Paranautical Activity creator resigns after making death threat

In case you missed it, a bit of hoopla surfaced earlier this week revolving around Steam, the game Paranautical Activity, and the game's rage-prone creator Mike Maulbeck. The final version of Paranautical Activity was released on Steam on Monday, but some snafu resulted in the game's page showing it as "Early Access". This frightened Maulbeck, who was worried that still being dubbed Early Access would "cripple" the game's success. Rather than dealing with the problem like an adult, Maulbeck resorted to raging — something that resulted in a death threat, the game being pulled, and, more recently, the creator resigning from the company.

On Monday when the Early Access issue became apparent, Maulbeck took his frustration to his Twitter account, where the now-deleted tweets expressed his dismay with statements like, "Steam is the most incompetent piece of f*cking sh*t". It was after five raging tweets that Maulbeck made his biggest mistake:

Valve didn't take kindly to the threat, and promptly pulled the game entirely, followed by a message to Maulbeck that his account was being closed and he wasn't welcomed back. Valve has confirmed its action to Polygon, saying in part, "[We] ceased relations with the developer after he threatened to kill one of our employees."

Fast-forward a short while, and Maulbeck announced that he had resigned from Code Avarice and sold his share of the company to his former partner. He said in a statement:

My temper and tendency to use twitter to vent has been a consistent problem since I entered the games industry, and I just can't do it. I don't have the willpower necessary to be the "face" of a company. If I do continue to work in games it'll be as an anonymous 1 of 1000 at some shitty corporation, not the most public figure of a single digit sized team.

SOURCE: Code Avarice, Polygon