I Am Become Smart, Destroyer Of Worlds. Look Upon My Flames, Ye Mighty, And Despair.

“like. can we just get on with the next decade already, because I hate this headband and want a real cell phone” So, Derek Smart had a bad 90s. It's OK, it was pretty bad for many of us. Creed, Shaq-Fu, Newt Gingrich, HIMEM.SYS, Donald Trump, there was just so much we prefer we would forget ever happened. In Smart's case, it was declaring war on pretty much the entire Internet (luckily, it was much smaller then). Time passed. We survived Y2K, al-Qaeda, Everquest, Internet Explorer 6, and many other threats to our way of life, entering a brave new era where everything is new. Derek Smart kept plugging away, working on his holy grail, which, in his case until very recently, was making you believe a battlecruiser could fly. Decades pass. Derek Smart gets older, grayer, and despite the occasional indulgence in pitying fools, finally gets public acknowledgement that one can survive one of the most notorious stories in game development and still reinvent themselves in the second act. Older, wiser, calmer.

You will find that you have much to learn, my young apprentice. About. A. Great. MANY. THINGS. Then 2015 rolled around. Welcome to Act 3.

I love this industry. An industry that, while brutal, gave me the opportunity to do something that I love, while not making it easy. I take pride in the fact that when I screw up, or fail, and fall down, I can pick myself up – and keep on running. For me, there is no shame in failure; only pride in being able to acknowledge mistakes, and to learn from them. My article (below) which I wrote, was a result of my observation that there is another industry disaster brewing, and which is, once again, going to not only cast the industry in a poor light if we didn’t do something, but which threatens to make it that much harder for the inbound generation to find their footing, because a bunch of people who came before, pretty much made it FUBAR. And during my research for the piece, and for which I have hundreds of web articles, forum posts etc in an Evernote notepad, I came across a lot of things that I wasn’t even aware of. And once the article went live, I started hearing from all kinds of people in media, game development, gamers etc. And the more I read, the more I came to the realization that my article, which was merely a technical wake-up call of sorts, hadn’t even touched the tip of the iceberg. Which is why I am adding this next paragraph. If you feel that you have been misled when you backed the Star Citizen project after Oct, 2012, and you want a chance to get your money back, the FTC has setup a special department that deals with crowd-funding complaints...

Why, yes, he did go pretty much right to Defcon One, didn't he? But this isn't just Derek Smart, this is OLDSCHOOL Derek Smart. You guys just don't know the kraken you released. He blew through Defcon One, hit Defcon Zero...

In the interim, since this pledge by you, has ended up being the usual meaningless lip service, as of this moment, Chris, your crowd-funding efforts for this Star Citizen project, in addition to the selling of virtual items for a non-existent game, are coming to AN END.

went straight to Defcon Absolute Zero...

Here’s the thing, yanking my RSI account, won’t silence me.  All you’ve done, is strengthened my resolve, and unwittingly broadcast to the world that you have something to hide by kicking me out as a backer, without warning. I am going to keep talking (podcast 1, 2) about this incessantly until we get some answers, as outlined in my Interstellar Discourse article. And next, I’m going to take out a full page article in the NY times, just to prove it.

...and is currently threatening to go to Defcon YOUR FACE unless his demands are met. No, that is not a typo.

1. You, and your wife, Sandra Roberts (aka Sandi Gardiner), should resign, effective immediately, and relinquish control of this company to an interim CEO.

2. Using the same rules you used to refund my pledge, without my asking, you are to immediately process refunds in the amount of $2,134,374 as per the initial Kickstarter crowd-funding effort for those who request it. Those who want to wait to see the end (my instinct, from what I know now, is telling me that the end is looking a lot like a catastrophic total loss of this project), and funded to the tune of $83m on your website, are welcome to do that.

3. Give backers the opportunity to hire an independent forensics accountant, and an executive producer, to audit the company records, and give an accurate picture of the financial health of the company, and it’s ability to complete, and deliver this project in a timely fashion. I hereby offer to foot the entire costs of this effort. And I will put up to $1m of my own money, in an escrow account of an attorney’s choosing, to be used as-needed for this exercise. I will pay this price to prove that I had every right to seek these answers. So this money can either go toward a good cause (righting this ship), or to attorneys who are most likely to burn it all down anyway.

4. If you ignore this, the more time passes, the more articles that myself, and investigative media write, revealing what we know, the more likely it is that this will end in legal (someone suing someone, and opening the flood gates) action, thereby  forcing you all to come to court and answer these questions.

If anyone else was posting these demands on their blog, people at Cloud Imperium would likely cackle a few times and then keep doing, well, this.

But this is Derek Smart, who is, for all his Act 2 calm Zen Master developerness, still can occasionally be as litigious as someone who has had a legal team on retainer for the past 25 years can be. So instead, CI decided to revoke Smart's Star Citizenship due to his being Derek Smart (oh, and threatening to bring down the entire company and demand top-level changes in corporate management and a few other things).

Mr. Lesnick, I can safely say this isn't about Smart's promoting Line of Defense any more. No one really can say! No one knows where this train is going to stop any more; Derek Smart is promising more updates, the media has been nibbling, and out of the 300 or so Cloud Imperium employees, I'm pretty sure one or two of them have a few things they want to get off their chest. At which point:

RAAAAR! At any rate, this entire tale could not get more weird. It really couldn't. Trust me, there is no way this can... ...OK, yes, it can. You see, there's this thing called Gamergate. More specifically, there's this thing called Airplay, which is a debate being run by Michael Koretzky during a Society of Professional Journalists trade show. Koretzky surveyed the landscape and decided not enough people were talking about how, actually, it was about ethics in video game journalism, and by cracky, he was going to fix that! Specifically by having a debate between some of Gamergate's noted ethical paragons (such as the guy who writes for Breitbart about how he hates women in tech so very much, the other guy who writes for Breitbart about how cool 4chan is, the lady scholar who gives commentary on feminism from the somewhat unique standpoint that it's actually men who are oppressed in modern society, and the ex-journalist who flamed out and yelled at Koretzky about how racist he was for not giving Gamergate an hour to explain what it was, presumably with Powerpoints and flowcharts) and, well, hrm. There was a distinct lack of interest in potential punching bags to show up and be punched for a day, to which the other Breitbart guy responded FINE WE DIDN'T NEED YOU ANYWAY, WE'LL JUST DEBATE OURSELVES! with no hint of perceptible irony or self-awareness. Yes, like anything else Gamergate-involved, this quickly became so stupid that Mark Kern may actually have gotten involved. But you may ask yourself, self, why I am I reading about this crazy not-a-debate in an article about Derek Sma.... oh no. Oh, no. OH YES.

Yes, Derek Smart is going to take time out of his busy schedule demolishing Star Citizen to solve this whole Gamergate thing. I am not making any of this up at all. I AM NOT CREATIVE ENOUGH TO MAKE ANY OF THIS UP. At this point, the only thing that can make this weirder is if Donald Trump gives a statement about crowd-funding Kickstarter game journalism. I fully expect this to happen by Wednesday. full disclosure!

• the author works on a crowd-funded project of his own which has nothing to do with any of this and you will note he is posting this blog article at 1:30 AM on his own time so kindly do not swarm his workplace ANY OF YOU.

• the author has been Internet-acquaintances with Derek Smart for a good while now and has occasionally given him what he thinks is helpful advice. It's safe to say Derek didn't ask the author about Airplay.

• the author knows quite a few people over at Cloud Imperium and wishes them all the best and wants a cool game for his Oculus Rift when it comes out, please.

• the author is so old he remembers the 1990s from back when he started blogging, and often speaks in the third person.