felipepepe
Codex's Heretic
I'll make it a clickbait: "Have Neanderthals predicted the death of a gaming company?"
It'll be like all the "experts" who think they know what old games were like by reading an article about it on RPS.The obvious solution is for felipepepe to write an article about why Sir Tech went bankrupt.
Zorba the Hutt Do you have all of those saved up somewhere in addition to your scattered forum posts? Could be useful for any future Cleve Blakemore Archival Project.
Sirotek said:Well we will see how good his product really is - I hope so for his sake otherwise he will be the laughing stock of the net.
This is, without hyperbole, the greatest post and online bitchslap I have ever read.I think the only thing that thread is missing (as far as I recall, been a while since I read it) is Robert Sirotek's Usenet post from 1998 discussing the death of Sir-Tech - to which Cleve immediately responded with a brief sympathetic statement
Robert Sirotek:
16/10/98
Eric C. Liebl wrote:
> Well...it was only a matter of time. Sirtech has been putting out more
> tripe than decent product for years...read the news article at avault. I
> got the impression we should be sorry for the Sirotek brothers...but from
> what I read they totally botched managing the company's direction. They
> should have stuck to their roots...created detailed RPGs. When they started
> branching out to adventure games, action shooters, etc trying in essence to
> land a lucky strike in the market without caring one bit what they were
> marketing they shot their own foot off. Sirtech the publisher would still
> be around if paid heed to their core audience...and still be making money.
I don't expect anybody to be sorry for us. The press article tried to
demonstrate the difficulties that go on in this industry, more often than not
completely out of view of game buying fans. I thought this would help educate
and maybe bring some good to the sad state of affairs out there.
Think about it. If the dynamics of the industry don't change to make the
horrendous cost of building quality product affordable, than nobody will invest
in buiding it. Then you guys will be stuck with nothing but junk.
Do you really thing we were completely ignorant of watching where we were
spending money, knowing all along this was coming out of my pocket? Come-on
boy, get a grip. Several people and firms did not deliver what we had
contracted, and we were caught in the middle. I'm not saying Sir-tech or the
execs were always perfect, far from it in that my crystal ball is as good as
anybody elses and mistakes were made in picking who we should trust.
You know, I found it amusing reading the raves of one notorious individual on
this site. The fact is, that individual and his team cost us $300,000 when he
failed to deliver product. So we killed the project to stop the bleeding. Yet
he would have you believe we are sinister. Perhaps it was a rude attempt to
bring noteriety to himself. Well we will see how good his product really is - I
hope so for his sake otherwise he will be the laughing stock of the net. When
will some developers realize that when they have been commissioned to do work at
somebody elses expense that their customer they should cater to is the one
paying the expenses.
Mr. Liebl, do yourself a favor and invest your time in trying to bring about
positive change for the industry. This way you will see more great product from
publishers, rather than taking needless pot-shots at people who have invested
much time in trying to bring good to this industry. If you do want to debate it
publicly, at least know the subject you debate.
***
Cleve Blakemore:
16/10/98
Robert Sirotek <nos...@dejanews.com> wrote:
> I don't expect anybody to be sorry for us. The press article tried to
> demonstrate the difficulties that go on in this industry, more often than not
> completely out of view of game buying fans. I thought this would help educate
> and maybe bring some good to the sad state of affairs out there.
Robert, you and your brother Norman are poor businessmen, period. Your weak
rationalization and lame denials about what will go down in history as the
worst incompetence of all time is falling on deaf ears with people smart
enough to read between the lines.
The Wizardry series had to be the biggest cash cow in the computer game
industry - one would think it nearly impossible to go broke with a raw stream
of revenue like you had from this game. You and your brother fell
ass-backwards into money with this franchise and all you had to do was keep
feeding the beast and you would have been major players a long, long time ago
... instead of struggling hand-to-mouth for 18 years.
I understand you have to go on living with yourselves - I'd expect the feeble
complaints about "the big name publishers." The question remains ... how come
you and your brother were never "big name publishers?" You sold 5 MILLION
copies of Wizardry, Rob. 5 MILLION COPIES of this game. That is almost a
surreal quantity. How could anybody possibly fugg this up?
