Are you enjoying Shovel Knight on your Wii U or Nintendo 3DS? The developers Yacht Club Games have recently gone on record saying you have Nintendo’s former indie man Dan Adelman to thank for that. In fact, they state that without Dan Adelman, a Nintendo release never would have been possible for them and may have not existed at all. That’s high praise for the man who is now heading up a game releasing exclusively for Sony platforms. (For now.)
Without Dan, Shovel Knight wouldn’t be on the Wii U/3DS and maybe it wouldn’t exist at all. We essentially sent Dan a blind email before our Kickstarter asking if we could be approved as developers on the platforms. He put his full trust in us and the game – without that, who knows if the Kickstarter would have even funded!
He is unbelievably supportive of indies, and it’s amazing to see a person so committed to aiding smaller teams so that they can focus on creating interesting and unique experiences. Also, he’s a spicy curry champ. Champion of indies and spicy curry…what more could you want?
It’s nice to see that the developers Mr. Adelman helped continue to appreciate his assistance, even if Nintendo didn’t. If you’re unaware, Mr. Adelman is no longer with Nintendo after leaving earlier this year. While with the company, he was put on a gag order and not allowed to tweet or state his opinions about how the company handles games, which made him unhappy and influenced his decision to leave. Nintendo lost a great employee because of archaic policies, but perhaps with Adelman gone, they’ll realize there is a need for people who reach out to indie developers in the same way that he did.
