YouTuber Jacksepticeye has revealed he spent a year working on a Soma animated show only for it to fall apart, leaving him “quite upset.”
In a new video titled ‘A Bad Month,’ Jacksepticeye, real name Seán William McLoughlin, not only revealed the existence of the Soma animated show, but that it had been canceled.
Soma, a survival horror science fiction video game from Amnesia developer Frictional Games, launched back in 2015 and was met with critical acclaim. Jacksepticeye streamed the game extensively at the time it came out, and often mentions it as one of his favorites.
In the video, Jacksepticeye talked generally about what has been a difficult period creatively following various projects that have either been canceled or failed to progress far enough to show his fans. Lamenting his lack of content creation lately, Jacksepticeye then revealed the Soma animated show.
“I had a very large creative project that I was very excited to do, and — I don’t actually know if I’m allowed to say what it is — I’m just going to say what it is, and then if I’m not allowed to say it then this next part won’t be in it,” he said.
“I was planning to do a Soma animated show. Because I love Soma — Soma is top five, top 10 at least video games of all time for me. I absolutely love that game. It has one of the best stories ever in a video game.
“And I was so excited to do that. We’ve been talking to the developers for like a year, talking about that, and we were ready to go into full production on that. And I was so excited, and I really wanted to announce that to people, and to talk about it and get really stuck in and share it.
“Because I wanted to play the game all in one video. And I was like, okay, I’ll hold off on that then till we can announce that we’re doing it. So that’s why I haven’t done it yet.”
Jacksepticeye went on to say the Soma animated show fell apart abruptly after an unnamed party suggested they wanted to do “in a different direction,” but he deliberately left out specifics because he was left so upset.
“We were making really great progress on that, and then it all just fell apart out of nowhere,” he said.
“I’m not going to go into too many of the specifics of what happened, because I’m quite upset about what actually went down. But, it’s more of a, ‘we’re going in a different direction,’ kinda vibe. And that really upset me.”
Jacksepticeye did not name the other parties involved. IGN has asked Frictional for comment.
The upset is the cancelation of Jacksepticeye’s Soma animated show “flipped” the YouTuber’s plans for 2025 “upside down.”
“I had planned a lot of my year around it. I was like, you know what? I won’t be able to upload as much because I’ll be focusing everything I have into that. But at least I’ll have a really cool creative thing to show off. And I’ll have something for you and we can talk about it and share it and be part of this thing together and have fun with it. And then it all fell apart.
“So all of my plans for the year are flipped upside down. Now what is the priority? What am I doing? I don’t know. I’ve had so many calls over the last couple of weeks. It’s been a lot. It’s been a tough month. I took time off and did all that and I have nothing at the end of it. It’s so frustrating. I hate that.”
Following the release of Soma, Frictional released two more Amnesia games: 2020’s Amnesia: Rebirth and 2023’s Amnesia: The Bunker. In July 2023, in the wake of the release of Amnesia: The Bunker, Frictional creative director Thomas Grip said the company was looking to cut back on horror games “to give greater focus on other emotional qualities.”
“While all of our games have been horror in some way, what we really try to do is to get a kind of playable immersion,” Grip said.
“We want to give the player some sort of immersive fantasy, be that being a [World War 1] soldier trapped in a bunker or a robot stuck at the bottom of the ocean.
“Horror games naturally are where emotions are front and centre. Games really excel at this. However, we are also exploring themes outside of making things spooky.”
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
