Where's my Chicken?

(Originally published in September 2022, this has now been updated with several recent Chicken Wiggle developments. A video version can be found here.)

Let me start by saying that I’m a pretty big fan of Atooi’s games, Chicken Wiggle included. I loved Mutant Mudds on 3DS. I’ll never play it again because oh my god that game was hard, but that hasn’t stopped me from re-purchasing it on newer platforms because I liked it that much. It reminded me of a cross between Virtual Boy Wario Land and Gargoyle’s Quest. It’s honestly brilliant. Xeodrifter is a game I’ve beaten 4 or 5 times because it’s a wonderful little slice of Metroid-inspired adventuring that’s also very, very good. Totes the Goat was a straight up obsession of mine when it came out on Switch for a solid week. It’s basically Q-Bert with a goat. And I mean that in the best way possible

Their output, even back in the Renegade Kid days with stuff like Moon and Dementium, has always impressed me. So when they announced a game called Chicken Wiggle, as a fan of colorful platformers and delightfully absurd names, I was 1000% on board.

Then a whole bunch of other stuff happened, and I’m over here struggling to understand exactly how things have gone so wrong. There was a Kickstarter, a name change, some amazing artwork, a massive communication breakdown, Twitter blocking, and well, it’s a mess.

Here’s what I know.

The Switch Effect

Chicken Wiggle released on the 3DS at just about the worst time imaginable. August 2017 saw the 3DS more or less about to be put to death with astonishing quickness thanks to the overwhelming success of the Nintendo Switch. Once the Switch happened, no matter how cool the games were, nobody seemed to want to play on their 3DS’s anymore. Yes, that’s a pretty broad stroke, but it’s largely backed up by reality. No matter what the game was or how good it might have been, nothing on 3DS had any sort of traction anymore. Metroid: Samus Returns came out in September, and while it was met with general acclaim, one sentiment was clear: Folks would have liked it a lot better had it been on Switch. Inti Creates and Sunsoft had announced Blaster Master Zero for 3DS, but then had the foresight to whip up a quick port for Switch a well, which as far as I know handily outsold the 3DS version. The same couldn't be said though for the likes of Ever Oasis, Rhythm Heaven Megamix, Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story + Bowser Jr.'s Journey, Hey! Pikmin, WarioWare Gold, and more. Basically if it came out after the second half of 2017, even major IPs sold a fraction of what it normally would have pre-Switch launch.

I have no doubt Chicken Wiggle was thoroughly decimated by this “Switch effect.” I can’t say Chicken Wiggle would have exactly set the world on fire had it released a year earlier, but it had a lot going for it leading up to its release. It had the Atooi pedigree which held some serious cache in the world of the 3DS eShop. It had a wonderful cast of characters featuring a chicken and a worm teaming up for some cool retro-inspired platforming. It had an extremely memorable name, Chicken Wiggle. And most important of all, the game was pretty good!

Sadly, it apparently sold incredibly poorly, rightfully much to the chagrin of its creator, Jools Watsham. He took to Twitter with an understandable level of frustration regarding Chicken Wiggle’s sales numbers. The answers to why this was the case, at least what I saw, seemed extremely obvious, and were largely the same from all directions. People would have bought it if it were on Switch. Which is true for me as well. Granted, I bought the 3DS version and happily played it the day it released anyway, but the entire time I was just wishing I was playing this delightful little platformer on my TV instead of cramped around my 3DS.

Not long after Chicken Wiggle’s poor performance on 3DS, Atooi decided to launch a Kickstarter to create a fancy new HD version of Chicken Wiggle for the Switch called Chicken Wiggle Workshop. Not only did this new version promise remastered music and visuals, but a greatly expanded level creator mode as well. The campaign was somewhat slow going at first, but it was eventually fully funded in April 2018 with an estimated product delivery date of December that same year. A reasonable timeframe considering the scope of the project. As you may have guessed, that didn't exactly happen.

What followed the successful Kickstarter was quite troubling. Updates became more and more scarce until there were extended periods of complete silence from Atooi. Something was clearly going on behind the scenes, but what exactly that was, the game’s investors had no idea thanks to a complete lack of communication on Atooi’s part. What really started to raise flags with backers though was when they began releasing new games that weren’t Chicken Wiggle.

