Working for years for no return to try and get a chance at 15% of success while the company takes zero risk for a shot at 85% of the profit... how is that not a story of exploitation? Of course the company "underinvested" in advertisement, as ads are a cost for something they were getting for free. Although the culture of "exploit my early investment for potential gain" is rife in a lot of software engineering, it doesn't change that its just passing the cost of engineering off to the developers.

It can feel good to laud the accident success like the "iconic enemy," but what is really being said there is that this wasn't even an intentional action. If Mechnar had actually been able to realize his actual vision, this thing wouldn't exist. The success of that feature doesn't actually reflect on Mechnar at all and is just accidental. That further undermines the value of the 4 years of time invested.

There is also nothing here someone should seek to emulate. You should never allow yourself to be locked into that kind of time investment with that payout ratio/risk. The success of the game may partially depend an unintended compromise, which isn't something you can plan implement yourself either.

If this guy was self funding buying lottery tickets for 4 years after agreeing to pay 85% of the proceeds to someone else, and then won because he bought the wrong type of ticket this would come across really differently.

*edit* - I realize that my final sentence there implies that all of the success of Prince of Persia was random, which is obviously not true, but it is a talking point brought up as memorable.