> Think about it. If the dynamics of the industry don't change to make the
> horrendous cost of building quality product affordable, than nobody will
invest
> in buiding it. Then you guys will be stuck with nothing but junk.
It is called creative destruction, Rob. I'm not going to give you an
education in market economics, so just trust me when I say it is all in the
natural order of things. It is inevitable that large, bloated inefficient
games companies will eventually topple from their own cumulative financial
waste and come to be replaced with small teams of craftsmen who work at very
tight margins to deliver excellent product. This is the case throughout the
software industry and not just in games development.
The distributors for the retail environment may always be gigantic
conglomerates. But the developers because of the risk and effort involved
will always have to be small independent satellites who pay most of their own
bills. The larger companies that have attempted in-house development with
mediocre people working according to big centralized schemes of organization
have failed miserably ... why did you think it would be any different for
you? Games development is a craft, not an engineering science. Ask IBM,
Netscape or Novell when was the last time they wrote quality software with
all their vast resources. What counts is brains and talent - money is of
little importance if you've got the Mhz upstairs.
I'd recommend THE MYTHOLOGICAL MAN-HOUR by Frederick Brooks to you, except it
would all be too little too late. Besides, I recommended it to you four years
ago and you didn't pay me any mind then either.
> Do you really thing we were completely ignorant of watching where we were
> spending money, knowing all along this was coming out of my pocket? Come-on
> boy, get a grip. Several people and firms did not deliver what we had
> contracted, and we were caught in the middle. I'm not saying Sir-tech or the
> execs were always perfect, far from it in that my crystal ball is as good as
> anybody elses and mistakes were made in picking who we should trust.
You were completely oblivious to where your capital was going - you had no
idea the Wiz 8 project in Australia was in trouble until I told you so. I
think you've been rewriting a lot of history in your head, but if you stop
and consider you'll have to admit that you've been altering the past in your
mind to pretend you were as cognizant of what you were doing wrong as I was.
You weren't ... you were downright sloppy and let things run off the rails
for years without auditing your teams to see what was going on in them.
But more on this in the next paragraph.
> You know, I found it amusing reading the raves of one notorious individual on
> this site. The fact is, that individual and his team cost us $300,000 when he
> failed to deliver product. So we killed the project to stop the bleeding.
Oh, I cost you $300,000, Robert? This is slander. I cost you $12,000 Rob. As
for the other $288,000 you spent, did you ask your Project Manager right in
front of my face what happened to it? What did he say? He shrugged and looked
sick and pale and sweaty, didn't he? Did he say "I gave it to Cleve?" OR did
he admit he really couldn't account for any of the money?
Was I ever given a checkbook? Of course not, I was a minor peon roundly
despised by the nearly all-homo design team. I was Cinderella, they were the
wicked stepsisters. I got no respect - I wasn't good enough to go to the
ball. I was told on more than one occasion I was lucky I was even getting
paid at all. When I was paid, my pathetic little $125 check was usually two
weeks late. Try to imagine that horror story with a wife to support and rent
to pay. You think I would go on welfare? How the hell do you think I worked
full time on your wacky project and managed to survive? How in god's name did
I ever get mixed up with you sick people and get into this dependent
situation?
Nobody ever bothered to talk to me about anything. I was expected to write
the actual game. They were mainly concerned with the important things; long
interminable meetings discussing the Gravis Ultrasound Card, masturbating
frantically on the living room floor and arguing the various merits of gerbil
versus hamster anal sex. Being far superior intellectually to mere heteros
like myself, they did not have to concern themselves with things involving
reality. Since their parent company indulged them freely in whatever demented
scheme they could come up with from one day to another, they did not have to
worry about constraints like money, time, experience, talent, effort,
consistency, deadlines, etc... this was all to be left to the hetero slave to
worry about.
Now Cleve Blakemore, the Senior Programmer, was making $125 a week U.S. which
by most standards is somewhat low for 20 hour days. But we do know that the
cross-dressing alcoholic who was Creative Director was being paid $4000 a
month U.S. for more than two years, right? So this explains where some of the
money went. Did the cross-dressing sugarcube-eating public masturbator and
his gay lover commission some $50,000+ worth of artwork from a graphics house
without any proper design spec six months before we had a user test and some
running code? Against the advice of both myself and the Systems Programmer?
