Nintendo Treehouse product team makes game developers "terrified" because they don't "give a s***" about anything other than how a game plays: "They were like these alien gods"

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Now I'm starting to get scared…

Eternal Darkness
(Image credit: Nintendo)

The Nintendo Treehouse product development division seems to share the same red-nose jolliness as the rest of kid-friendly Nintendo in its various gameplay livestreams, but former Silicon Knights president Denis Dyack says it has a dark side.

Extremely dark, Dyack suggests in a new interview with the Kiwi Talkz YouTube channel. He explains that, while he was working with Nintendo to publish GameCube survival horror game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, he was forced to endure the otherworldly powers of Nintendo Treehouse.

"'They're brutal,'" Dyack remembers hearing from Sterchi. "'They don't like anything. They're super hypercritical, but that's OK, we can deal with it.' And I remember the way he said that – it didn't give me confidence." Sterchi apparently warned Dyack not to speak to anyone from Treehouse – he wasn't even supposed to know who its members were – as the institution that is Nintendo Treehouse was considered to be that serious, that violent of an adversary.

"Everyone was terrified of them," Dyack concludes. But at least "Nintendo generally picked good games" – and Eternal Darkness eventually became one of them.

Ashley Bardhan
Ashley Bardhan
Senior Writer

Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about horror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.

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