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 were like these alien gods that no one could touch," Dyack recalls. "They didn't answer to anyone. They just played games and rated games, and they just didn't give a shit." Eternal Darkness producer Henry Sterchi talked to Dyack about Treehouse like it was a one-way portal to Hell, telling him that, although Nintendo of America loved Eternal Darkness, they were certain Treehouse wouldn't.
"'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.
