Middle Manager of Justice accidentally hits App Store, Double Fine turns it into a beta

Middle Manager of Justice, Double Fine's upcoming free-to-play mobile title, was accidentally released on the App Store this week. Instead of fretting over it an unfinished version of the game landing in the public's hands before it was ready, the firm instead pulled the buggy version, and encouraged early buyers to become its playtesters.

Speaking with Gamasutra, the game's project lead, Kee Chi, said the early release on the App Store was his blunder.

"Yeah, it was totally my fault," he said. "With the way you submit things on the App Store, you have to specify what the release date is, and a while back we had set the date to September, but at the time we didn't know if that would be final or not.

"Once we submitted the game, we realized we had a lot of things we still needed to tweak and fix, but at the same time, we didn't want to remove it from the [submission] process in case Apple catches other things we need to take care of, and we didn't want to do a double submission

"So I was on the train heading to work this week, and I get a call from our tech director saying the game [was] live in every territory."

Chi admitted it wan't the version Double Fine "wanted the world to see quite yet," but the silver lining is that accidental adopters can "find bugs that we haven't found internally."

"I'd love to know about them so I can fix them," Chi said. "If anything, I welcome these suggestions from people, because we're still learning and we plan to work on this well after it goes live to make the game deeper, and luckily this means we'll get an early start on that process."

The proper version of Middle Manger of Justice will release in the "coming weeks."