Cleve Blakemore presents: Grimoire (an Indiegogo project)

Yes, ITZ finally here. You can secure a copy of the greatest RPG of all time on Indiegogo, due in just 8 short months. You said he was crazy. You said it was vaporware. You were wrong. Behold the creation of a genius of our time, a man Neanderthal with supreme intellect and physical prowess:

http://www.indiegogo.com/grimoireforever

I already pre-ordered.



In 1986.

Wow, he's raised $1281 so far. That's $1281 more than I expected him to.

Those stretch goals are hilarious. "Yes, I know that this game is seventeen years late, but if you give me a couple thousand bucks I'll add a WHOLE NEW CONTINENT to the game which is TOTALLY GONNA SHIP ON TIME, YOU GUYS."

There's a GREAT thread about this on RPG Codex - which, somehow, is still a thing. Anyway, the thread is pretty civil up to about page 16, when Cleve reveals that he's a) going on IndieGoGo instead of Kickstarter, and b) set the goal at $250,000.

I quote the great Neanderthal himself:

Am I to really believe someone actually pledged 500 bucks to that? Stolen credit card maybe?

Or Cleve himself. You know, like how lounge piano players always stick a few bills in the tip glass before they play.

The bullet points came from 1994 too. No way, 8000 words of dialogue?

$1000 of that is from 6 backers.

Hey, some of those noteworthy features seem pretty good! And it looks like he plans on continuing to develop the game too... let's see what number one on his list of planned enhancements is:

Edit: also holy shit The Entity is in the lower right corner of the screenshot before you play the video.

Am I missing something? I remember Cleve as a Forum Nut (tm) from QT3, and assume he has found a home at RPG Codex.

But this seems like a really poor parody which is neither good or bad enough. In fact I think I can detect his honest belief in this crazy fantasy of releasing a game. So it all just seems like encouraging someone who needs help. Like that Judge guy, someone else from QT3 (sorry non-QT3'ers).

However, I am usually the guy in the room not in on the joke.

"Winged Exemplar"

Cleve is one of the Elder Gods. He's been crazy-on-the-internet for twenty years and he's been working on Grimoire for almost that long. Don't give him your money.

Yes he is crazy. But not sympathetically like Judge Floro. Floro is bright, compassionate and apparently an accomplished lawyer who had the awful misfortune to have grown up and developed schizophrenia in a society that is unable or unwilling to treat him, and whose gestalt gave Floro a sustainable mythos in which to stay out of touch with reality for the rest of his life. Cleve is a hateful narcissist whose insanity lies in his prodigious capacity for self-delusion and confabulation. It seems to me that if you stripped the "crazy" from Judge Floro you'd be left with an agreeable man, indeed a model citizen; if you stripped the crazy from Cleve you'd still have a psychopathic creep.

Cleve was a dude who worked (or was contracted by) SirTech back in the Wizardry 7 days. He claims to have worked on Wiz7, and for the sake of argument let's say he did. (Previous to that, his big contributions to gaming was in the C64 era.) He had a falling out with SirTech and started working on Grimoire, which was to be a "Wizardry 8 killer", which gives you some idea of how long this shit's been going on for.

Anyway, if that's all it was, he'd just be another vapourware guy. BUT THERE'S MORE! See, Cleve used to go on Usenet back in the day and regale us with stories about the coming race wars in America, how he once defeated an entire gang of Mexican thugs in the L.A. riots, and how he's actually descended from Neanderthals and hence is like an ubermench to us puny Homo Sapiens. He would tell us tales of his superior bone density, which once allowed him to not only get hit by a car and survive but the car's metal bent around him because he's just that strong, yo. Oh, and how musketballs used to be the size of basketballs and if you got hit with one you'd just explode into red mist. Not him, though, because he's a Neanderthal.

All the while, he'd be talking up Grimoire, announcing it was "95%" completed and would be the greatest game of all-time. Sometime around then, he apparently packed his family up to Australia because he was 100% there was a coming nuclear war, built a fallout shelter, and started selling a computer system designed to be used by other wingnuts with fallout shelters. He has a blog called Vault Co which is technically work safe, but neither brain nor eyeball safe.

In the time since everybody abandoned Usenet, he's put up a dozen or so websites for Grimoire announcing new release dates, then berating everybody who understandably complains that this game is vapourware, then missing his own self-appointed release date, and then quietly taking down the website before rinse-and-repeating the process every couple of years. Hence the MASSIVE HILARITY of a guy putting up a crowdfunding request for a game he's been claiming has been more or less done for literally dozens of years and then setting that request at $250,000.

There's more, but that's the basics. I strongly urge you not to bother with his blog unless you're a connoisseur of internet racist narcissists.

He also has showed up at QT3 at least twice. Tom would refrain from banning him for a few months until, you know, he started going on about the coming race war again.

Do you mean he showed up after his first banning? If you're talking about before that time, "showed up" is a huge understatement. He pretty much took over Everything Else for a few months.

So many things I love about that site:

- The I'm sure authorized use of Vault Boy from the Fallout games.
- The way it makes Brad Wardell's blog look perfectly reasonable.
- The globe at the side that conveniently shows me the locations of other people reading this thread who clicked that link, because there's zero chance anyone else is looking at that site.

http://brokenforum.com/index.php?threads/cleve-blakemores-masterpiece-grimoire-thread.3335/ wasn't enough for you jerks?

Madkevin's post contains a disturbing lack of mention that Cleve has re-built Grimoire from the ground-up. Twice. (I believe it went from Pascal -> Java -> C++).

When I said I would donate to this so I could do a let's play when it came out, I was assuming Cleve would get really salty and set the target to 50k.

Whoops.

He had me at "greatest vaporware in the history of mankind".

"Heralds of the Winged Exemplar"? I'm willing to bet Cleve doesn't know what at least two of those words mean.

It's easily the greatest game title ever, now.

Cries of the Whinging Procurer
Flames of the Overclocked Processor

Here's a pitch video: Chock full o' crazy

This is a spoof. Come on, this has to be a spoof. But if not it's objectively the most awesome promo video in the history of the universe.

It's not a spoof. Hence why I am not 100% convinced Cleve's online character isn't just a big troll.

I want to change my vote!

This guy is hilarious! There is no way that is the outpouring of a crazy man. It's fine, fine comedy! You guys had me believing that he takes himself seriously. But come on, there's no way that's possible.

"The puzzles range from difficult to intriguing" :-)

"You're gonna believe a baby can fly... a GOLDEN baby can fly!" Epic.

Goddammit I'm dying here...

JOIN OUR CAMPAIGN
WE FIGHT FOR THE GOOD
HELP US CRUSH POPAMOLE

"We'll put the item in the tomb if that's what you want!"

"Mandatory quote by Nietzsche. Had to slide that in somewhere. Has nothing to do with the game, really."

Rule 1 of presenting: do not read out every single word on every slide of your Powerpoint presentation.

FAILED.

Just to put a proper time frame on this nonsense, Zeboyd Games has released 7 ... count them, 7 Breath of Death Games.

No, just the one.

Maybe I retract my earlier statement... that video is self aware and very funny

Even the craptacular Duke Nukem Forever was finally released!

All we need now is for Gearbox Software to get involved and polish off the final 5%.

BEHOLD WHAT YOUR RETRO FETISHISM HAS WROUGHT

Guys he's serious:

Pledge your non-refundable $100 now or IT WILL BE DRM FOREVER AFTER.

Not Pictured: a racially superior bi lateral lisp