Many of you who have come to know me have done so after 2019, or at least late therein. This is about just before then, and maybe the formative years of General Grizwald Gaius Grim and probably the second thing I’d pitch if I had an Angel Investor in the room… but the first image I’ll give you is new: the latest trading-card image of me in the game we’re playing today.
A quick jaunt through my timeline shows the highlights of escaping this geography in Easter of ‘18, all “Call to Abraham’d” up on Jordan Peterson. When an old roommate offered me a cheap room up in Portland, Oregon (PDX), I jumped at the chance. Whilst there, I suspended my disbelief, became a YouTube Truther and had a phone interview with a D-List celebrity who has since apparently died under mysterious circumstances. I had considered that poking into darkness would result in jeopardy to those I care about, but I told myself that was between them and God.
Then grandma had a bad bowl of chili at Bingo, and they called me back to Oklahoma.
It was during the drive back here that the notion for Paintball for Jesus (PB4J) really crystallized in my mind. I was still in Truther-mode, which can be summed up as the mode you go into when you first start acknowledging the Darkness below the surface of things and think if only the right people knew, someone would do something…
In other words, people who are about to figure out what this meme means:
… and if I could get the Churches to help pull kids out of videogames and prep them for urban combat, when the Truth did come out we’d have the men to deal with it. Grandma held on until just after Christmas.
Disenfranchised but still enmeshed in the ‘Truther Community,’ I quit avoiding those LARPing villains therein. By June, one had run a clip of the first Webb I’d run into online that was my final exit key to that particular knowledge compartment.
I had already backslid into JumpGate though, having found an old Force Feedback 2 Joystick on eBay, and by February was already trying to save that game Universe again:
Unless I’m misremembering, I had found JumpGate in the mid-to-late nineties, while everyone was still on dial-up. Massive Multiplayer Gaming was just emerging as a thing, Everquest Online perhaps the flagship of the time. Fortunes were being made and lost as the dot-com bubble filled and popped. I had fallen in with my second gaming group in the good ole edition of Crimson Skies, having developed a joystick fetish my from my time in X-wing vs. Tie Fighter and that space sim classic Privateer. One of the fellas had found JumpGate still in Beta, and that meant free.
I was a Wal-Mart Associate getting an Associates degree in Computer Science at the local community college, and leaving the house wasn’t often in the budget. This made Internet gaming, particularly at $10 a month, the most viable off-work entertainment mainstay. So, when the game finally found a dying publisher (3DO) and went live, I kept flying.
In the beta I learned how much sway we lowly players could have over development of a game if we found it early, and after launch I did several college credits’ worth of online debating - the fun kind when you think that guy’s tub-girl link is part of his argument.
The story of Netdevil, the company that birthed JumpGate, is worthy of a documentary. The quick and dirty legend is that some coders at a database company that played Starcraft together saw the movie Office Space, and started building JumpGate in their basement.
After publishing, the went to work on what essentially would be the expansion pack (allegedly to please the publishers), and it changed everything. Why JG is both the oldest and best MMO I’ve ever played is that the jackasses wove the fact they were building it from the ground up into the storyline. The JumpGate universe was one recovering from a great collapse, and the only storyline was player LARP.
This far out, an entry from a Stolen Journal of a God Emperor echoes in my head: “I took away their ability to participate in history.” JumpGate was the opposite. What the players were doing was history.
All during development each feature being added was a competition amongst the three space-faring factions, at least to see who got the new toy first. Meanwhile, what the next toy would be was being argued for on the game forums. Episode II changed that, rumors and waiting for a game with no storyline - and which the level ramp was linear. The best gear was the highest level gear.
After Episode II was released and introduced the much requested POS (Player Owned Stations), what was left of most hope fell apart. The piss-poor implementation of player station markets killed the group squad factional warfare that came from all the different squads launching from the faction stations. Now the squads looted the faction stations, the sole producer of ship equipment you had to replace at every death, and capitalists would put their POS in the same sector as the station, empty it’s shelves and sell it at a markup.
