giwake

found out today that someone trademarked the Cool S smh can't have shit under capitalism

I got a game off the eshop on sale (3.99€) called Marble Maid that looked like a fun if somewhat cheeky (there's a maid) Monkey-Ball-like platformer because I had seen some gameplay on a news site forever ago. I was greeted with a disclaimer about adult content and there is indeed a gallery of lewds to unlock (they are often censored on Switch).

But, long story short, it's still a pretty decent and fun collect-a-thon. Say 7/10.

have just learned about "dog tag" / "frag tag." someone back in 1996 hacked capture the flag into the doom engine through a completely vanilla wad, using some batshit logic system built out of lifts to track score. i don't think it works on gzdoom but i can't tell because the instructions are so convoluted that i can't really understand if i'm interacting with it right. nonetheless, this is nuts

*and then never actually paid him the money he was promised

so Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube? was a HELL of a game. or, "experiment" according to its lead designer peter molyneux

back in 2012, pete and his friends went 'what if people hit blocks? imagine.' as a test to see how folks would collaborate on a cumulative goal:

solve fun little puzzles to break the billions of small cubes, surrounding a prize inside which only one player can claim, something quote, "truly amazing, absolutely unique"

would people compete by default, would they work together? would factions form of peoples trying to break certain spots of the cube faster?

or would they spend around $62,000 USD in today's money in a stunt gacha games could only dream of being bold enough to pull?

motherfucker really looked at a journalist dead in the soul and said "it's not about the money, it's about sending a message"

and, largely, send messages people did. specifically swear words and titty art.

(sadly, the image examples were deleted, and that's probably for the best.)

anyways. people dug away at it for a couple of months, until finally a teenager in Scotland opened the last cube. he was the winner! congrats, bud!

or, rather, i'm sorry.

now, i'm not going to post the guy's name or face here, cuz while reading up on this whole thing, he's made it pretty clear he's a bit done and over this. actually, his exact words were:

"I don't care. Really. Like, whatever."

hell yea bud. so i'll be citing a lot of information from this eurogamer interview with him, just like, don't bother the guy, yeah? he's been through enough dealing with peter's bullshit. on that note,

In my humble opinion, Peter Molyneux is a liar and a con man.

"Every time people spend money on Godus, you will get a small piece of that pie."

the prize for getting to the center of the tootsie pop was becoming God and revenue sharing for a video game they hadn't released yet. and as a matter of fact-

still haven't actually released!

Godus was a weird, ethnocentric thing that made $450,000 on Kickstarter back in 2012 and now, over a decade later, has a barely functional freemium mobile game and an early access PC hell to show for itself

the winner of curiosity hasn't seen a dime. he has no god powers. the game doesn't exist in a medium for him to be able to claim any promised wealth, but they sure did rack in that kickstarter and microtransaction money, huh?

peter threw a temper tantrum and said it's not his fault his company fired the person who was supposed to pay the winner his prize. even though, again, it's one person. you could just call the kid yourself.

though i guess he's a bit busy, since he's already moved onto his next project by the way!

i'm sure that's going just great for him!

actually, we should take a moment to talk about pete.

he actually made a text-based business simulator way back in his day, called The Entrepreneur, and it failed miserably. so he used the fact that he was mistaken for a representative for a "human capital firm" whatever the FUCK that means to lie his way into snagging free computers and helping design a database system for the amiga

he literally just bullshitted his way through the deal. he got lucky. cuz he was mistaken for a rich white guy, and thus became a rich white guy himself.

look, i like Fable y'all, but peter molyneux is a scumbag.

fucking CREEP. "someone from 22cans"

YOU'RE FROM 22CANS! YOU "INDUSTRY LEGEND" YOU.

pick up the phone. now. just pay the kid some of the kickstarter funds you never used to finish the game, so he can get a portion of the "money spent on Godus" like you promised. or just out of pocket! since it's been a decade and all, it only seems fucking fair!

it's not hard. call it a 'charitable donation' and write it off on your taxes or somethin, or is that not subversive enough for you?