Before we even knew what resolution or size any artwork should be in or even
had a real scenario document to outline what art was actually needed? I think
he did. Did the cross-dresser order our full-time artist to work for over six
months on character portraits scanned from gay pornographic magazines? I
think he did. What about the long hard work spent on animations of the
bumhole monsters or the giant throbbing penis creatures? How much did all
that cost? I think it cost a hell of a lot. I think a single frame of that
bumhole monster ended up costing more than I made in 3 months.
What about the $30,000+ spent on the "RPG maths expert" who was so loosely
supervised he was not contacted for nearly a half a year and when finally
reached could not produce any proof he had worked during that time? He
released his own MYST-style game about two weeks after he was fired?
If Cleve Blakemore came into the project after it had been underway for a
year when they had already spent $175,000 and these guys HAD produced NO
source code or engines, then went on to singlehandedly build a Wiz 7 clone
from scratch in XMode over the next 12 month which demoed at the Chicago
convention for a cost of $12,000 in salary ... is it really evidence of sober
perspective to decide this same individual is responsible for wasting your
money? I don't think so. I think Rob and Norm be illing in the belfry.
You killed the project to stop the bleeding? IT WAS MY IDEA TO TERMINATE THE
PROJECT, ROBERT. WHERE DO YOU GET THIS FROM? YOU ASKED ME IN FRONT OF TEN
WITNESSES WHAT YOU SHOULD DO WITH THE PROJECT. I TOLD YOU, I THINK YOU SHOULD
TERMINATE IT. IT IS THE WORST MESS I HAVE EVER SEEN. Oh no, don't give up on
it, you said, Cleve. Come to work for us in Ogdensberg and finish it here.
This was maybe the 6th time I had tried to resign and you BEGGED me to come
back. BEGGED ME to come back. The Project Manager almost started crying in a
public restaurant in May 1994 BEGGING ME not to resign, HOLDING MY HAND and
BEGGING ME to stay on. PLEASE CLEVE, DON'T LEAVE US. YOU'RE THE ONLY GOOD
THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO US. PLEASE DON'T LEAVE US. PLEASE, IF I THOUGHT
YOU WERE QUITTING I'D GIVE UP ALTOGETHER. Please CLEVE, don't leave us with
the cross-dressing sugar-cube sucking child-buggering psychotics, we'll be
doomed. PLEASE.
Four years later, your official story is I "cost you $300,000." This is why
you are out of business, Robert Sirotek. You and your brother stink at
recognizing and retaining talented people. Forget about the SGI and the FMV
and the Redbook Audio. You have had Andrew Greenberg, David Bradley and Cleve
Blakemore working for you in your 18 year history and you thought they were
all irrelevant, interchangable and no better or worse than any generic
programmer out there.
This is the Sir-Tech legacy. You had Cleve Blakemore sitting so close to you
that you could have reached out and TOUCHED him. Cleve Blakemore, no less, the
best computer RPG designer in the history of the Earth, probably our galaxy.
When you think about it, never forget this. You could have reached out and
TOUCHED me. This guy went off on his own time and built a superior game to Wiz
VII working part time for $940.18 in C++ and STL. Never forget this, Rob.
Rob, I make nearly a quarter a year as a software developer since I left Sir-
Tech. Why do you think people pay me this kind of money? Because I have a
nice smile? Or because my references say, "IF you want the best in Australia
and maybe on Earth, this is the right guy. Pay him whatever he asks, he's
worth it, trust me. This guy could write more code in an hour than most
people will write in a year. He's like a Zen master of software development."
I'm fickle, a prima donna and manifest a serious attitude problem at all
times. How do you think I get away with that and still pull down 8 large a
day? Because I'm just too damned good. You telling me you ever had ANYBODY
with that kind of market value working for you before? No way. You can't
afford somebody like me, I was fire from heaven. I was a blessing that fell
out of the clouds at Sir-Tech, you shouldn't even ask what you ever did right
to deserve to even sit with a serious powerhouse like me.
