Cleve Blakemore presents: Grimoire (an Indiegogo project)

Yup... Everyone snickering, ask yourself if your internet brand is worth $7000.

Right - there's nothing funny about only getting paid $7,000 for 18 years of work.

Still not worth it.

Yeah. I mean, $7k isn't much payout for over a decade of work setting up the con...but hey, $7k.

Not to be overly judgmental, but I think he feels 7k buys him a lot of Twinkies. Gotta store up since they're going out of business!

I hear that twinkies aren't affected by nuclear fallout.

That fucker took all my Twinkies.

Maybe Cleve will offer them as Indiegogo rewards.

He'll only ever release physical Twinkies to those who pledge to him on Indiegogo.

How does crow taste anyway? Like chicken?

After reading this article about a Kickstarter scam for an NCAA football game, I got curious what was up with Grimoire. 3 days left, seems like there is still no demo, but he might crack $10k before the end!

According to his updates, he plans to just relaunch another 120 day campaign after this one finishes. Hmm. I'd be surprised if Indiegogo lets you relaunch a campaign while there are still unfulfilled commitments from the previous one, but they are somewhat looser about these things than Kickstarter.

Wherein he uses those 120 days as another excuse. Hopefully IndieGoGo sees right through that bullshit.

How did that demo turn out?

He's just about to release it, he's had trouble with a bug manifesting itself on 64-bit Windows versions triggered by legacy DOS code that took a while to pinpoint, but he sorted it out, and he debugged and polished almost the whole rest of the rest while he was chasing it. He is just making some minor polish to the demo and will release it real soon. The public will get a demo with three levels, while backers will get a bigger one.

He will only make a second Indiegogo campaign if they allow him to, he isn't out to scam anyone. The elaborated videos on his YouTube channel and the DOS demo from way back constitute more than enough proof that the game is the real deal.

5/5, would read again. WELL DONE SIR

Pretty sure reality never factors in to anything related to Cleve.

Yeah, seeing how he was trash talking the Wizardry guys and bragging about how his game would blow it away and beat it to market - back about 10 years ago - I don't know why anyone would question Cleve's claims.

Yeah, it's not like he's promised things and not delivered them before.

Don't you guys understand? It's coming out any minute now. For certain this time!

Well at least he is still trying to make a game that will honor the spirit set forth by Wizardry and to add a lot of features to an already complex game system, while others have withdrawn into making pay to win mobile and Facebook games.

Anyway here's a new update:

He was asking which file hosting site he should use to host his demo just yesterday.

He's trying to collect money from suckers, and doing better at it than I would have imagined. But seriously, keep right on waiting for the game. And waiting, and waiting, and waiting...

... and updating us on how it'll be ready "anytime soon" and how "it's just a minor setback", because of the sweet sweet schadenfreude.

It's a pretty fascinating case study to see exactly how long you can string along people with empty promises. For shit's sake, he's been saying Grimoire's some-percentage-over-90% done for over a decade now. A decade. That is not the actions of a person who is trying to make a game that will "honor the spirit set forth by Wizardry", whatever the fuck that means. (Sprites, I guess?) Those are the actions of a mentally unstable person who cannot reconcile his actual meager accomplishments with his massive ego. In rock 'n' roll terms, he's the drummer who leaves a hugely successful band because they never want to do HIS songs, man, and then spends the rest of his life wondering why he was never in another successful band. What I'm saying is: Cleve Blakemore is Peter Criss.

I am not surprised a project of this envergure took so long. The sheer size, amount of content, and complexity of it all is mind-boggling. We basically here have a guy who does it in his spare time, while he still has full-time programming duties, and occasionally getting some help from his friend Mike Shamgar who worked on the failed Wizardry Stones of Arnhem along with him.

He is not getting rich with this, at this point I am pretty sure that going through with such an ambitious project and contributing to the genre is more important than making money off it.

I believed that Duke Nukem Forever would come out for all of 14 years, and I was proven right.

Or there is something in game design known as feature creep, and biting off more than you can chew.

Did you also believe it was worth waiting for?

It was mostly disappointing, because 3DRealms delivered a game that while containing a lot of the humor, inventiveness and spirit of the original, it went too meta, and ultimately because we went from a fast-paced arcade shooter with ambitious level design, to a linear, slow shooter with a two weapon limits that had most of the trappings of braindead Call of Duty clones.

I see no such thing in this case, what I see is that the original Wizardry VI/VII blueprint has been greatly expanded upon.

So after Cleve goes bankrupt, someone else will finish and release Grimoire? You're right, that's probably the only way it happens.

In all fairness, if Grimoire would turn out to be a Call of Duty clone everyone would be surprised.

3DRealms delivered nothing. It wasn't until Gearbox took over the game was actually released.

I'd almost think HHR is trolling if it wasn't for that Judge Dredd guy on Planetcrap years ago.

I remember him, I bet he was astounded that Dredd wasn't nominated for best picture.

Because the adjective I'd use to describe any iteration of the Duke Nukem franchise would be 'cerebral'.

Duke Forever would have benefited by being a Call of Duty clone, at least it would have shortened the shit sandwich by a loaf.

Our problem is that our time frame expectation of just is different than Cleve's. He operates in a time frame of millenniums whereas us mortals think in shorter terms.

It worked so admirably that he's proposing ANOTHER indiegogo campaign!

Yeah, all you guys are gonna look real stupid when the demo comes out next week and the RPG genre is revolutionized by this new DOS game.

Them fucking Polish!

When Cleve first started trashing other developers and their release dates and bragging about how his game would make them all look like pong, 17 years ago (I'm an old fart and remember his bragging first hand) :

- Bill Clinton was starting his second term
- The Dow Jones crossed 7000 for the first time
- The English Patient won Best Picture
- Timothy McVeigh was convicted for the Oklahoma City bombing two years earlier
- The UK turned Hong Kong over to China
- Steve Jobs returned to Apple Computer
- Apple was in financial trouble, to the point that Microsoft bought a $150 MM share
- Princess Diana was killed in an automobile accident

And BTW, I've played a number of RPGs on my iPad and iPhone that are far more complex and enjoyable than anything Cleve has produced.

I'd be willing to bet he's the same guy.

You know, I think the pitch video alone was worth the seventeen year wait.