Yeah fuck all those people pressing F5 to buy the game. I was one of the few who managed to get in and buy the game, I was refreshing the page for almost 5 hours before I could get in and purchase it, many others were doing the same and the site simply couldn't handle it.

There was literally zero reason to attack him, people loved the game and wanted to play it. There was no "DDOS attack" before the game was released because there was nothing on his store that people wanted to buy. Keep in mind that big names at the time like Notch (Minecraft) knew that it wasn't an attack and even offered servers for free (for a time) to help him handle the influx of people trying to buy the game, he actually refused. I remember because I was following this game's development religiously at the time.

All a DDOS is at the most basic level is a server unable to handle too many requests for access, this can be done with malicious intent or it can be done by accident simply because there are too many people trying to access the site. It's the reason Steam's website goes down when Steam sales start, and it's the reason many webpages go down when someone links to one on Reddit and it gets massively upvoted.

Personally, I'm not mad that we got no updates for 5 years, I got my $15 worth back then. For me, either his mental health truly makes him believe that he was under attack, or it's just an excuse to silence all the people who are still mad. I'm leaning on the first, when you're under anxiety it's easy to think everyone wants to hurt you.