You and your brother had a chance to hire that kind of magic and put it to
work for you. You looked right AT the guy, you saw nothing. That about says
it all.
Guarantee you, go through one of those sliding doors like Gwyneth Paltrow and
somewhere Sir-Tech software is in the black and has a development monster
named C.M.B. at the Canadian Lab who pisses out three Wizardry scenarios a
year in the time it take most people to talk about creating a game. This guy,
combined with the Wizardry brand name, is like a force of nature. Sir-Tech
software sweeps the shelves every Christmas and kicks ass on it's competitors
like Bill Gates with an attitude. Too bad you and your brother never went
through that door, Rob. I see it in my mind's eye all the time. If you took
my brains and added it to your intellectual property, you guys would have
been the first games company in history to get dragged in front of a Senate
Committee and questioned about your "anti-competitive practices" in the
multimedia industry.
>Yet he would have you believe we are sinister. Perhaps it was a rude attempt to
> bring noteriety to himself.
Or a desire to warn other talented people to make sure nobody ever went
through what my wife and I did. That's all it was. I wanted to make sure
others knew about you.
> Well we will see how good his product really is - I
> hope so for his sake otherwise he will be the laughing stock of the net. When
> will some developers realize that when they have been commissioned to do work
at
> somebody elses expense that their customer they should cater to is the one
> paying the expenses.
We (me & the Systems Programmer) did nothing but cater to you and Norm. You
said 8 way step engine, we did it. You said smooth scrolling, we did it.
Mobile NPCs, done. Double heighth buildings, done. Navigate anywhere by
remote control, done. (Not as good as Grimoire by half, though) Unlock
critical after use, done. The more you saw, the more you decided what you
wanted really was something like HEXEN instead of Wizardry. That's not my
fault. In some quarters this is considered moving the goalposts, but hey, who
is nitpicking now? You had us by the balls with our white slavery contracts
anyway, so what could we do but comply?
We danced, shimmied, dodged and ducked like Mike Tyson on amphetamines. Design
spec changes every hour? No sweat, we're pros, watch us work. Cross-Dressers
insist all existing code be destroyed and replaced? Why not, we're fugging
supermen, we can rewrite it all by end of week anyway!
Shams? Mike loses more brain cells in a bowel movement than anybody who ever
worked at your company. Take a look at the graphics in ENEMY INFESTATION,
just out now. Shams could eat a roll of toilet paper and s**t the Unreal
Engine between breakfast and lunch. He's bad to the bone. He did his job, I
did mine. Who came up short? Not us, that's for sure. We did more programming
in 12 months than most games programmers will do in their lifetime to keep
you vague, confused and demented fools happy. Like me, Michael did the best
he could with an almost impossible situation.
> Mr. Liebl, do yourself a favor and invest your time in trying to bring about
> positive change for the industry. This way you will see more great product
from
> publishers, rather than taking needless pot-shots at people who have invested
> much time in trying to bring good to this industry. If you do want to debate
it
> publicly, at least know the subject you debate.
If you wanted to do good in the software industry, pay your authors the
royalties you owe them. Otherwise - good riddance, the world is a better place
without you.
> > Well...it was only a matter of time. Sirtech has been putting out more
> > tripe than decent product for years...read the news article at avault. I
> > got the impression we should be sorry for the Sirotek brothers...but from
> > what I read they totally botched managing the company's direction. They
> > should have stuck to their roots...created detailed RPGs. When they started
> > branching out to adventure games, action shooters, etc trying in essence to
> > land a lucky strike in the market without caring one bit what they were
.... everything Eric said was so spot on it was amazing, it was like he was
inside the company.
Truth is, Norman and Robert Sirotek were the LAST ones to know when Sir-Tech
went out of business. Everybody else knew you were on your way out a long,
long time ago.
***
The obvious solution is for felipepepe to write an article about why Sir Tech went bankrupt.
It will turn out "because mysogyny111".
Next up: thread moves to the Strong Museum.Why, that's like saying that moving the Mona Lisa to a museum makes it unviewable.
I'll give it to Robert, he got that part right.Well we will see how good his product really is - I hope so for his sake otherwise he will be the laughing stock of the net.
