You may recall an alt.publishers article a few weeks back which called out Variant Interactive, the outfit supposedly publishing much-loved PC dojin title Cave Story for PSP next year. Well, now the Little Mathletics site has interviewed Variant's CEO Christopher Boyer, who strikes back at the skeptics.

Boyer claims: "There are some fans who think we're trying to steal the game from Pixel, and thusly are going around to web forums and news sites claiming that we are "shady."... The thing is that some suspicious fans of the original game emailed Pixel using Babelfish to ask him about our adaptation, and when he said he didn't know what they were talking about, they went all "AHA!" on us."

This is all fair enough, but if Variant Interactive is a 'proper' publishing company, would they not sign a contract with Pixel and get concept approval from Sony for the game before 'announcing' it to the world? It's not immediately clear that they have done either of these things - they're certainly listing games like Speed for the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo DS on the site without having development kits for either, as far as I can ascertain.

We somewhat wish that Little Mathletics had given them a harder time, but if any of the Variant folks are reading and would like to riposte, that's what the comments are for...