Huh. It didn’t really occur to me until now, but I think what was Self Aware Games is now fully dead.

I mean, as a thing, Self Aware’s been dead for more than a decade at this point. But relatively recently, a bunch of artists got laid off, and while there’s one person who’s still there, but for all practical purposes, Self Aware Games is no more.

I’ve had fairly un-mixed feelings about its long slide into irrelevancy. I’d feel … nothing, if every remaining vestige of it disappeared. I loved a lot of the things we built, but Casino, which is the only thing that survived, was a means to an end, and was never intended to be an “end”. And yet.

I wish I’d done some things, in retrospect. When SA was at its apex, I had a chance to talk more about how we got there. Our methodology, our team’s culture, how we took on giants and beat them. Nearly a decade later, I’m only just starting to hear about people doing some of the things we did, and some of the things we put into our games – people are trying to do some of the stuff we did, and they’re not even close.

But all those things are dead. They all died in service of Casino, killed by people who didn’t understand that the things we learned by building those games are why casino succeeded at all.

In 2012, right after we got acquired, if you go back and look at the charts, you’ll see that Casino peaked and then fell. Throughout 2013, it was on a steady decline. Why? Because by 2013, my co-founder and I were barely on speaking terms, and the easiest way to keep the company from turning into a daily slugfest was to let him run one part of the company, let me run one part, and create as much buffer between us as possible.

I let him run Casino, because I thought, a.) it’s $$$ (so there’ll be glory in it), and b.) it’s fairly straightforward, where Fleck was a game that needed a lot of work, and wasn’t succeeding on its own. But the trajectory of casino was … poor. Morale on the team was poor. And as a recently-acquired company, having our primary source of $ dry up would have been a great excuse for the acquiring company to step in and take control. I didn’t want that to happen.

So we consolidated both teams, and I took over running Casino with the technical folks from Fleck in charge. Co-founder got ousted to R&D land, which was honestly just a way of keeping him busy and away from everyone else, since most of his team hated working with him at that point.

We left Fleck with a small team of brilliant folks who could keep making some sort of progress, and everyone else went back to Casino. There’s a turning point in the game’s momentum a month or two after that happened. It was when we starting making new types of slot machines, and running more live events and promotions based on the things we’d learned in Fleck.

Fleck never made enough money to sustain itself in the end, but it’s one of the reasons Casino became a billion-dollar juggernaut. No one accounts for it this way except me, but Fleck is one of the most profitable development endeavors in iOS history, easily.

But so we turned it around. Fleck unfortunately ended up getting canned. We couldn’t make the numbers work, and the acquiring company demanded that Fleck “stand on its own.” Which was a misguided notion, again, driven by folks who couldn’t see the bigger picture.

So the old guard’s gone. All the people who knew those old stories have left. All the people who knew what Self Aware was when it was great have moved on. All the people who built everything good about that studio, who suffered through the hard times, who built the culture and the team, who revolutionized the development process, who changed the game re: live ops are gone. And most of them have been gone for years already.

I wish I’d been able to segment how I felt about SA in the end from some of the people. There was a lot of collateral damage in how my time at SA ended that ruined my relationships with a lot of those folks. I felt betrayed by everyone that stayed. I couldn’t have realistically expected them to leave, but knowing that they saw what happened to me and they chose to stay… I couldn’t reconcile people doing that, and being my friends, for the vast majority of the folks involved. I know most of ’em are decent folks, and a lot of people don’t mind working for the fucking devil, but that’s a lesson I’d have to learn again, at least.

But there’s something to the last folks leaving that is maybe still notable.

We started this thing at the beginning of 2009. I often come back to thinking about how I feel about the whole experience. For a while, I’d have erased it in a heartbeat – good and bad – without a second thought. Now? Probably still the same. There’s some part of me that doesn’t think about “revisionist history” anymore, because anything that would change the arc of my life away from the kids I have now, I’d reject instantly. Whatever misery and pain led to those kids, I’ll endure. But absent that… yeah, I’d still erase it all without a second thought.

And now it’s dead.