I think the only thing that thread is missing (as far as I recall, been a while since I read it) is Robert Sirotek's Usenet post from 1998 discussing the death of Sir-Tech - to which Cleve immediately responded with a brief sympathetic statement
Robert Sirotek:
16/10/98
Eric C. Liebl wrote:
> Well...it was only a matter of time. Sirtech has been putting out more
> tripe than decent product for years...read the news article at avault. I
> got the impression we should be sorry for the Sirotek brothers...but from
> what I read they totally botched managing the company's direction. They
> should have stuck to their roots...created detailed RPGs. When they started
> branching out to adventure games, action shooters, etc trying in essence to
> land a lucky strike in the market without caring one bit what they were
> marketing they shot their own foot off. Sirtech the publisher would still
> be around if paid heed to their core audience...and still be making money.
I don't expect anybody to be sorry for us. The press article tried to
demonstrate the difficulties that go on in this industry, more often than not
completely out of view of game buying fans. I thought this would help educate
and maybe bring some good to the sad state of affairs out there.
Think about it. If the dynamics of the industry don't change to make the
horrendous cost of building quality product affordable, than nobody will invest
in buiding it. Then you guys will be stuck with nothing but junk.
Do you really thing we were completely ignorant of watching where we were
spending money, knowing all along this was coming out of my pocket? Come-on
boy, get a grip. Several people and firms did not deliver what we had
contracted, and we were caught in the middle. I'm not saying Sir-tech or the
execs were always perfect, far from it in that my crystal ball is as good as
anybody elses and mistakes were made in picking who we should trust.
You know, I found it amusing reading the raves of one notorious individual on
this site. The fact is, that individual and his team cost us $300,000 when he
failed to deliver product. So we killed the project to stop the bleeding. Yet
he would have you believe we are sinister. Perhaps it was a rude attempt to
bring noteriety to himself. Well we will see how good his product really is - I
hope so for his sake otherwise he will be the laughing stock of the net. When
will some developers realize that when they have been commissioned to do work at
somebody elses expense that their customer they should cater to is the one
paying the expenses.
Mr. Liebl, do yourself a favor and invest your time in trying to bring about
positive change for the industry. This way you will see more great product from
publishers, rather than taking needless pot-shots at people who have invested
much time in trying to bring good to this industry. If you do want to debate it
publicly, at least know the subject you debate.
***
Cleve Blakemore:
16/10/98
Robert Sirotek <nos...@dejanews.com> wrote:
> I don't expect anybody to be sorry for us. The press article tried to
> demonstrate the difficulties that go on in this industry, more often than not
> completely out of view of game buying fans. I thought this would help educate
> and maybe bring some good to the sad state of affairs out there.
Robert, you and your brother Norman are poor businessmen, period. Your weak
rationalization and lame denials about what will go down in history as the
worst incompetence of all time is falling on deaf ears with people smart
enough to read between the lines.
The Wizardry series had to be the biggest cash cow in the computer game
industry - one would think it nearly impossible to go broke with a raw stream
of revenue like you had from this game. You and your brother fell
ass-backwards into money with this franchise and all you had to do was keep
feeding the beast and you would have been major players a long, long time ago
... instead of struggling hand-to-mouth for 18 years.
I understand you have to go on living with yourselves - I'd expect the feeble
complaints about "the big name publishers." The question remains ... how come
you and your brother were never "big name publishers?" You sold 5 MILLION
copies of Wizardry, Rob. 5 MILLION COPIES of this game. That is almost a
surreal quantity. How could anybody possibly fugg this up?
> Think about it. If the dynamics of the industry don't change to make the
> horrendous cost of building quality product affordable, than nobody will
invest
> in buiding it. Then you guys will be stuck with nothing but junk.
It is called creative destruction, Rob. I'm not going to give you an
education in market economics, so just trust me when I say it is all in the
natural order of things. It is inevitable that large, bloated inefficient
games companies will eventually topple from their own cumulative financial
waste and come to be replaced with small teams of craftsmen who work at very
tight margins to deliver excellent product. This is the case throughout the
software industry and not just in games development.
