Sega's Golden Axe reboot prototype cuts deep for staff made to crank it out

Sega is releasing Golden Axed, a 2012 reboot of arcade classic Golden Axe that never made it past the prototype stage. The comical marketing around it has fallen flat for its developer, Tim Dawson, who worked under crunch conditions to produce the prototype only to see it shelved by indifferent colleagues with no clue at all what Golden Axe was even about. Moreover, he wasn't told about it finally emerging as a joke product.

"This project was my personal nexus of nightmare hours, inept management, industry realisations and heroics achieved with a small team under unreasonable conditions, so it's an odd feeling to see it surface eight years later without context, credits and with a joke title sequence," Dawson wrote on Twitter, the start of a thread about his experiences that includes sharp words for the those exploiting it now.