Days Gone director blows a gasket as its protagonist is 'reduced to a cartoon shill' to promote 'small game' Astro Bot—Sony's all-star romp featuring Kratos, Aloy, and Nathan Drake

GamesActionDays GoneDays Gone director blows a gasket as its protagonist is ‘reduced to a cartoon shill’ to promote ‘small game’ Astro Bot—Sony’s all-star romp featuring Kratos, Aloy, and Nathan DrakeWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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A picture of Days Gone protagonist "Deek" turned into an Astro Bot, watching dogs play with a beach ball.

Astro Bot appears to be doing rather well—we’re not nattering about it, obviously, because it’s a PS5 game, but the scant few of us who have betrayed our rigs, and have access to the forbidden console, have only had glowing words for it.

Someone who isnotdoing well, conversely, is Days Gone’s former director John Garvin. His former studio posted a cute cartoon featuring the game’s protagonist, Deacon Lee St John (or Deek) to celebrate the launch of Astro Bot, since both developers are part of Sony’s PlayStation Studios division. What should have been a bit of fun, with colleagues supporting each other, seems to have incensed Garvin who has been posting through it on Twitter (viaEurogamer), claiming that Deek has been “reduced to promoting other games”.

(Image credit: @John_Garvin on Twitter/X.)

A quote tweet that reads: “Kinda sad that Deek has been reduced to promoting other games … well done Bend Studio! Way to protect your legacy!"

When one commenter gently recommended he “calm down, my brotha”, Garvin gave, well, a very impassionedresponse: “Haha, I see my character reduced to a cartoon shill promoting some small game and I’m being harsh? Sit down, my brotha, adults are talking.”

Days Gone, which was ported to PC in 2021 and received a 63 from us in ourDays Gone review, is a open world zombie game about a biker who faces the grim, harsh reality of the apocalypse with a stern expression and who (as reviewer Andy Kelly put it) is “mostly angry and monosyllabic.”

“I don’t know Astro Bot and wish them well, but not at the expense of #Daysgone,” hewrites, before entering a Twitter beef with someone called Lil Rizky, asking some variant of ‘what have you made?’ three separate times.

(Image credit: @John_Garvin on Twitter/X.)

A series of quote tweets where John Garvin asks the same person several times “what have you created again?"

But this isn’t the first time Gravin has blown his lid on Twitter—like that time when in a (since-deleted, to be fair) tweet from 2022, the former directorblamed Days Gone’s receptionon “woke reviewers who couldn’t handle a gruff white biker looking at his date’s ass”.

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You can make the argument that Astro Bot’s entire gimmick—making a platformer out of Sony properties, turning them into cute li’l funko pop style robots—is a little corporate, but it’s not an insult to be included among heavy-hitters like Uncharted, God of War and Horizon. I certainly wouldn’t get into public fights over it.

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