The distributors for the retail environment may always be gigantic
conglomerates. But the developers because of the risk and effort involved
will always have to be small independent satellites who pay most of their own
bills. The larger companies that have attempted in-house development with
mediocre people working according to big centralized schemes of organization
have failed miserably ... why did you think it would be any different for
you? Games development is a craft, not an engineering science. Ask IBM,
Netscape or Novell when was the last time they wrote quality software with
all their vast resources. What counts is brains and talent - money is of
little importance if you've got the Mhz upstairs.
I'd recommend THE MYTHOLOGICAL MAN-HOUR by Frederick Brooks to you, except it
would all be too little too late. Besides, I recommended it to you four years
ago and you didn't pay me any mind then either.
> Do you really thing we were completely ignorant of watching where we were
> spending money, knowing all along this was coming out of my pocket? Come-on
> boy, get a grip. Several people and firms did not deliver what we had
> contracted, and we were caught in the middle. I'm not saying Sir-tech or the
> execs were always perfect, far from it in that my crystal ball is as good as
> anybody elses and mistakes were made in picking who we should trust.
You were completely oblivious to where your capital was going - you had no
idea the Wiz 8 project in Australia was in trouble until I told you so. I
think you've been rewriting a lot of history in your head, but if you stop
and consider you'll have to admit that you've been altering the past in your
mind to pretend you were as cognizant of what you were doing wrong as I was.
You weren't ... you were downright sloppy and let things run off the rails
for years without auditing your teams to see what was going on in them.
But more on this in the next paragraph.
> You know, I found it amusing reading the raves of one notorious individual on
> this site. The fact is, that individual and his team cost us $300,000 when he
> failed to deliver product. So we killed the project to stop the bleeding.
Oh, I cost you $300,000, Robert? This is slander. I cost you $12,000 Rob. As
for the other $288,000 you spent, did you ask your Project Manager right in
front of my face what happened to it? What did he say? He shrugged and looked
sick and pale and sweaty, didn't he? Did he say "I gave it to Cleve?" OR did
he admit he really couldn't account for any of the money?
Was I ever given a checkbook? Of course not, I was a minor peon roundly
despised by the nearly all-homo design team. I was Cinderella, they were the
wicked stepsisters. I got no respect - I wasn't good enough to go to the
ball. I was told on more than one occasion I was lucky I was even getting
paid at all. When I was paid, my pathetic little $125 check was usually two
weeks late. Try to imagine that horror story with a wife to support and rent
to pay. You think I would go on welfare? How the hell do you think I worked
full time on your wacky project and managed to survive? How in god's name did
I ever get mixed up with you sick people and get into this dependent
situation?
Nobody ever bothered to talk to me about anything. I was expected to write
the actual game. They were mainly concerned with the important things; long
interminable meetings discussing the Gravis Ultrasound Card, masturbating
frantically on the living room floor and arguing the various merits of gerbil
versus hamster anal sex. Being far superior intellectually to mere heteros
like myself, they did not have to concern themselves with things involving
reality. Since their parent company indulged them freely in whatever demented
scheme they could come up with from one day to another, they did not have to
worry about constraints like money, time, experience, talent, effort,
consistency, deadlines, etc... this was all to be left to the hetero slave to
worry about.
Now Cleve Blakemore, the Senior Programmer, was making $125 a week U.S. which
by most standards is somewhat low for 20 hour days. But we do know that the
cross-dressing alcoholic who was Creative Director was being paid $4000 a
month U.S. for more than two years, right? So this explains where some of the
money went. Did the cross-dressing sugarcube-eating public masturbator and
his gay lover commission some $50,000+ worth of artwork from a graphics house
without any proper design spec six months before we had a user test and some
running code? Against the advice of both myself and the Systems Programmer?
Before we even knew what resolution or size any artwork should be in or even
had a real scenario document to outline what art was actually needed? I think
he did. Did the cross-dresser order our full-time artist to work for over six
months on character portraits scanned from gay pornographic magazines? I
think he did. What about the long hard work spent on animations of the
bumhole monsters or the giant throbbing penis creatures? How much did all
that cost? I think it cost a hell of a lot. I think a single frame of that
bumhole monster ended up costing more than I made in 3 months.
