Subnautica Fires Sound Director for Twitter Behavior

Subnautica, a horror game disguised as a crafting-survival title, is known for crafting superb underwater environments rich with ambiance, beauty, and underwater monstrosities from our worst nightmares. And an important part of building any such living world is the sound design: the way the water flows past your ears, the wind racing over the waves, the growls of the merciless eel-monster slowly ripping off your legs… it’s one of the most important aspects of the game.

Which is why it’s a darn shame their sound designer, Simon Chylinski, was recently fired because he was a jerk on Twitter.

Now being a jerk might not be enough to typically get you fired from a small team, but if you decided to peruse his extensive Twitter history, as some users did, you’d find a huge backlog of startlingly racist, sexist, and transphobic comments that went a bit beyond the realm of simple trolling. For example:

“We need a ‘diversity’ slider in the options. It will make the character progressively darker, more feminine, and less sexy”.

“importing random people from the 3rd world is also importing 3rd world tier crime rates and IQ.”

And so on, until his Twitter reported on February 2nd that he had just been fired. Following up with Kotaku, Unknown Worlds game director Charlie Cleveland had this to say:

“Over the weekend we discovered that one of our team members had made many hateful statements online that are against our company values. After discussing the matter with him, we decided to stop working with him immediately.”

I’ll be the first to say that this is a pity for a lot of reasons. Typically, I take joy in jerks getting their karma, but this guy was really good at his job and won’t be easy to replace. All the same, considering this is a game that won’t add guns to make a political statement, choosing to be a political jerk on Twitter was basically asking for trouble.

And hey: ask, and ye shall receive.