The majority of the Dev team went on to NetDevil’s next creation, Auto Assault. They put the maintenance and future development of ole JG into the hands of player-turned-coder, GM_Istvan. Meanwhile the vaporware whispers of JG2 trickled down. Under Istvan, our goal was supposedly to keep JG alive long enough for JG2 to launch - but the beast JG2 was aiming to be showed a demonstrable misunderstanding of what made JG great.
Meanwhile, when the ole thing was holding together well enough, Istvan was teaching himself how to fix the spaghetti code - but he listened to us. Little things like: a level 50 fella should have a reason to fly a light-fighter, which resulted in a rebalancing of combat that made it practically assessable to all pilots. I never did get them to put turrets on the mining and hauling ships though, despite the Mad Max space they were operating in.
While JG2 never came to be, NetDevil managed to score the contract to make Lego Universe. Somehow, Lego Universe wasn’t MineCraft… and then MineCraft was. Apparently someone did make a documentary of that:
By 2019, the BitCoin phenomenon was a phenoma, and the ‘crypto’ space (jinxed name if I ever heard one) seemed to be where a great deal of creative coding energy was going. The censorship on the Corporate Press platforms was starting to heat up, and the crypto-social sites offered the “stored forever on the decentralized blockchain” promise of Truth-Seeking communications.
The crypto shills are no stranger to even This Little Corner, and they run a lot thicker in communities rumored to be chock-full of grifters and shills. As such, I was exploring one such crypto-social platform in 2019, when I saw crypto as one more chance to try and save the universe I forged my character in.
Essentially, what crypto-investors are looking for is volatile markets. A space-combat video game is a damn volatile market. One known for catastrophic collapse allows for semi-predictable calamity, the kind an investor can bet on. The catastrophic nature of the universe allows for a unique history of each collapse. Writing the code for the game as it is to be after the next collapse is something the player factions can support through crypto investments and in-game warfare.
As a Player in 2019, I was playing as a GM. I was running mysterious characters and turned a whole sector of space into a combat arena. There’s rumored to be footage on Facebook. My retreat into trying to save that old universe again felt like cope after the loss of my grandma.
I was sporadically working with the Sorting Myself Out YouTube channel at the time, but many hours were spent running character’s in the Universe where I could make a difference.
It’s running on a Russian server now (allegedly), with a volunteer game master trying to turn the malfunctioning code into storyline. We were peaking at 8 to 12 players in 2019. It’s hard to imagine it’s not peaking around 3 these days…
… but a piece of game lore resurfaced in my consciousness - or perhaps was placed there by my conscience. It escaped from me in a Livestream:
…and I past-authored the story of “I am a Weapon” therein. On the precipice of this backslide, I see how the tale has awoken the draw - to fly amongst the skybox stars again. Aren’t we almost to the point where I can feed an AI the client code and have it create the server-side code I’ll need to shape the universe into what it could be?
That I’m approaching July 2nd, when my YT community strikes fall off and I’m “eligible” to submit my channel for monetization review, and that I fully expect them to terminate the channel as a result of that review, is perhaps also what is pushing me to fly again.
It was awfully strange, however, that I got the coveted “rando slot” of Pastor Paul VanderKlay the same day I last ragequit dear ole JumpGate.
On the other hand… I never did throw the ole Force Feedback 2 Away… and I think I’ve said most of what I have to say to ‘This Little Corner’ - cause it’s all stuff they don’t have ears to hear.
Play-by-mail games like Illuminati and Starweb were my forte - and the physical games from Steve Jackson spent much spare time effectively. Somehow it seems that LARPs originated from basic games that were used to pass time - the opposite of saving time. Since time runs eternal, i have yet to find anyone that has saved time on anything, but i thank those people who spent time saving thyme and i relish the wisdom saving throw. Nice post, my friend.