Former Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart Lead Writer, Sam Maggs, has taken to Twitter to express her frustration with not being properly credited for her hard work on Rivet.
During a GDC 2022 design session last week, Insomniac Games lead designer, Mark Stuart, talked about the design of last year’s Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart and its characters, including the female alternate dimension version of Ratchet, Rivet. Going by Stuart’s talk, a lot of alternate names were considered for the joyful character, but eventually, the team ended up with the name ‘Rivet’.
As now expressed by former lead writer Sam Maggs, however, Stuart is now seemingly taking “unilateral credit” for her hard work on the game, while she wasn’t mentioned once, despite working on Rift Apart for a year and a half and being responsible for a major part of the game’s development. In fact, as revealed by Maggs, she was the one who told the team that naming Rivet 'Rachette' instead wouldn't be right , and she now claims that her work is being erased.
“This is a fun piece that goes into detail about how we developed Rivet, though it’s pretty upsetting and frankly offensive that they never once mention me, given I was the lead writer and responsible for a TON of this development”, Maggs writes on Twitter.
“Seems like Mark’s GDC talk makes it sound like a bunch of this stuff sprung up from nowhere? I was one of like 4 people in the room for most of Rivet’s development. I was the one who said “We can’t call her RACHETTE.” Gadget and Rivet were me. Sucks to have my work erased.”
This speaks to a broader issue of game devs being entirely erased from the narrative of their own work once they leave a studio. I’m not even credited as a writer on this game despite dedicating a year and a half of my life to it and creating Rivet’s personality from scratch.
— Sam Maggs (@SamMaggs) March 29, 2022
The former lead writer continues, “At a time where story treatments were being rapidly iterated on” — who wrote every single one of those story treatments? It wasn’t Mark! It was me, actually. I worked my ass off on this game for a long time and it’s misogynist erasure like this that makes my blood boil.”
Quite the story, and although we can’t imagine that Insomniac’s lead designer purposely didn’t credit Maggs for her hard work on the game, we can understand her anger.
Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart is available globally now for PlayStation 5.
