Cleve Blakemore presents: Grimoire (an Indiegogo project)

Well, certainly Cleve's claims about the cancelled Wi 7 sequel were vindicated, also that he worked at Sir-Tech (which some doubted; I can't imagine why).

As to any claims he has made regarding Sir Tech - I'm not really sure of specifics honestly - was there ever anything outrageous? I've read tidbits here and there that suggested the Sirotka brothers weren't the best people to work for. And their business vision was certainly lacking; Garriot was openly discussing the foolishness of forcing players to import characters into Wizardry: The Knight of Diamonds in the 80s, citing it as being a big impact on the Ultima design. That trend continued with Legacy of Llyglyafuckitican'tspellit. Wizardry 4 was a departure, and it wasn't until DW Bradley was running the series that sanity reigned. It's hard to explain to people that didn't, you know, live it that DW Bradley often considered to be in the tier just below the industry giants, and underrated to boot. The Wizardry sales plummeted until 5, though I'm not clear what the series did after that.

That leaves the rest of his claims, which compromise the vast majority of his so called "claims work".

1. Race wars: nope, still wrong.

2. Every other claim about the future of civilization: nope.

3. Cleve can easily crank out 10k lines of "production ready" code in a day: if we set the bar here as "lines of code that are not auto-generated/stubs/macro'd/copied and pasted from somewhere else/invisible/imaginary, and do meaningful things from a business/user perspective, and have no bugs" then nope. Froemmer's fact: if you type 120 wpm for 8 straight hours you'll hit 57,600 words. At 5 words per line, that would net you 11,500 and change lines of code. Jon Skeet cannot do this (he can; but he doesn't want to make the rest of us look bad). Nobody can do this.

4. Cleve has worked on over 200 games: I doubt it, but who cares.

5. In terms of producing software, Cleve can can do by himself in less time what it takes teams of dozens of developers to do: Still waiting on that Grimoire release.

6. Grimoire will be the best CRPG ever times infinity: Maybe. And maybe I'm a Chinese jet pilot.

7. Cleve feeds only on god juice: If I drink a bottle of Coke Zero, and refer to is as "god juice", I can claim the same thing.

8. Cleve can bench press more than Jason Hall - I wouldn't know.

9. Cleve was once struck by a car moving over 60 miles an hour and the car totaled itself, while he was unharmed - ok, this one seems like it probably did happen, so I'll give him this one.

The bulk of the criticism Cleve has taken has been due to his vast body of work, not because he said he worked at Sir Tech/on a Wizardry game. Cleve has been making claims that were sometimes vile, sometimes outrageous, and sometimes both for almost two decades. Most of you young wippersnappers won't believe this either, but in 1996 a fair amount of folk found him somewhere from a little weird to creepy, but were genuinely interested in seeing how Grimoire turned out (and right here, right now, I would be curious to see it if it came out). Yes, belief that it might in fact come out back then was not "vain hope", "desperation", or "delusion".

And yet here we are. I have no doubt that RPGCodex feels Cleve is vindicated; I can't really speak to the actual context and don't care to look it up. I'm am equally certain that, unless we're referring to the specific case of "worked at Sir Tech"/"worked on Wiz 7.5", saying "Cleve has been vindicated" is roughly on par with saying "the sky is not blue and is in fact a sort of yellowish purple with large squant-colored spots".

He also claimed that, in order to use the bathroom at Sir-Tech, you had to wade through a mountain of used dildos that was waist-deep. But, hey, it's good to know he doesn't have a problem with gay people.

Yeah. Honestly, even in the most obvious examples of his "vindication," it's pretty clear that his claims about doings at Sir-Tech were quite exaggerated. For example, while some of those creature illustrations have unquestionably phallic features, they aren't really any more sexually outlandish than the average H.R. Giger illustration (note: I am not saying that they are as good as an H.R. Giger illustration). I don't see anything in any of those linked images (not even the phallic-sphincter monster) that even comes close to Cleve's descriptions in that thread, like:

There's a kernel of truth here, but the rest is just the homophobia/cognitive disorder speaking. I suspect that most of his claims about Sir-Tech are similar. Based on real people or events, but wildly exaggerated to the point of absurdity.

And for whatever it's worth, the phallic sphincter monster is actually a somewhat successful design, in that they clearly intended it to be kind of disturbing, and it is. It's a better than some of the juvenile cheesecake illustrations posted later on in the thread.

I would love to photobomb that thread with Georgia O'Keeffe paintings, but then I'd have to sign up at the Codex. My commitment to humour only goes so far.

