Technology, Gaming, and Humor from the school of twisted perspective, a Fearsome Force, Two like-minded individuals born and raised on sprinkled megabits in corn flakes, taking 8-bit mega shits, and coming to the conclusion that the world better take a turn for the better before we all take a turn for the worse.
On the last day, they gathered for a group photo. They were videogame programmers, artists, level builders, artificial-intelligence experts. Their team was — finally — giving up, declaring defeat, and disbanding. So they headed down to the lobby of their building in Garland, Texas, to smile for the camera. They arranged themselves on top of their logo: a 10-foot-wide nuclear-radiation sign, inlaid in the marble floor.
To videogame fans, that logo is instantly recognizable. It’s the insignia of Duke Nukem 3D, a computer game that revolutionized shoot-’em-up virtual violence in 1996. Featuring a swaggering, steroidal, wisecracking hero, Duke Nukem 3D became one of the top-selling videogames ever, making its creators very wealthy and leaving fans absolutely delirious for a sequel. The team quickly began work on that sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, and it became one of the most hotly anticipated games of all time.
It was never completed. Screenshots and video snippets would leak out every few years, each time whipping fans into a lather — and each time, the game would recede from view. Normally, videogames take two to four years to build; five years is considered worryingly long. But the Duke Nukem Forever team worked for 12 years straight. As one patient fan pointed out, when development on Duke Nukem Forever started, most computers were still using Windows 95, Pixar had made only one movie — Toy Story — and Xbox did not yet exist.
On May 6, 2009, everything ended. Drained of funds after so many years of work, the game’s developer, 3D Realms, told its employees to collect their stuff and put it in boxes. The next week, the company was sued for millions by its publisher for failing to finish the sequel.
Front and center in the photo sits a large guy with a boyish face. You can’t tell from the picture, but he had gotten choked up when he made the announcement. His name is George Broussard, co-owner of 3D Realms and the man who headed the Duke Nukem Forever project for its entire 12-year run. Now 46 years old, he’d spent much of his adult life trying to make a single game, and failed over and over again. What happened to that project has been shrouded in secrecy, and rumors have flown about why Broussard couldn’t manage to finish his life’s work. What went so wrong?
This is what happened.
Broussard would not talk to Wired for this story. He was polite about it, but because his firm is being sued over its failure to complete Duke Nukem Forever, he declined to be interviewed, as did his cofounder and partner, Scott Miller. Broussard also emailed his former employees to warn them not to talk; many refused my requests, often because they remain friends with Broussard.
But enough were willing to discuss the game — almost all anonymously — that a picture began to emerge, aided by Broussard’s and Miller’s prodigious postings on discussion boards and a handful of public interviews.
Broussard and Miller met in the late ’70s in Dallas, during Miller’s senior year of high school. They would hang out in the computer lab, programming clunky 2-D and text-adventure games. When Miller was in his twenties, he invented the shareware model of selling games and formed his company, Apogee (which started going by 3D Realms in 1994): He’d break a game into chunks, release it for free on BBSes, get people addicted, and then charge them for the remaining parts. By 1990, he was publishing and marketing titles created by others. He quit his day job and brought Broussard on. They were a study in contrasts: Miller, guarded and quiet, became the savvy business dealer, while Broussard — a voluble, energetic, ponytailed presence who carried around a single notebook as his organizational tool — became the creative impresario, famous for an unerring sense of what was fun. In 1992, the duo published Wolfenstein 3D, created by a then tiny studio called id Software. It was the first game to let players run around a 3-D first-person environment shooting enemies, and it became a breakout hit, selling 200,000 copies. 3D Realms went from being a $25,000-a-month startup to a $200,000-a-month corporation. The realistic, lead-spewing shoot-’em-up was born.
By 1994, Broussard began concocting his own breakout game — one that would upend the conventions of the fledgling genre. Where other titles were gloomy and self-important, his would be brassy, colorful, and funny. Instead of playing as a faceless marine, gamers would play as Duke Nukem, “a combo of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Arnold,” as Broussard described him. Broussard and Miller assembled a seven-person team to build the product. The pair had a knack for discovering talent: One of their recruits was a 17-year-old programmer from Rhode Island — barely out of high school — who created their game engine, the crucial piece of software that displays the 3-D world for the player. After a year and a half of work, Duke Nukem 3D was released online in January 1996.
