Sacred Symbols+, Episode 166: The Character Assassination of Troy Leavitt (Patreon)

In early 2021, a hack journalist deployed a transparent political attack on a relatively anonymous game dev. The dev's name is Troy Leavitt, a veteran designer of the Utah studio scene with experience at defunct teams like SingleTrac, and more recently at the Disney-owned and then WB-owned Avalanche Studios. There, he quietly toiled away on high-quality licensed games until, like a meteor, his world was blown apart. Why? Because, years prior, he dared question the political orthodoxy of the industry on his YouTube channel. And that's it. A year after his life radically changed, we sat down to talk not only about his experience in the industry going back to the '90s, but what it was like working on Hogwarts Legacy and how he dealt with the fallout surrounding the coordinated attack on his character, his work, and his beliefs. If you don't want to hear about politics, that's fine. Just don't hit play. You've been warned.