Meet the man behind the some of the worst, most inexplicably successful video games ever made
So-bad-they’re-good video games haven’t quite achieved the cultural cachet of movies like The Room or Troll 2, in part because games are an active experience rather than a passive one. It’s a lot easier to sit back and watch a trainwreck than it is to understand its inner mechanics and slog through them. Credit goes, then, to Mat Dickie, the subject of a new Ars Technica profile, for making the kind of games that land in that ever-so-slim sweet spot.
Dickie, whose first games were born out of a shoddy-sounding Spanish development tool called Div Games Studio, allowed each of his titles to emerge organically from the previous one. This is especially hilarious considering he began making wrestling games and eventually ended up making what looks like a fighting game starring Jesus. Its innate earnestness carries it, as it does all the games in Dickie’s library.
