Rogue Ant Simulator devs blow budget on 'liquor and strippers'

Ant Simulator

Well here's the sort of story that hasn't been seen since the '90s. Ant Simulator has been cancelled after two of the devs allegedly blew Kickstarter and investment funding on restaurants, booze and strippers. Yeah.

The video above is a tough listen. In it, Eric Tereshinski resigns as lead programmer on Ant Simulator after discovering the extent of his long-term friends' spending. If it's not obvious, 'long-term' can now be swapped for 'former'.

"A year and a half ago, I signed an LLC agreement with them," Tereshinski says. "I trusted them and they had been my friends for 11 years. That means that resigning, and therefore cancelling the development of Ant Simulator, is really the only option available to me right now."

Worse, Tereshinski claims that he's legally obligated to take any videos that were created as part of his work for ETeeski LLC down from his channel, including all Ant Simulator videos and a popular, Kickstarter-funded series of game development tutorials.

"They went over the contract line by line with me and I reviewed the whole thing twice," Tereshinski comments in response to calls for a lawsuit. "I just didn't realize they had protected themselves, screwed me (like the fact that they listed themselves as consultants, so they aren't legally obligated to work on anything, but still have the rights to spend money etc.), and I had no idea what their plan was until it was too late."

People who pre-ordered Ant Simulator can expect an email to try to arrange a refund. If Tereshinski's account is accurate, it's a catastrophically bleak situation. We covered Ant Simulator in September, and it looked like a promising, unique survival game, now squashed.

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