Sales were explosive. The game was addictively fun and crammed with racy humor, including strippers you could tip (at which point they’d flash their pixelated boobs) and mutant pigs dressed in LAPD-like uniforms. Critics went fairly mad with praise. In most games, the world was static, but Duke Nukem players could interact with objects — they could get Duke to play pool or admire himself in a mirror (”Damn, I’m looking good!” he’d say). The title sold about 3.5 million copies, making Miller and Broussard straightforwardly wealthy.
In April 1997, Broussard announced a follow-up: Duke Nukem Forever, which he promised would outdo the original in humor, interactivity, and fun. The firm set no formal deadline, but Miller predicted the game would be out within about a year, “well before” Christmas 1998. “We see Duke Nukem as a franchise that will be around 30 years from now, like James Bond,” Miller told a gaming site. Broussard compared Duke to Nintendo’s Mario — a character that would star in title after title, year after year.
But the cycle that would demolish Duke Nukem was about to begin.
Broussard (front row, center) and the 3D Realms team on their last day.
Part of what caught Broussard off guard was the sheer speed at which videogames were improving. In the late ’90s, the processing speed of computer chips exploded, so each year programmers were releasing more and more powerful game engines — able to handle increasingly lifelike graphics, more enemies onscreen at a time, smarter artificial intelligence, and more objects that could be destroyed.
This ignited an arms race in game development. When Duke Nukem 3D came out, Broussard’s Duke Nukem engine — called Build — produced the best-looking game around. Barely a year later, though, it looked antiquated. Broussard’s key rival in the Dallas gaming scene, id Software, had announced its Quake II engine, which produced graphics that made Build seem blocky and crude. Broussard decided to license the Quake II engine, figuring it would save him precious time; programming an engine from scratch can take years. Though 3D Realms never confirmed how much it paid for the license — Miller referred to it as “a truckload of money” on a gaming news site — the price was said to be as high as $500,000. When the engine was released in December 1997, Broussard’s team quickly began creating game levels, monsters, and weapons around it.
Epic Fail
It was supposed to be the blockbuster sequel to Duke Nukem 3D. Instead, Duke Nukem Forever became the biggest videogame that never was. A few key milestones. —Benj Edwards
Jan 1996 Duke Nukem 3D is released. The sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, is announced in April 1997.
Nov 1997 3D Realms shows off early DNF screenshots, targeting a mid- to late-1998 release using the Quake II engine.
May 1998 Trailer for DNF is shown at videogame industry convention E3. Fans and critics rave.
May 1999 The game isn’t shown at E3. Broussard says, “We’re sick of jumping through pointless PR hoops.”
May 2001 3D Realms releases its first video in years. “No, this is not some kind of sick joke,” the company Web site says.
May 2003 Publisher Take-Two Interactive says DNF will not come out in 2003; blames its financial difficulties on ongoing delays.
Dec 2008 3D Realms releases a new desktop wallpaper image of DNF.
May 2009 3D Realms shuts down internal development. Take-Two sues.
By May 1998, the team had created enough material to show off at E3, the annual videogame industry convention. Duke Nukem Forever was set in Vegas; in the game’s plot, Duke operates a strip club and then has to fight off invading aliens. Broussard showed a trailer featuring a dozen different scenes, including Duke fighting on the back of a moving truck, jet airplanes crashing, and furious firefights with aliens. Critics were awed: “It sets a new benchmark for making a 3-D game more like a Hollywood movie,” Newsday proclaimed. Broussard was clearly obsessed with making his product as aesthetically appealing as possible. When he brought a few journalists over to a computer to show off bits of the game, he pointed out the way you could see individual wrinkles on characters’ faces and mused over how to make his campfire more realistic. (”As soon as we mix in some white smoke and some black smoke, I think we’ll be there,” he said.)
Behind the scenes, though, Broussard was already unhappy with the results and was craving better technology. A few months after the Quake II engine was released, another competitor, Epic MegaGames, unveiled a rival engine called Unreal. Its graphics were more realistic still, and Unreal was better suited to crafting wide-open spaces. 3D Realms was struggling mightily to get Quake II to render the open desert around Las Vegas. One evening just after E3, while the team sat together, a programmer threw out a bombshell: Maybe they should switch to Unreal? “The room got quiet for a moment,” Broussard recalled. Switching engines again seemed insane — it would cost another massive wad of money and require them to scrap much of the work they’d done.
