In 2023, I reported that the development team of then-upcoming fighting game Diesel Legacy included Mike Zaimont, previously a developer on Skullgirls and Indivisible who had been accused of sexual misconduct at Lab Zero, the indie studio behind those games. Diesel Legacy released to little fanfare more than a year later, but the next fighting game from the team behind it, Gameplay Group International, has accumulated significantly more buzz. That game is Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game, due out on July 23.
After a viral media post brought Zaimont’s likely involvement in Avatar Legends’ development to light, the game’s publisher has confirmed his role on the game.
“Mike Zaimont holds a position as an individual contributor at the developer Gameplay Group International working specifically on backend programming, engine architecture and netcode,” a PR representative for publisher Paramount Game Studios wrote in a statement to PC Gamer.
When I reported on Diesel Legacy’s development in 2023, the publisher’s then-CEO Christina Seelye said that she hired Zaimont because “you have to create a way for [people] to show the world that they’ve changed and decided to do better,” and that she believed he “was committed to it and that he didn’t want everything that went down to be the end of his story. He wanted the opportunity to have the redemptive arc that’s in so many stories that we all love.”
Zaimont’s former colleagues from Lab Zero who I spoke with disagreed with that framing. When the company fell apart, two of its former developers, creative director Mariel Cartwright and CEO Francesca Esquenazi, sued Zaimont over wrongful termination and retaliation. He counter-sued, which the employees I spoke with pointed to as one indication Zaimont hadn’t actually made up for his past behavior, which included making a joke about the death of George Floyd in 2020 and an accusation of “frequently mentioning his genitals, forcing unwanted physical contact, making sexual comments about himself or about employee’s bodies, insulting coworkers privately or openly in front of other coworkers, or using very personal details to threaten or demean coworkers when they didn’t go along with what he wanted” at Lab Zero.
The lawsuit wasn’t settled until April 2026, at which point a joint statement between Cartwright, Esquenazi and Zaimont “agreed to resolve” the lawsuit. Terms of the settlement were not made public.
Zaimont remains a controversial figure in the fighting game community, with Legend of Korra comic book artist Irene Koh raising his involvement with Avatar in a viral Bluesky thread last week.
Hey y’all, I wanted give people a heads-up that Mike Z is still working on the Avatar Legends dev team, for anyone who wanted to know before deciding whether to buy/support the game. (If you don’t know who that is or need a refresher, here’s the Kotaku article: kotaku.com/workers-leav…)
— @koh.money (@koh.money.bsky.social) 2026-07-15T00:54:40.994Z
“As an Avatar + fighting game fan, I was extremely disappointed to hear that he’s involved. I’m proud of my work on the Korra comics & contributions to the IP over the last decade,” Koh wrote, after publisher Paramount seemingly went radio silent after being asked about his involvement.
Paramount has now disclosed Zaimont’s role in development, but he hasn’t returned to having a public presence online since 2020.
Read the full article here