hey, at least devolver digital used the disinterested kid's story for a PR bump so that was nice for them.

anyways, i guess we'll add this one to the history books as another example of a british man promising a scottish youth freedom and riches, and very much not following through

i feel this is the context that's lost when discussing the man. Curiosity was a game where people all over the world would tap a screen until someone would win THE BIG PRIZE WHICH WE'RE NOT TELLING WHAT IT IS BUT IT IS SO COOL IT IS AMAZING. and you could spend both in game and real life money to make your tap more efficient.

that's it. that's all Curiosity ever was.

for fuck's sake What's inside the cube? was literally the tagline. there was no game to it. it was pure gambling. it preyed on people's FOMO and their willingness to put down money for a bigger chance of being the winner.

and that guy had the audacity to say, and i quote, "There is something we haven't told everybody about when you play the cube. When you play the cube you're also doing something else. You don't realise you're doing it. [...] You're not just doing things in the cube. You don't realise it but you're doing something in something else as well at the same time."

there is nothing. there is absolutely nothing and there was never anything there. molyneux just makes stuff up on the spot. it's all he ever did. and the industry that called him "too enthusiastic" instead of a con artist is complicit. no, after all those years, i'm not giving him the benefit of the doubt and thinking he was simply overambitious – fool me once, fool me twice, we're well above a dozen times now! god, at least RPS actually had the stomach to ask the right question, see above

and the post above barely scratches the surface, because then there's Milo, and the absolutely gobsmacking marketing of Fable, and a million other things

calling Curiosity a game is an insult to game design. calling Curiosity an experiment is an insult to your entire audience.

I don't think it excuses him from responsibility for his many harmful actions one iota to say that Molyneux's entire career arc is the result of some sort of mental health situation, that I am not qualified to diagnose with any clarity, that capitalism is particularly good at producing.

I think he has always believed that everything he says is going to happen, and that that will make people love him more - in late career, restore peoples' love for him to its previous levels. Until the moment it doesn't happen, which he responds to the pain and anxiety of by dreaming up a new thing to believe in, and continuing as before.

I think he fell into this pattern during the 90s once Bullfrog - via the many prodigious talents and hard work of all the people who worked there - reached a certain level of acclaim. He noticed that when he talked in interviews about stuff he wanted to do that excited him, stuff that wasn't real yet, the journalist listening beamed with enthusiasm and wrote it down, and it ended up in the magazine. And for a while his games were critically praised bestsellers, and who wouldn't want that streak to continue forever? And he became - non-clinical usage of the term here - addicted to that. It made him feel great and the more he did it the more he wanted to do it. And for the next couple decades he had a large talented team around him beavering away to make whatever he pulled out of his ass possible¹. When he no longer had that, the jig was up... but it took a while to really fully fall apart.

At this point I have zero sympathy for him and, to be clear, no interest in explanations that paint him as simply a victim of something. Other people enabled his public self delusion habit but ultimately it's his problem, rippling out into the world and hurting others. As a PC gaming teen in the 90s following everything Bullfrog did with great interest, he was a hero of mine, until sometime in the late 00s / early 10s when I realized he was something else, something sad.

And I think a tragedy like that deserves to be examined and understood and discussed, and when we see it happening elsewhere we should talk about that while acknowledging how each new case is unique. I think collapsing all that to "pathological liar" or "scammer" is generally a way of skipping over the useful part of the discussion and just getting straight to the, again, not-undeserved hate.

1. The particular anecdote I remember hearing was that he claimed, during a press interview for the first Black & White, that the game would scan your email inbox and name villagers after people you'd emailed with. This apparently caught the dev team completely by surprise, and some miserable programmer had to figure out how to do that. (And wow you can definitely tell this was a prior era of computing because holy shit, what a privacy breach! Just finding the default filename for the Microsoft Outlook Express inbox on your players' hard drives and sifting through it to do whatever with! Hopefully they disable that code if they ever do a rerelease.)

if they don't wear a blazer over it they aren't serious

try them sometime