Paramount confirms Mike Zaimont is employed by Avatar Legends dev
Paramount Games’ new video game division is coming online with what could be a win for the company: the release of Gameplay Group International’s Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game, a two-player fighting game inspired by the popular 2005 animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender. But industry professionals have expressed frustration over one developer working on the project: former Lab Zero Games CEO Mike Zaimont, who was previously accused by colleagues of sexual harassment in the workplace. Game Developer can now confirm that Zaimont is an employee of the Avatar Legends developer.
This information comes straight from a Paramount Games representatives who informed Game Developer that Zaimont “holds a position as an individual contributor” at Gameplay Group International, where he is “working specifically on backend programming, engine architecture and netcode.”
The question of Zaimont’s employment came up after veteran Avatar comic artist and illustrator Irene Koh publicly shared details of her back-and-forth with Paramount Games, who had reached out to her to potentially commission promotional art for Avatar Legends.
She asked the publisher to confirm if Zaimont was working on the game, but said the company did not respond to her queries.
Multiple studios face questions over decision to employ devs accused of harassment
It’s unusual for any one developer to invite such scrutiny for his involvement in a project, but Zaimont’s history of allegedly abusive behavior has invited scrutiny into multiple games he worked on after shutting down Lab Zero Games following a mass exodus of workers in 2020. That same year, Arc System Works suspended Zaimont from work on a rollback netcode update for Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus.
The accusations against Zaimont landed in the midst of a mass reckoning in 2020 over allegations of sexual harassment, abuse, and other offenses being levied against individuals and people in positions of power across the game industry. Companies like Tencent who chose to hire some of these accused individuals—the company hired former Assassin’s Creed game director Ashraf Ismail 2022 after he was accused of sexual harassment at Ubisoft—faced similar questions to the ones being posed to Gameplay Group International and Paramount Games.
In 2023, PC Gamer pressed then-Maximum Games CEO Christine Christina Seelye about his work on Modus Games’ Diesel Legacy. Seelye defended her decision to approve Zaimont’s employment, acknowledging the validity of the past allegations and saying that he “wanted the opportunity to have the redemptive arc that’s in so many stories that we all love.”
However former Lab Zero employees speaking to PC Gamer pointed out that Zaimont was still fighting former employees Mariel Cartwright and Francesca Esquenazi in court, having filed a counter-suit challenging their claims of sexual harassment and unfair dismissal.
Those lawsuits have since been “resolved” as of April 2026.
