With GDC 2025 underway in San Francisco, developers are taking the opportunity to promote upcoming games. While some take the conventional route of a trailer, one teams of devs has sparked curiosity with a cheeky billboard directed at a controversial figure.
Placed in San Francisco's Union Square, the add shows the enlarged head of Gunther Harrison, CEO of Alta Interglobal in the upcoming game Revenge of the Savage Planet. But the ad's message appears to be a satirical reference to a different Harrison (see our pick of the best game development software if you're getting started in the sector).
Have 🫵 YOU 🫵 been fired by this man?!We know how it feels. So we took out a billboard in downtown San Francisco.🧵👇 pic.twitter.com/Uq9u93mLLZMarch 18, 2025
'Has a Harrison fired YOU lately?,' the billboard asks, ostensibly referring to the fictional Gunther Harrison's. But those in town for GDC 2025 will surely recall Phil Harrison, the former head of Google's Stadia cloud gaming service. He was responsible for many layoffs when he called time on Google's brief flirtation with games publishing, Stadia Games & Entertainment, in 2021, including the Savage Planet team.
The moment was particularly cutting for the devs at Typhoon Games, which Google bought in 2019. They found themselves out of work on the very same day that their Journey to the Savage Planet launched as an exclusive game for Stadia.
After leaving Stadia, Typhoon Games became Raccoon Logic with the help of investment from China's Tencent, and it bought back the Savage Planet rights. But the upcoming Revenge of the Savage Planet suggests they haven't forgiven Harrison, who left Google in 2023 after the complete closure of Stadia in 2022.
The billboard advert includes a QR code that leads to a promotional site for the game that displays the message that "We got fired by him as well!" The site pledges to make a donation to the Canadian Mental Health Association for every person who scans the billboard and visits the site.
"After we launched Journey to the Savage Planet as Typhoon Studios, our full team met the same fate! (minus the alien world)," the developers write on X. "But we were determined to keep going. We wanted to put the sequel you deserve in your hands. So Raccoon Logic was born."
Revenge of the Savage Planet will be released on 8 May. For more news from GDC 2025, see the anime teaser for Ark: Lost Colony and the announcement of Roblox Cube 3D AI tools.
