Tag: Gamasutra

“Any one of you in this industry who hires either one of these will get what you pay for. Just don’t bother asking *anyone* at QOL for a reference.”
-Derek Smart, Quest Online, on ex-employees  Hue Henry and Jason Blood

I’ve been following Derek Smart for a long time, even before he threw up a bloody coup that ousted David Allen from Quest Online LLC, because the more I read this guy’s text, the more I see a creepy Christian Bale aura around him. I mentioned in an article so fresh I can smell the ink, that Derek Smart took no time after his entrance to publicly slam David Allen and remind everyone that, no, he did not depart on good terms.

Derek Smart can be found commenting and blogging on Gamasutra, and if you click on the link you can read his comments (I have a few snippets here.) and get a good idea to the man’s character. Of course, Smart started off with:

“It was nothing personal nor was it designed to embarass anyone.”
-Derek Smart, Quest Online, on comments made over David Allen

Hopefully I’m not the only one who immediately thought of the, “I’m not racist but…” comment that always ends in racism, because in the link to the comments page I provided, Derek Smart takes absolutely no time pounding ex-employees Hue Henry and Jason Blood into the floor.

Jason (#2) and Hue (#3) were the two others, including David who started this co and ran it straight into the ground.
-Derek Smart, Quest Online LLC, on ex-employees Hue Henry, Jason Blood, and David Allen

Not a single one of these three had any meaningful experience developing games, let alone *shipping* a game – any game for that matter – yet, they blew through four years and millions on the most difficult genre to develop for: an MMO
-Derek Smart, Quest Online LLC, on ex-employees Hue Henry, Jason Blood, and David Allen

Now, Derek Smart’s career wasn’t always about insulting ex-employees. In fact, we’re going to jump back a long time ago (ten years) to the days of Usenet, where Derek Smart took the role of insulting his customers and not only getting into frequent, and well publicized, flame wars but encouraging and inciting them. I’ve edited some of the content for profanity, mostly because I just did an article on Fusion Fall today, and there will likely be chillins about.

Typical bull**** from a moron with ***t for brains. While we're
at it, you are so wrapped up in the twisted, warped lies, that
you've taken it further and started inventing your own ***t.
Where on the ****ing box did it say that BC3K had internet play?

What I do with my time, *Rob*, is no concern of yours. Mind
your business and I'll mind mine and until you tell us what
you've done with your time in the past four years, shut the
**** up because I don't remember anyone asking you for an opinion.

I already told UK owners to ditch their version and get the US copies.
I told EVERYONE that the UK version would NOT be complete. I still have
those messages. I even did a press release about it. So assholes go out
and buy the UK version so they can flame and abuse me some more.
**** 'em, it's their Quid. I'm not getting paid anyway so
what have I got to lose? UK owners who genuinely did not know what was
going on, sent me e-mail and I told them to return it and get the US
version.

Granted, this article isn’t completely about Derek Smart, or his microscopic fuse, because a lot of what he says has merit to it:

“You guys got the money, the game wasn’t ready and it ended up being a disaster when launched on Dec 1st. In the end after I was brought in, we ended up tagging it a “soft launch” in order to soften the blow of that disaster you guys created.

Then less than a mointh later, David was demoted. Yet, you guys KEPT ADDING STUFF TO THE GAME INSTEAD OF FINISHING IT. I was asked to take over – in a contract that David signed with the investors to make it happen.

Behind my back and against my authority, instead of FINISHING and FIXING the game, you guys kept ADDING to it. As I type this, the team are still working their way through UNFINISHED stuff that YOU left behind.”

David Allen is not an innocent bird in all of this mess, shockingly attempting to sign off Alganon to another company, as Smart points out:

“The day we found out – quite by accident – that Truegames had a team down in Chandler evaluating the game that David – even though he was told weeks before NOT TO DO IT – was trying to sign to them for pennies on the dolalr (a fire sale designed to cut the investors out and leave them hanging) – was the day I sent Jeff Luhan (who clearly had no idea what he was stepping into) a strongly worded email notifying him that David had no authority to act in that capacity on behalf of QOL and that we had NO interest in giving the game to them. He called his team back immediately. We fired David. An emergency session of the investors was then called.”

“During all this, while he was complaining about not having enough money to operate, he was negotiating a buy out of his remaining shares in a ploy to abandon the team (who worked hard to make this game) and the company. We have all the emails and letters he was passing around the investors in order to get a golden parachute OUT of the company and AHEAD of the Mar 1st disaster he knew was going to come. I put a stop to that when I told the investors not to give him a dime and that the QOL team needed the money a lot more than Dave Allen did. Of course they listened to me.”

“Jason is lucky that QOL hasn’t decided to file a criminal complaint or take legal action. Yet.”

Given Mr. Smart’s pension for saying what is on his mind, coupled with the undoubtable stress of “dealing with the investors, getting the team on track, dealing with the police, the FBI (!), the banks, the attorneys (no less than three law firms to be exact) etc over this farce,” I don’t think you will find many people who are not stressed to the point of breaking.

So here we stand…er, sit. Alganon, for all intent and purpose, has become without a doubt, the biggest MMO soap opera of 2010. When the game does fully launch, all we can do is sit back and hope that the drama is over now that Allen, Blood, and Henry are gone from the company.

But for all that this spat on Gamasutra has done, Smart and Blood may have just as well been standing in a corridor calling each other “doodoo head,” because mud slinging in a public domain almost always results in neither side looking good, following the tirade of unprofessional, immature jabs and gotchas. Perhaps it was in Smart’s best interest to stop at “David Allen was fired,” because I’m not certain if Smart thinks public spats like this make him look edgy and cool, but in the words of the late George Carlin;

“You ain’t cool, you’re chilly. And chilly ain’t never been cool.”

This is MMO Fallout, and I can only apologize to anyone who disliked reading this as much as I disliked writing it.