Questions and Concerns

As outlined in their Retrospective Development Diary posted on the Kickstarter page on September 27th, 2023, They felt that Chicken Wiggle Workshop had a bit of an identity problem. They were proud of the level editor they had created, but they felt that they needed to focus on the main adventure more. This makes sense, as the single player game that released on 3DS was exactly what people had paid money to have ported to Switch. Of course, Atooi felt that this needed retooling, and apparently went about overhauling much of how the game played out. And this cost them time, and money. 

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To quote the diary: 

“We felt good about these changes and shared our progress on Kickstarter updates, and then continued along our merry way. However, these changes pushed the schedule off the original course, and we needed money to continue development of Hatch Tales and keep the studio afloat. We had to turn some of our attention to releasing smaller titles that could be completed quickly and had the potential of bringing in some money. This unfortunately resulted in us not being able to focus all our attention on Hatch Tales. We muddled through as best we could.”

Here’s the problem. Very little, if any of that was actually communicated to backers in any meaningful way.  

From the outside, with absolutely no communication relating to what was really going on with the game, it looked like the money people had given Atooi was spent on other games instead of Chicken Wiggle. After all, for all anyone outside of Atooi knew, this was just a port of an existing game. How much more money could really be necessary for a project of that scope? The only logical conclusions were that either they had expanded the scope of the project without informing their investors, or that the money was being used elsewhere without their permission. It would have been so very simple to write up a few sentences on the Kickstarter page to let people know what was going on, but that didn’t happen. Instead people were left to draw their own conclusions for literal years, which as it turned out, weren’t all that far off. 

Back to the original timeline though, updates started gradually reappearing again, though in hindsight a lot of other information was needlessly being withheld. The name Chicken Wiggle was changed to Hatch Tales, a far less interesting title if you ask me, and Watsham started a podcast to talk about game development. Unfortunately, this didn’t provide much in terms of tangible insight into Hatch Tales’ state of being, which continued to understandably anger many of the game’s backers.

Questions were being asked, and instead of providing answers, backers were frequently ignored both on Kickstarter and social media. Or worse, when backers asked Watsham about the status of the project on Twitter, they wound up getting blocked outright instead of engaged with. In fairness, many of these people were indeed getting pretty nasty about it, and understandably so since they gave money and never got what they were promised, but what’s confusing to me is that not all of these responses were nasty. Even people trying to respectfully air their grievances with Watsham were blocked with no other interaction. 

In May of 2022, an update was finally posted on the Kickstarter page stating that they had just finished the game’s art assets. While an actual update was nice, it certainly didn’t make folks feel good to know that this many years later there was still seemingly so much more work to do.

Then on September 18, 2022, Atooi tweeted about their new game Run Box Run finally being approved by Nintendo. In the tweet, they expressed their frustration that the game was only supposed to take 3 months to finish, but wound up taking 12 months instead. Naturally, bringing up frustration about this project rubbed some Hatch Tales Kickstarter backers who had been waiting for nearly 4 years at that point to get a game they already paid for, the wrong way.

Many of those people were subsequently blocked without engagement by Atooi, and the project then went back into complete radio silence for over a year. 

More Odd Decisions

On August 2, 2023, GameXplain posted an interview they did with Watsham about a canceled DS game. Toward the end of the interview, they actually managed to get him to talk about the Hatch Tales Kickstarter. The content of this interview was patronizing, borderline irresponsible, nothing short of infuriating. In it, Watsham claims that they’re game developers, and they don’t know how to entertain a Kickstarter audience while creating a game. He then claims that they didn’t take peoples’ Kickstarter money to work on other games (which is at best technically true) and the interviewer condescendingly told everyone who was frustrated by their experience to “relax” insinuating that backers were clearly overreacting. 

Watsham then said that he believes that Atooi is doing the right thing, and that once people see what they’ve been up to, everything will be fine. 

It wasn’t. 

It’s unclear to me why Watcham didn’t take that opportunity to actually explain that he hadn’t done anything nefarious with peoples money. To simply tell people that the scope of the game had changed, and in order to deliver on what they felt was the right direction for the project they needed to raise additional funds, which they did by releasing other smaller projects. Look, I just did it right there, and it took me literal seconds. I have no idea where he got the idea that Kickstarter backers needed to be “entertained.” Nobody who backed this project was ever asking to be “entertained” by updates. They just want information. Information that didn’t need to be dressed up, just stated clearly in a timely manner. 

