@Doggit (formerly a composer for Thrive) posted a message on Thrive Discord, he gave me permission to repost it here.
Hi everyone, I’m writing again.
Yesterday I spoke with Henri (hhyyrylainen) about an old issue that has been lingering for many years, and I thought it would be right to clarify the situation with all of you.
As many of you know, I started collaborating with the Thrive project about 14 years ago. At the time I became the team lead for the music side of the project and opened the “official” Thrive YouTube channel. Later the channel was renamed “Thrive Game Italia”, with the idea of making it the Italian reference channel for the project, while also hosting musical themes and gameplay tests from the early versions of the game.
Over time, some dynamics developed that led me to step away from the project on my own. I discussed these matters privately with a single user, whose name I prefer not to mention.
Unfortunately, even though that conversation was private and even though I decided to leave the project voluntarily because of that situation, some aspects of that discussion ended up leaving the private context. Over the years, partly due to a sort of “telephone game” effect, the story seems to have grown and become distorted.
After leaving the Thrive project, I continued over the years to study and improve my musical technique. This eventually led me to start publishing and distributing my tracks on digital platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music. In recent years I’ve begun achieving very positive results, with over 1.5 million monthly streams on Spotify, in addition to results from other platforms. Today this activity has become one of my main sources of income.
For this reason, I decided to officially transform the “Thrive Game Italia” channel into my artist channel. This is also why many of the old videos, especially those related to early versions of Thrive, were removed or set to private.
Despite leaving the project, I have always remained interested in following the updates and development of the game. In fact, as some of you may have noticed, I registered on the forum again on two different occasions after leaving the project, simply as a regular user, in order to keep following the development more closely.
What I had not realized, however, is that over time an incorrect version of what happened continued to circulate on the forum, on the Discord server, and generally within spaces related to the Thrive project.
These incorrect statements concern both my person and my music project. On several occasions my old nickname “Doggit” has been linked to my real name. This connection was also noticed by the network and the music label I collaborate with, in a non-exclusive way, for some of my projects.
They initially considered intervening directly, but I preferred to handle the situation myself and address it personally.
The main misleading point, and partially incorrect one, is the idea that I plagiarized or stole some musical themes related to the project. As I have already explained, that discussion originated from a private matter and does not accurately represent what actually happened. Information that came from a private conversation later became public, including my nickname, often easily associated with my real name, circulating in publicly accessible places such as the forum and this server.
Additionally, there have been claims that I was kicked from the project, when in reality it was my own decision to step away.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I discussed this situation with Henry and several of the old comments have already been removed. I kindly ask you to take the actual facts into account and to respect this situation.
If in the future there is any need for help with composing new music for the project, I would genuinely be happy to collaborate. Likewise, if it is necessary to recover some of the old tracks that are currently private on my YouTube channel, I would be glad to provide them, obviously limited to the tracks that were entirely composed by me.
Thank you all, and sorry for the long message.