In 2023, I reported that the development team of then-upcoming fighting game Diesel Legacy included Mike Zaimont, previously a developer on Skullgirls and Indivisible who had been accused of sexual misconduct at Lab Zero, the indie studio behind those games. Diesel Legacy released to little fanfare more than a year later, but the next fighting game from the team behind it, Gameplay Group International, has accumulated significantly more buzz. That game is Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game, due out on July 23.
After a viral media post brought Zaimont’s likely involvement in Avatar Legends’ development to light, the game’s publisher has confirmed his role on the game.
“Mike Zaimont holds a position as an individual contributor at the developer Gameplay Group International working specifically on backend programming, engine architecture and netcode,” a PR representative for publisher Paramount Game Studios wrote in a statement to PC Gamer.
When I reported on Diesel Legacy’s development in 2023, the publisher’s then-CEO Christina Seelye said that she hired Zaimont because “you have to create a way for [people] to show the world that they’ve changed and decided to do better,” and that she believed he “was committed to it and that he didn’t want everything that went down to be the end of his story. He wanted the opportunity to have the redemptive arc that’s in so many stories that we all love.”