Double Fine accidentally allowed its upcoming title Middle Manager of Justice to be bought at the App Store before it was ready.
While the title has been pulled from Apple’s online shop there are now a number of people out there with an unfinished version of the game. Project lead Kee Chi has explained in an interview with Gamasutra that “it kind of just turned into a beta test.”
“If people find bugs that we haven’t found internally, I’d love to know about them so I can fix them,” he explained. “If anything, I welcome these suggestions from people, because we’re still learning and we plan to work on this well after it goes live to make the game deeper, and luckily this means we’ll get an early start on that process.”
Chi was understandably a little annoyed to begin with though admits the debacle was “totally my fault”.
“With the way you submit things on the App Store, you have to specify what the release date is, and a while back we had set the date to September, but at the time we didn’t know if that would be final or not,” he explained. “Once we submitted the game, we realised we had a lot of things we still needed to tweak and fix, but at the same time, we didn’t want to remove it from the [submission] process in case Apple catches other things we need to take care of, and we didn’t want to do a double submission.”
The problem Chi faced was that he hadn’t gone back to change the date when the dev work had begun to take a little longer than originally estimated.
“It wasn’t what I wanted the world to see quite yet,” Chi said. “At Double Fine, we pride ourselves on putting a solid product out there, so having something out there that was buggy and not quite ready yet was really frustrating.”
Middle Manager of Justice looks fantastic, and should deliberately hit the app store in the coming weeks. There’s even hint of some day getting an Android version.
