Ant Simulator dev cancels game and accuses partners of embezzlement; partners say “bulls***!”

Over the weekend, the developers of Ant Simulator made an announcement that caught a lot of people’s attention (seen in the video above). Eric Tereshinski, who was working on the game with two childhood friends, said that the game has been cancelled. 

According to Tereshinski, the reason behind this cancellation is that his partners were stealing company money. He accused his fellow developers of taking both Kickstarter money (for an unrelated project) and the Ant Simulator investment money and spending it “on liquor, restaurants, bars, and even strippers.”

In a statement to GameInformer, he had this to say:

“My ex-business partners demonstrated to me that they’re willing to keep secrets from me and jeopardize the game for drinks. They put forth a lot of effort to keep me from finding out how they spent the money. They planned on getting away with it. Now I’m the one who has to clean up this mess and push forward. These other two guys don’t care about making games. Hell, one of them doesn’t even play video games. Making video games has always been my dream career. I’m not going to stop working towards that goal.”

Both of Tereshinski’s partners have answered these accusations. One of them, Tyler Monce, responded with this:

I don’t know why he’s painting that picture, but the reality is that anything that was spent in a bar or restaurant was very reasonable in nature when you look at any business, including video game companies. It was part of our operating budget, it’s not anything that was excessive. It was all reported to the IRS. The picture he’s painting about that is 100 percent bull****.”

Monce argues that embezzlement was pretty much impossible, because Tereshinski had access to all of the financial data. Monce, and the other partner Devon Staley, said that things were going pretty well until November of last year.

They claimed that Mr. Tereshinski “took control of everything.” By that, they mean bank accounts, social media accounts, website, etc. They feared he was going to cut them out since the game had grown popular, especially when he moved the company funds to a personal account. 

There is no resolution at this point, as Tyler Monce and Devon Staley are accusing Eric Tereshinski of fabricating the story to grab headlines. Eric has yet to respond to these claims, but we can probably safely assume he’ll accuse them of lying as well. Both sides are crying foul, and it’s impossible to know the truth. We’ll have to keep our ears open to see if this story has any more developments.