But Broussard decided to make the change. Only weeks after he showed off Duke Nukem Forever, he stunned the gaming industry by announcing the shift to the Unreal engine. “It was effectively a reboot of the project in many respects,” Chris Hargrove, then one of the game’s programmers, told me (though he agreed with the decision). Broussard soon began pushing for even more and cooler game-building tools: He ripped out the ceiling of a room at the 3D Realms office to assemble a motion-capture lab, which would help his team in rendering “complex motions like strippers,” he noted on the 3D Realms Web site.
Broussard simply couldn’t tolerate the idea of Duke Nukem Forever coming out with anything other than the latest and greatest technology and awe-inspiring gameplay. He didn’t just want it to be good. It had to surpass every other game that had ever existed, the same way the original Duke Nukem 3D had.
But because the technology kept getting better, Broussard was on a treadmill. He’d see a new game with a flashy graphics technique and demand the effect be incorporated into Duke Nukem Forever. “One day George started pushing for snow levels,” recalls a developer who worked on Duke Nukem Forever for several years starting in 2000. Why? “He had seen The Thing” — a new game based on the horror movie of the same name, set in the snowbound Antarctic — “and he wanted it.” The staff developed a running joke: If a new title comes out, don’t let George see it. When the influential shoot-’em-up Half-Life debuted in 1998, it opened with a famously interactive narrative sequence in which the player begins his workday in a laboratory, overhearing a coworker’s conversation that slowly sets a mood of dread. The day after Broussard played it, an employee told me, the cofounder walked into the office saying, “Oh my God, we have to have that in Duke Nukem Forever.”
“George’s genius was realizing where games were going and taking it to the next level,” says Paul Schuytema, who worked for Broussard and Miller heading up the development of Prey, another 3D Realms title. “That was his sword and his Achilles’ heel. He’d rather throw himself on his sword and kill himself than have the game be bad.” By the end of 1999, after blowing several publicly proclaimed release dates, Duke Nukem Forever was nowhere near completion. Half the weapons were still just sketches, and when a new version of the Unreal engine was announced — one designed for live, multiplayer online battles — once again Broussard opted to upgrade. Worse, former employees say, he did not appear to have an endgame — an overall plan for what the finished product would look like, and thus a way to recognize when it was nearing completion. “I remember being very impressed by the features. It was incredibly cool technology,” says the developer hired in 2000. “But it wasn’t a game.” It was like a series of tech demos “in a very chaotic state.”
It’s a dilemma all artists confront, of course. When do you stop creating and send your work out to face the public? Plenty of Hollywood directors have delayed for months, dithering in the editing room. But in videogames, the problem is particularly acute, because the longer you delay, the more genuinely antiquated your product begins to look — and the more likely it is that you’ll need to rip things down and start again. All game designers know this, so they pick a point to stop improving — to “lock the game down” — and then spend a frantic year polishing. But Broussard never seemed willing to do that.
Mike Wilson, a former games marketer with id Software and 15-year veteran of the industry, suspects that Broussard was paralyzed by the massive success of Duke Nukem 3D. “When Duke came out, they were kings of the world for a minute,” Wilson says. “And how often does that happen? How often does someone have the best thing in their field, absolutely? They basically got frozen in that moment.”
Broussard was also cursed with money.
Normally, game developers don’t have much cash. Like rock bands seeking a label to help pay for the cost of recording an album, game developers usually find a publisher to give them an advance in exchange for a big slice of the profits. But Broussard and Miller didn’t need to do this. 3D Realms was flush with cash; on top of the massive Duke Nukem 3D sales, they had other products that were selling briskly, including several add-on packs for Duke Nukem 3D that they’d outsourced to another developer. (They even licensed their Build engine for a dozen games, bringing in more dough.)
So when Broussard and Miller began work on Duke Nukem Forever, they decided to fund its development themselves. They arranged for a publisher, GT Interactive, to help with marketing and physically shipping the CDs, but they took only a tiny $400,000 advance. (Later, Take-Two Interactive — famous for publishing the Grand Theft Auto games — bought the rights from GT Interactive and became the publisher for Duke Nukem Forever.)