Most of the images they are posting aren't even noticeably weird, unless you are really reaching, in a Freudian "everything's a penis" sort of way. This guy? Sure. That's pretty clearly intended to be a phallic-sphincter monster. And this sort of thing is definitely facepalm-worthy. But when they've moved on to discussing the relevance of this guy's package, then you know that they've gone off the rails.

I want a t-shirt that says "TOO GAY FOR WIZARDRY".

Alas and alack! The party is attacked by 99 Waist-Deep Piles of Dildos, 99 Waist-Deep Piles of Dildos, 1 Speeding Car, and 1 Enemy With Relevant Package!

Negative Nancy MISSES 99 Waist-Deep Piles of Dildos!
99 Waist-Deep Piles of Dildos riposte for 162 damage!
Wizard CASTS FIREBALL on 99 Waist-Deep Piles of Dildos for 58008 damage!
Monk CRITICALLY HITS 1 Enemy With Relevant Package for 2 damage, instantly killing him!
1 Speeding Car RAMS Neandertal and is TOTALED!

HHR doesn't love us anymore, :(

Also, somebody over there has Lum's "Ho Ho Ho" fatbird avatar, which is kind of weird. I know it;s not Lum because he didn't use capital letters at the beginning of a sentence, which we all know was the reason Lenin invaded England and started World War 2.

"Damage control?" Why would we need to do any damage control? We're just amused onlookers cackling from the peanut gallery.

Because the RPG Codex forums are a hardcore collection of haters, and provide Cleve with a modicum of respect. Yeah, it's that kind of forum. Case in point: look up a Dungeon Crawl LP by a guy named Yeesh. He's evidently an S&M hound, and posted a large full-body nude shot of his latest beau covered with welts. On an RPG forum. And nobody trolled him/GTFO'd him. Lovely lads, these RPGC yots.

I just think it's funny that we get singled out by people like Brad and HHR bitching about us, because it's not like anyone here gives a shit.

Still and all, I don't think "damage control" means what he thinks it means. Nobody cares what we think or say here. We have no public image to protect, restore, or defend. There's no fallout from us pointing at a bad game and laughing, even if that game somehow turns out to exist.

Which, let's be clear, it hasn't.

Well, I played the "beta demo" that was released in the early aughts. It was certainly real. I of course cannot speak to the state of the full project. The demo was clearly called beta, and it was beta (early beta, perhaps).

I don't doubt that it exists as a project. Whether it will ever exist as a playable game has yet to be determined.

So they pre-empted Saint's Row 3 by almost 20 years?

You haven't fully considered the impact on the bottom line that whatever they're talking about could have. It could cost MILLIONS of pretend somethings.

He's got a hard head.

I've obviously missed something, but how is it that "struck by a car moving over 60 miles an hour and the car totaled itself, while he was unharmed" seems like something that "probably did happen"?

Why would he lie about that?

Because physics, obviously.

Because that's what he does.

Remember that we are talking about a guy who believes that being injected with Draino turned him into a Neanderthal with superpowers,

And we're at 11. Keep at it, people.

Well, physics and his titanium skeleton.

Maybe the car just brushed past him and then slammed itself into a tree to avoid the Neanderthal.

No, no, no - the car wrapped itself around him. Look, I know you're thinking that the laws of physics, along with everything your personal experience with the real world has ever told you, is saying that must be the ravings of a crazy person. But it must be true, because there's a concept art drawing of a monster that looks like a lamprey with legs.

Cromo Superior bone structure is like carbon nano tubes. They're actually lighter than homo sapiens bones, but 25x as strong.

Vindicated!

We're 31 days in and Cleve is still under 7k. Which happens to be 1/107th of the value he was supposed to sail by at this point.

I sure hope he remembers to put all the crow he was ready to serve us back in the fridge.

You earn 386 Negativland points for working the primary color squant into this thread.

He just made almost $7k. I'm not seeing the crow he needs to eat.

Because he originally said, on the RPGCodex thread when he announced the fundraiser, "I reckon all of you are going to eat crow when I sail through the $750,000 mark about 30 days in."

I'm fairly sure Damien meant it in the way that con men rarely eat crow.

Whoops. Sorry, Damien.

Please note he never said 30 consecutive days. He meant a non-linear subset of 30 days that take place in a larger set of days. It's an easy mistake for puny homo sapiens intellects to make, locked into linear conceptions of time and having missed the crucial window of having their brains rewired by the proper exposure to sodium chloride and Drano.

Neanderthal* days are different lengths than Homo Sapien days, anyway.

*I originally typed "Beanderthal", which conjured an image of a Bea Arthur cavewoman which will probably take heavy drinking to thoroughly purge.

Sounds redundant to me.

The internet is awesome.