How a physical copy of Bastion wound up in Afghanistan
"He told me they had no plans of releasing a physical copy in the future, but if I gave him my address then he would see what he could do," one lucky Reddit user and Afghanistan-stationed United States Air Force officer wrote on the social news site earlier today. User "bolivar-shagnasty" was speaking about Supergiant's multi-award winning Bastion -- a game only available digitally for both Xbox 360 and PC.
But "shagnasty's" internet connection while stationed in Afghanistan is ... let's call it less than ideal. "My internet connection is disgustingly slow and it costs so much that it seems like price gouging," he wrote. And despite his best efforts to snag Bastion via both Direct2Drive and Steam, he was rebuffed at both stops. Rather than give up, however, he decided to shoot an email to Supergiant and see if the studio had plans to release a retail version of the game at some point.
Supergiant isn't a big studio by any means. Beyond creative director Greg Kasavin, six other folks can refer to themselves as full-time Supergiant-ers. So when the Air Force officer emailed what he expected to be customer support, he actually got a direct response from the aforementioned studio head, Greg Kasavin.
"I've never really seen customer service like this before"- Reddit user "bolivar-shagnasty"
"We get emails from fans each day and many of them are touching or memorable. Usually all we can do is say thank-you. This case was different -- though he's not the first soldier deployed overseas to write to us, he was the first to explain that he wanted to play the game, but could not due to lack of Internet availability, and was wondering if he could purchase it through some other means," Kasavin told Joystiq this afternoon.
As Supergiant has no plans to release Bastion at retail, Kasavin came up with another solution. A much more incredible solution, actually. "We went out and got a spool of DVD-Rs and burned him a disc containing the installer for the game ... We recently started selling some Bastion merchandise out of our studio so we threw in a Bastion bandana for good measure," Kasavin said. Why the bandana? "That seemed like it might come in useful out there," he told us.
Understandably, "shagnasty" was elated. "I've never really seen customer service like this before," he told Reddit. Kasavin is, also understandably, thrilled about the exchange as well. "We're humbled by the kind of reaction the game has received from players. We respond to every fan email we get because we think it's well worthwhile to treat our customers the way we'd like to be treated. Besides which, we wouldn't be able to do any of this if not for them."