Other game developers envied the freedom that Broussard and Miller had, at least at first. Developers and their publishers, indeed, are often at war. It’s like many suits-versus-creatives relationships: Developers want to make their product superb, and the publishers just want it on the shelves as soon as possible. If the game starts getting delayed, it’s the publisher that cracks the whip. Broussard and Miller were free to thumb their noses at this entire system. Indeed, they even posted gleeful rants online about the evil of publishers and their deadlines. “When it’s done” became their defiant reply whenever someone asked when Duke Nukem Forever would be finished. They even criticized their publisher viciously in public. In 2003, Take-Two CEO Jeffrey Lapin complained to analysts that Duke Nukem Forever was so late he had begun writing it off as a loss, and he predicted it wouldn’t be out anytime soon. Broussard erupted. “Take-Two needs to STFU,” he hissed in a dicussion-board posting, using the well-known shorthand for “shut the fuck up.” “We don’t want Take-Two saying stupid-ass things in public for the sole purposes of helping their stock,” Broussard continued. “It’s our time and our money we are spending on the game. So either we’re absolutely stupid and clueless, or we believe in what we are working on.”
Yet the truth is, Broussard’s financial freedom had cut him off from all discipline. He could delay making the tough calls, seemingly forever. “One day, Broussard came in and said, ‘We could go another five years without shipping a game’” because 3D Realms still had so much money in the bank, an employee told me. “He seemed really happy about that. The other people just groaned.”
The only serious pressure came from fans. Duke diehards were losing their minds waiting for the game, crowding discussion boards to pester the developer. (”Sometimes I feel like a thousand Dr. Evils are looking at us yelling ‘throw me a frickin’ bone here!’” Hargrove, the programmer, complained on 3D Realms’ Web forums.)
To keep fans at bay, Broussard decided to put together another trailer for E3 in 2001. It was the first peek at Duke Nukem Forever in three years, and it was genuinely spectacular. Duke rode on trains and in cars while blasting enemies. Wounded soldiers held their guts and groaned in pain. A pack of enemies attacked on Jet Skis. The trailer was the talk of the show. After four years of work, Duke Nukem Forever looked as good as any other game in development, and maybe even better.
The 3D Realms staff returned to Texas elated. One told me that the period immediately after E3 felt like the closest they came to shipping the game. “The video was just being eaten up by people,” he said. “We were so far ahead of other people at the time.”
But Broussard still didn’t seem to have a finish line in sight. “I was hoping for George to come in and say, ‘OK, that was great, we got what we wanted, let’s get this done now!” another employee said. “But he never did.”
The long grind began to wear on the staff. The Duke Nukem Forever team was unusually small; by 2003, only 18 people were working on it full time. This might have been adequate back when the game was announced in the mid-’90s. But in the years that Broussard had spent tweaking Duke Nukem Forever, games had become bigger and bigger. It wasn’t unusual for a developer now to throw 50 people or more at a single title. In essence, 3-D games had grown up: It’s as if Hollywood had evolved from tiny hand-cranked three-minute reels to two-hour epic blockbusters in half a decade. Successful developers had disciplined management that set deadlines and milestones. Someone at the top carefully made sure every piece was moving along. Yet Broussard and Miller hadn’t changed with the times. They were still designing “with a 1995 mentality,” as one former employee told me — trying to produce a modern, massive game with a stripped-down little group.
After eight years of work, even Broussard and Miller seemed chastened by their failures. In 2006, journalist Tom Chick became one of the few outsiders in years to get a peek at Duke Nukem Forever. Broussard appeared nervous, almost contrite, about the delays and continually referred to an index card while talking about the game’s features. “We fucked up,” he told Chick. “Basically, we threw everything out and started again.”
Then a staff rebellion broke out. For longtime employees, the incessant delays posed two big problems. One was professional cred: Duke Nukem Forever was the only modern 3-D game some of them had worked on; if it didn’t ship soon, they’d have spent nearly a decade with nothing to show for it. The other was money. 3D Realms paid its designers less than many competitors, most notably id Software down the road. Broussard motivated them by offering profit-sharing. “Their business model was to pay the developers very low, but with a potential payday at the end that was pretty substantial,” says former employee Schuytema. As Duke Nukem Forever failed to arrive, so did that big payday.
By August 2006, at least seven people had left — nearly half the team — taking with them years of experience and institutional memory. “It was a waterfall,” recalls one employee; after the first employee announced he was leaving, another quickly followed, after which the rest all fled in a torrent. Some seemed openly bitter. “I left because I was burned out after working on the same project for five years without any end in sight,” former Duke Nukem Forever programmer Scott Alden posted on Shacknews.
