Publisher Nicalis are renowned for taking chances with indie games like Cave Story and Binding of Isaac, and these usually pay off. Despite that track record, the company has some dark secrets that were recently brought to light

A Kotaku report stated that Nicalis has a long history of mistreating employees and outside developers, particularly in ghosting them. While the company had some public scuffles with developers in recent years, there’s actually a lot of this happening behind the scenes way before that.

• Nicalis founder Tyrone Rodriguez is described as a friendly but often difficult boss, and prone to “controlling” and “exploitative” behaviour. He would pressure them to drink heavily, make racist jokes in the workplace, and berate-slash-ignore them.
• He abuses his employees via control over crunch hour breaks. A former staffer said that it was a “anything I tell you to do, you have to do this because I’m the boss” situation. Employees even wasted days and weeks of work because he wouldn’t respond to questions, and even have dinner breaks and doctor visits rebuked.
• His Skype exchanges would put even the late Richard Pryor to shame. He would call external partners “retards”, his employees “you gays”, use the “n” word for African Americans casually, just to cite a few examples.
• Check out the picture below for one more example.

Game publisher Nicalis, successful for smash hits like Cave Story and Binding of Isaac, has a dark side. A Kotaku investigation reveals employee exploitation, mismanagement, and a whole lot of workplace racism from founder Tyrone Rodriguez. My latest: https://t.co/S6U8RghwOO pic.twitter.com/btXZmWPPu8

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) September 12, 2019

• Tyrone Rodriguez is also known for ignoring developers and wasting their time. Nicalis’ mismanagement has cost external developers like the Enter The Gungeon folks a lot of time. The Game Bakers, who made Furi, were also ghosted by Nicalis when the wanted a Switch port done with their help.

We sent the project, they evaluated the cost, sent a first contract draft that we sent back with changes,” said The Game Bakers co-founder Audrey Leprince in an email. “But then they started ghosting us. Not answering emails, Skype calls. We waited three weeks, tried to contact them several times…

Finally they answered that they were sorry and would send us a mail the next week. Time passed. We were going at E3 (they were there), offered to see them there. We reminded them how acting fast was important. So eventually we sent a message saying the deal was off considering the communication breakdown.

Check out the full exposé here.