternal Darkness.

You can watch the full video at the bottom of this post in which Dyack apologises for X-Men: Destiny, claims everything at Silicon Knights was above board and discredits the aforementioned article. MCV has transcribed a lot of the video and that text can be seen below.

 “For the first time we are combining a crowd funding effort on Kickstarter with community driven content where gamers can actually add content to the game driven all through an episodic model. We think the potential for this is fantastic,”

“We thought it would not be taken seriously due to lack of sources. Old newspapers would actually do some further research to check whether the research in that article is credited. Now people will just link and link and link and every time it’s linked it gets some incremental shred of credibility.

“I’ve gotta do something as it’s now affecting me and my colleagues at Precursor. I was always aware the allegations were not true. The extent to which people thought it was real did not become apparent until we started to try and do fundraising. It became overwhelmingly obvious to everyone at Precursor and all our fans that we continue to run into this wall.

“What’s really disappointing to me is that such serious allegations are being made credible and has been given a life on its own and there isn’t any hard evidence of its own from credible sources that this ever occurred.

“We realised that if I came on the record and said something [McMillen] would have his first credible source, so I decided not to go on the record and comment as the allegations were all untrue.”

“We realised that after Too Human which was one of our worst Metacritic scoring games since our previous games we wanted X-men to be as good as possible, The people at Activision were stunned by this. They said they really appreciated it but didn’t know if it was a good business move.

“We are really sorry how that game turned out. We did nothing but put our best efforts into this project. We all tried to make it work out but sometimes it doesn’t happen.”

“I’ve said some things out there in the press about this project and some other projects and I apologise for that,” he said. “I’ve learnt my lesson. I’ve learnt my lesson so much that at Precursor I’m not making business decisions like that. Shaun and Paul are running precursor. I’m in charge of the creative.”