well.

we got geese's manifest trauma haunting the generation after big's heyday. mr. big is so detached from that scene, despite his apparent role as the "big bad" in this story, no one really has a gripe with him. there are no personal stakes.

who then might trap this dude in his own bespoke nightmare?

if we're gonna bring mr. big back to the story, for the first time since 1979—well, that was nearly two generations before the new cast. beyond his actions in the story here, none of the kids, and not really any of the adults, has a direct link to this dude.

but what if his past were to haunt him?

so yeah, if i were snk's dev team, i feel like i know what would tickle me to cram into the game at this specific juncture, under these conditions. to drum up excitement, as an epilogue to the game's first season and an overly stressful year of work.

something intentionally fun and stupid.

i'm not saying i absolutely expect it, because this is a story i am fully writing in my head here, but after half a lifetime i feel like i have a certain justified intuition about the way these hopeless impractical hyperfocusing weirdos tend to operate.

almost like i vibe with them. mysteriously. 🧐

if kofxv is in any way a reasonable frame of reference, rugal and goenitz were never part of the season passes. both of them just dropped for the hell of it as unprompted bonuses for everybody, whether subscribed or not.

historically snk tends to just Do Things, given a little extra grace time.

like, i expect they have long since rescheduled and reorganized those plans and barring further interference they probably know exactly when they intend to get back to them.

so, what better way to cap off the first season than with a typical-snk out-of-nowhere, out-of-season surprise boss drop?

i think in a touch of irony, the late-stage interference wound up buying them a couple months' work in the post-launch cycle; a little bit here, a moderate hunk there, the savings added up.

and whatever else they intended for launch or season one (e.g., jae hoon) is probably bumped to year two.

due to that inane scramble pushing back work they meant to finish earlier, i don't think that any of the season-one characters wound up needing all of the surely-conservative time windows the devs had estimated for whipping together a whole new character from scratch. it was more, finishing them up.

we know that jae hoon was way far along before they hit pause and jumped to another stream. context clues make it abundantly clear that mr. big was supposed to be in the game at launch. we know that andy, joe, ken, and chun were in the plans almost from the start, so surely had at least prelim work.

remember the crazy situation in the last few months before publication date—how much work in all aspects of finalizing the thing, that they clearly had to shuffle or push back due to an unexpected hyper-scramble mode suddenly tossed on their shoulders.

that back-burner work, some was nearly done.

future seasons will almost certainly contain a half-dozen characters—based both on the intended two-month interval and what the game's own internal data would suggest—but of course this first one is theoretically maxed-out at five.

if you count the game's launch as "slot zero," that sorta tracks...

originally they said a character every two months, but if some quickly-removed upload blunders yesterday are to be read as accurate, they're finishing up the season two months early.

which again raises the question, what does buying that extra time do for the dev team?

i think i have a good sense.

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kof, you know, it's kind of a faggy thing