The next day, August 3rd, marked the first update on the Kickstarter page in over a year, and took on a rather tone-deaf “Hey guys! Let’s get excited!” approach. They tried to explain themselves a little, but didn’t actually say anything of substance. They ended with a single screenshot of a menu half of which was blurred out. 

It’s also worth mentioning that the update contained explanations, but nothing resembling an apology. 

Just short of 2 months later, on September 26th, a quick update was posted that NintendoLife was going to be announcing the game’s release date. They also said they’d be telling the Kickstarter backers an hour before the article gets published. Why they couldn’t just tell the backers the release date once they had it set is unclear, but the assumption was that they didn’t want to take any wind out of NintendoLife’s sails, which was clearly far more important to Atooi than giving much requested information to their investors. 

The release date was indeed announced the following day, and it was March 28th 2024, the 6 year anniversary of the Kickstarter campaign, a fact that was weirdly touted as a good thing and not yet another point of frustration.

In case you weren't keeping track, This release date went from December 2018, to Early 2019, to Q4 2019, to “Will Not Release in 2019”, to 2021, to 2022, to Early 2023, to March 2024. 

I don’t even think the Intellivision Amico had this many release dates. 

Once the release date was officially announced to the world, the aforementioned developer diary was also published for the Kickstarter backers to read. The point of this was seemingly to explain what had been going on, and as Watsham had put it in his GameXplain interview, make people say “Oh, okay. Cool.” 

That absolutely did not happen. 

As it turns out, throughout the process of making Chicken Wiggle Workshop, several big decisions were made without investors being consulted or even informed. Obviously, the name of the game changed from the quirky and memorable Chicken Wiggle to the eminently forgettable and bland Hatch Tales. The focus on the level creator had rightfully been given a backseat to the more important single player campaign, which they decided to expand on to an undisclosed degree. But the strange thing is that they also came to the absurd conclusion that the original release of Chicken Wiggle failed because the game looked too cutesy, and decided to reinvent the main character. What was once a charming duo of a chicken and a worm was now a flightless hawk with a grappling hook, which they achieved by simply recoloring the character from yellow to brown and giving him “angry eyes.” and changing the adorable worm to a generic item. 

This decision is so out of touch with reality it made my head spin, and I wasn't alone. The comments on social media and the Kickstarter campaign were filled with dissatisfaction with the character change, and pleas for Attoi to recognize what everyone else can see plain as day. The characters weren’t the problem with Chicken Wiggle, the platform was. In fact, the characters and the name were among the original release’s biggest draws, and changing them to what amounts to something with far less imagination, whimsy, and character coupled with releasing so late into the Switch’s life will likely only lead to yet another commercial failure. 

If these ideas had been brought before the game’s investors, as they should have been, they likely would have been shut down, which is I imagine exactly why backers were being kept in the dark. 

This series of honestly baffling decisions has led to where we are today. Backers are getting a game that no longer resembles the simple HD remaster they paid for, and potential newcomers are going to be treated to what will likely be at best a solid, yet uninspired platformer. 

Personally, I find the notion that Chicken Wiggle’s failure was a result of the game’s visuals looking too “kiddy” beyond absurd, and so out of touch with reality that it’s borderline offensive. One final bit, the following day Atooi announced that Dementium: The Ward is coming to Nintendo Switch. An HD remaster of the 3DS port of the game. That they seemingly had no problem funding. That's coming out in October. Let’s just say I have equations. 

So, Where's the Poultry? 

There was a time when I sincerely did not wish Mr. Watsham any ill will. But while he and his team have stepped up to the line of admitting fault, they refuse to actually cross it, and the lack of anything resembling an actual apology to the people he solicited money from for the way this has all turned out has soured me and many others beyond repair. The notion that he decided, without running it past the people he asked for money for to pay for the project, to change its scope, then just tell people “trust me, you’re going to like this even better!” is simply unacceptable. I would honestly have rather had this project be canceled outright instead of being transformed this way. But more than anything, I want more answers. I’m no expert in game design, but I can’t imagine that these changes seriously took 5 years of work to get done, with another 6 months ahead of us. What was our money spent on? When were these decisions made? Why was it decided to make these decisions without consulting or informing the people Atooi asked to fund the game? At this point, the answers wouldn’t change much, but as a backer, a literal investor in the project, I feel like the least I should be getting is the truth.