What about the $30,000+ spent on the "RPG maths expert" who was so loosely
supervised he was not contacted for nearly a half a year and when finally
reached could not produce any proof he had worked during that time? He
released his own MYST-style game about two weeks after he was fired?
If Cleve Blakemore came into the project after it had been underway for a
year when they had already spent $175,000 and these guys HAD produced NO
source code or engines, then went on to singlehandedly build a Wiz 7 clone
from scratch in XMode over the next 12 month which demoed at the Chicago
convention for a cost of $12,000 in salary ... is it really evidence of sober
perspective to decide this same individual is responsible for wasting your
money? I don't think so. I think Rob and Norm be illing in the belfry.
You killed the project to stop the bleeding? IT WAS MY IDEA TO TERMINATE THE
PROJECT, ROBERT. WHERE DO YOU GET THIS FROM? YOU ASKED ME IN FRONT OF TEN
WITNESSES WHAT YOU SHOULD DO WITH THE PROJECT. I TOLD YOU, I THINK YOU SHOULD
TERMINATE IT. IT IS THE WORST MESS I HAVE EVER SEEN. Oh no, don't give up on
it, you said, Cleve. Come to work for us in Ogdensberg and finish it here.
This was maybe the 6th time I had tried to resign and you BEGGED me to come
back. BEGGED ME to come back. The Project Manager almost started crying in a
public restaurant in May 1994 BEGGING ME not to resign, HOLDING MY HAND and
BEGGING ME to stay on. PLEASE CLEVE, DON'T LEAVE US. YOU'RE THE ONLY GOOD
THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO US. PLEASE DON'T LEAVE US. PLEASE, IF I THOUGHT
YOU WERE QUITTING I'D GIVE UP ALTOGETHER. Please CLEVE, don't leave us with
the cross-dressing sugar-cube sucking child-buggering psychotics, we'll be
doomed. PLEASE.
Four years later, your official story is I "cost you $300,000." This is why
you are out of business, Robert Sirotek. You and your brother stink at
recognizing and retaining talented people. Forget about the SGI and the FMV
and the Redbook Audio. You have had Andrew Greenberg, David Bradley and Cleve
Blakemore working for you in your 18 year history and you thought they were
all irrelevant, interchangable and no better or worse than any generic
programmer out there.
This is the Sir-Tech legacy. You had Cleve Blakemore sitting so close to you
that you could have reached out and TOUCHED him. Cleve Blakemore, no less, the
best computer RPG designer in the history of the Earth, probably our galaxy.
When you think about it, never forget this. You could have reached out and
TOUCHED me. This guy went off on his own time and built a superior game to Wiz
VII working part time for $940.18 in C++ and STL. Never forget this, Rob.
Rob, I make nearly a quarter a year as a software developer since I left Sir-
Tech. Why do you think people pay me this kind of money? Because I have a
nice smile? Or because my references say, "IF you want the best in Australia
and maybe on Earth, this is the right guy. Pay him whatever he asks, he's
worth it, trust me. This guy could write more code in an hour than most
people will write in a year. He's like a Zen master of software development."
I'm fickle, a prima donna and manifest a serious attitude problem at all
times. How do you think I get away with that and still pull down 8 large a
day? Because I'm just too damned good. You telling me you ever had ANYBODY
with that kind of market value working for you before? No way. You can't
afford somebody like me, I was fire from heaven. I was a blessing that fell
out of the clouds at Sir-Tech, you shouldn't even ask what you ever did right
to deserve to even sit with a serious powerhouse like me.
You and your brother had a chance to hire that kind of magic and put it to
work for you. You looked right AT the guy, you saw nothing. That about says
it all.
Guarantee you, go through one of those sliding doors like Gwyneth Paltrow and
somewhere Sir-Tech software is in the black and has a development monster
named C.M.B. at the Canadian Lab who pisses out three Wizardry scenarios a
year in the time it take most people to talk about creating a game. This guy,
combined with the Wizardry brand name, is like a force of nature. Sir-Tech
software sweeps the shelves every Christmas and kicks ass on it's competitors
like Bill Gates with an attitude. Too bad you and your brother never went
through that door, Rob. I see it in my mind's eye all the time. If you took
my brains and added it to your intellectual property, you guys would have
been the first games company in history to get dragged in front of a Senate
Committee and questioned about your "anti-competitive practices" in the
multimedia industry.
