JASON THOR HALL breathing out heavily, reading a text while trying new games: "how do you manage your ego? It gets better with time."
JASON THOR HALL: "I grew up in a time in the internet, where there was wild, abandoned creation. we had all kinds of shit. everyone had a stupid website for their cat. and now, we're caught in these monolithic social media towers. and there's very little creation for a lot of people. they're afraid to try it. they're afraid to step outside of the box."
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"a gentleman always tells the truth, for the truth is always better than falsehood and the harm that it hides." - - seon fong (I will call bro by the way I like to call him, thanks)"
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I first spotted Jason Thor Hall in my YouTube recommended page way before his own reputation was put through the meat grinder.At the time, I didn't watch enough videos to know anything deeper about his character, but what I could glean (and this is someone who had his fair share of dealing with people on the internet) was that he was
In my heart of hearts, I always knew that Jason Thor Hall was a liar from the moment I saw him speak with so much confidence and gusto. But when he cried with that banana costume on stream, something in me switched from seeing him as just another performative liar to someone who might have originally had good intentions before being consumed by the lie that he told himself. But his videos got me a pretty tough time in my life in which I couldn't even muster the will to believe in myself, so the little mental construct I made of him in my mind was enough to get me motivated to stop fussing and start making progress on programming.
Then, I watched Thor play a game about building a city and he read out one particular comment before giving his thoughts on it. This comment shook me to my core. He made it in the middle of a multi-hour long livestream, and said it after a long breath, indicating that it was genuine.
Afterwards, I believe the fact of the matter is this; that Jason Thor Hall knew deep inside of himself that he was a fraud and could not help but endlessly envision the world where he actually completed and finished Heartbound, becoming a famous developer just like Toby Fox.
Testament to my thesis is that Jason always talked about Heartbound as if it was a work-in-progress even if he knew he probably didn't have the skills or progress to work on it ever again. His love
Would someone just looking to scam his audience have made any game at all? I'm not excusing the fact that he took money out of the Kickstarter and ran, but for a good moment it seemed like he had finished his first game, Champions of Breakfast , then moved on to developing HeartBound as his dream game.
I also thought about just keeping this to a chat app. But if I do that, or seal it off somewhere else, nobody's going to read that due to how the silo internet works.
I hesitated on making this page for a variety of reasons, each of which were more difficult than the last.
For one, I'm pretty sure that this guy absolutely scammed the living daylights out of the people who funded his kickstarter, especially after he lost steam to continue developing Heartbound and got burned out. He may (or may not) have had that checkered of a past, but I'm personally hesitant to really call anything on a roleplay account real.
Secondly, from the little bit of the drama I consumed, he treated and clashed with people which he should have held close to him, and instead of reacting with maturity, acted our with indignation instead.
Additionally, for the reason that he kept on maintaining his Discord after the allegations, many of which proved to be true, I don't believe that he was an industry plant either. I think he got progressively more and more lost as he continued making YouTube shorts, which were initially just a way of Gatsby'ing his fanbase into Making Games. Sure, maybe not everyone can or code a game, or would just spend their days dillydallying, watching YouTube or cranking it to stuff on Twitter, but he hosted 19 game jams with 2,350 or so games submitted. That's no small feat.
In a messed up way, Gatsby'ing everyone else just revealed how gullible the people were around him. Much like how Gatsby himself might have been a total fraud but he brought to attention that all the people next to him were veritably insane high society types, Pirate's successful Gatsbying of asmongold and all those other people at the awards ceremony for something he didn't really do is kind of hilarious in its own right just because it showed that everyone else was easily duped by a fraud.