14 DAY TRIAL // Dan Adelman, the man who ran Nintendo of America's indie program for close to nine years, left the company last week.
Adelman was an outspoken personality, who always looked after the indie community, spending his last nine years handling support for independent developers on various Nintendo platforms. He assisted games such as World of Goo and Cave Story in making it over to the Japanese company's devices but, unfortunately, his journey also had a few bumps.
A few months ago, a report on Gamasutra claimed that Nintendo had banned Adelman from using Twitter, as a direct result of a comment he had made, criticizing the region-locking of the Nintendo 3DS.
Adelman confirmed that he was leaving Nintendo in order to purse an independent career, and said that, although he was frustrated with the company's tendency to muzzle him when he disagreed with the official policy, his former employer was supportive of his decision.
After Nintendo rejected a Nintendo 3DS port of popular indie roguelike The Binding of Isaac, stating that it violated the company's guidelines on religious content, Adelman expressed his desire for the company to be more flexible about such issues in an interview, and then sympathized with a fan who complained about the region-locking feature that Nintendo insisted on blessing its platforms with.
"I think people were kind of on pins and needles about anything untoward I might say. And every once in a while, I'd give an answer that people didn't like, and some people would freak out, so they tried to scale things back. First they had me do interviews with someone from PR or marketing. Later they just decided that I shouldn't be in the press at all anymore," Adelman told Kotaku.
"I had been strongly encouraged to stay off of Twitter — or at least say only things that were clearly safe — so after the region-locking comment they just said I needed to stop completely. When people started complaining that I wasn't active on Twitter anymore, it was suggested that a PR person could just post in my name. I thought that was about the worst idea I'd ever heard, so I left it as is and let the silence speak for itself," he continued.
He also assured the gaming community that Nintendo would still continue working with independent developers, as there were still a large group of people working on helping indie devs through the process of delivering games to Nintendo platforms.