>Yet he would have you believe we are sinister. Perhaps it was a rude attempt to
> bring noteriety to himself.
Or a desire to warn other talented people to make sure nobody ever went
through what my wife and I did. That's all it was. I wanted to make sure
others knew about you.
> Well we will see how good his product really is - I
> hope so for his sake otherwise he will be the laughing stock of the net. When
> will some developers realize that when they have been commissioned to do work
at
> somebody elses expense that their customer they should cater to is the one
> paying the expenses.
We (me & the Systems Programmer) did nothing but cater to you and Norm. You
said 8 way step engine, we did it. You said smooth scrolling, we did it.
Mobile NPCs, done. Double heighth buildings, done. Navigate anywhere by
remote control, done. (Not as good as Grimoire by half, though) Unlock
critical after use, done. The more you saw, the more you decided what you
wanted really was something like HEXEN instead of Wizardry. That's not my
fault. In some quarters this is considered moving the goalposts, but hey, who
is nitpicking now? You had us by the balls with our white slavery contracts
anyway, so what could we do but comply?
We danced, shimmied, dodged and ducked like Mike Tyson on amphetamines. Design
spec changes every hour? No sweat, we're pros, watch us work. Cross-Dressers
insist all existing code be destroyed and replaced? Why not, we're fugging
supermen, we can rewrite it all by end of week anyway!
Shams? Mike loses more brain cells in a bowel movement than anybody who ever
worked at your company. Take a look at the graphics in ENEMY INFESTATION,
just out now. Shams could eat a roll of toilet paper and s**t the Unreal
Engine between breakfast and lunch. He's bad to the bone. He did his job, I
did mine. Who came up short? Not us, that's for sure. We did more programming
in 12 months than most games programmers will do in their lifetime to keep
you vague, confused and demented fools happy. Like me, Michael did the best
he could with an almost impossible situation.
> Mr. Liebl, do yourself a favor and invest your time in trying to bring about
> positive change for the industry. This way you will see more great product
from
> publishers, rather than taking needless pot-shots at people who have invested
> much time in trying to bring good to this industry. If you do want to debate
it
> publicly, at least know the subject you debate.
If you wanted to do good in the software industry, pay your authors the
royalties you owe them. Otherwise - good riddance, the world is a better place
without you.
> > Well...it was only a matter of time. Sirtech has been putting out more
> > tripe than decent product for years...read the news article at avault. I
> > got the impression we should be sorry for the Sirotek brothers...but from
> > what I read they totally botched managing the company's direction. They
> > should have stuck to their roots...created detailed RPGs. When they started
> > branching out to adventure games, action shooters, etc trying in essence to
> > land a lucky strike in the market without caring one bit what they were
.... everything Eric said was so spot on it was amazing, it was like he was
inside the company.
Truth is, Norman and Robert Sirotek were the LAST ones to know when Sir-Tech
went out of business. Everybody else knew you were on your way out a long,
long time ago.
***
Holy shit, what is Rob's reply to Cleve?
Has anybody accused you of having sex with his wife yet? I thought at one point all Sir-Tech employees were accused of having sex with somebody's wife there, it is par for the course. Be patient, there is a waiting list and he will eventually get around to you. No matter how improbable, you will eventually be subjected to paranoid ranting about having sex with his wife. When the Wiz 8 project in Australia was going down the toilet, the guy could care less. The only thing that seemed to interest him was establishing who had sex with his wife and when. Nobody had sex with this guy's wife, he's a nutjob.
but you are free to DREAM about what it would be
like to have a library of modular, reusuable C++ code with infinite scope
for expansion and reuse over the next 25 years for RPG games.
Cleveland Mark Blakemore, thoughts on the possibility of some of Max Phipps' finest work being lost to a shredder for all eternity?
The bunker is the first priority.Well that took a while. Guess all the work going into Grimoire takes precedence.