It all seemed pretty bleak for Code Avarice developer Mike Maulbeck a few weeks back, when his ill-advised mock threats to kill Valve’s Gabe Newell caused Paranautical Activity to be pulled from Steam.
After resigning from the studio following the subsequent uproar, Code Avarice has announced in a new blog post that he’s now back working for them.
Maulbeck went on a lengthy rant when Valve got a banner wrong, stating that Paranautical Activity was now in Early Access rather than just coming out of it. There’s a pretty concise log of the initial Twitter outburst that led to Paranautical Activity being pulled here, courtesy of VG247. There’s a lesson to be learned here about threatening the owners of key retail sites, kids, even if you do it in jest. Still, it’s good to see Maulbeck back at work. Everyone screws up and does something stupid once in a while.
“First off, Mike is back,” reads the recent blog post. “This is probably not hugely surprising to some of you, but Mike couldn’t commit to his decision to leave Code Avarice. Travis publicly denounced his departure, and in the weeks following his official stepping down Mike had second thoughts.”
“Looking for a new source of income was extremely overwhelming and when it finally came time to put pen to paper, Mike and Travis agreed the best thing to do would be to have Mike return to Code Avarice. In retrospect we should have waited until everything was finalized before making the announcement, but Mike was extremely eager to just get out and never look back. He posted the announcement to the site before even talking to Travis about his intentions.”
Code Avarice is moving away from personal blog posts and social media accounts for the foreseeable future, which means every post will be joint written by Maulbeck and co-founder Travis Pfenning. Which should avoid similarly awkward situations in the future. The duo also officially announced that Spinal Destination, the shooter they describe as “Left 4 Dead meets Timesplitters meets Painkiller”, is now in [url=http://www.codeavarice.com/spinal-destination.html]development proper]/url]. Not much information on it right now, however.