Perfecting every detail, down to realistic strippers, takes time and money.
Ironically, the end was within reach, even if Broussard couldn’t see it. Raphael van Lierop, who was hired in 2007 as a creative director, was given several pieces of the game to play. It took him about five hours. Broussard was stunned; he’d thought those levels would take half that time to get through. “You could see the gears turning, with him thinking, ‘Oh wow — maybe we’ve got more game than we think,’” says van Lierop. Broussard had been staring at the game for so long, he’d lost perspective.
Van Lierop was excited: From what he’d seen of it, Duke Nukem Forever was so well developed — and so graphically superior to any other game in production — that if 3D Realms pushed hard for a year, they could release it and “blow everyone out of the water.” No, no, Broussard replied. It was two years out. Van Lierop was stunned. “I thought, ‘Wow, how many times have you been here, near the finish line, and you thought you were way out?’”
By then, even Miller’s two sons were making jokes about the delays. “Duke Nukem Taking Forever,” they teased their father.
The exodus of employees seemed to shock Broussard into action. By the end of 2006, he appeared to finally become serious about shipping the title.
Pressure was also building internally. Former employees told me Broussard’s relationship with Miller was slowly deteriorating over Broussard’s inability to complete Duke Nukem Forever. It’s certainly possible that Miller was angry that Broussard was blowing through so much money on the game. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Miller proclaimed he was “dumbfounded” that it had taken them so long.
To mount a final push to get Duke Nukem Forever out the door, Broussard went on a hiring spree. “Need more help. Must go faster. Scotty, we need more powah!” Broussard wrote in a discussion-board posting advertising the new design jobs. Within a short period of time, the size of the team more than doubled, from 18 to about 35. Many of those he hired were high-powered creatives, like Tramell Isaac, a 12-year veteran of the industry. “All of my friends wondered if I was crazy. Why would I go to 3dr?” he later wrote on his blog. “The funny thing is, I knew what I was signing up for … George made it perfectly clear in our discussions prior to me joining that this would not be a walk in the park. You got to respect the man for that.”
One particularly crucial hire was Brian Hook, who became the project’s lead, a central boss operating directly below Broussard. Hook realized the challenge ahead: He was inheriting “a fractured and demoralized project that lacked direction, milestones, or cohesion,” as he later described it. Hook, former employees say, also attempted something nobody had done successfully before: He pushed back on Broussard’s constant requests for endless tweaks and changes. And when Broussard complained, Hook held firm. He was the first employee to stand between Broussard and his beloved game, making it possible for the team to move forward without getting stalled by new requests.
On January 26, 2009, Broussard got on a plane to New York with a copy of the game to show the publishers at Take-Two. “Packing up to go visit our publisher and show them the game and cool sh!t to get them hyped and excited,” he posted on Twitter.
But the money was finally running out. Broussard and Miller had spent some $20 million of their own cash on Duke Nukem Forever — and their current development team would likely burn through another several million dollars a year. Miller and Broussard were forced to break their cardinal rule: They went to Take-Two with hat in hand, asking for $6 million to help finish the game.
In court documents both companies later filed, Broussard and Miller claim that Take-Two initially agreed, then quickly backtracked, offering only $2.5 million. Take-Two officials dispute this: They claim they were sufficiently dubious that they offered only $2.5 million up front, agreeing to give another $2.5 million when the game was completed. Either way, Broussard and Miller rejected the counteroffer.
With the negotiations at an impasse, Broussard and Miller decided the end had come. On May 6, they announced that they were disbanding all development at 3D Realms. They would continue to hire other developers to make other games for them, but 3D Realms would cease to create anything itself. Broussard took that last photo and then bid his creative staff good-bye.
Will Duke Nukem Forever ever come out?
Many observers think Take-Two is attempting to bleed 3D Realms dry until it has no more cash, then convince a judge to force Broussard and Miller to hand over intellectual-property rights to the Duke Nukem franchise to repay the $2.5 million advance. “It’s an IP grab,” says one Dallas-area developer. If Take-Two actually secured the rights to Duke Nukem, it might likely throw out the by-then-aging Duke Nukem Forever and simply hire new developers to produce new Duke games. But even without the suit, there is only a short window for Duke Nukem Forever to come out in its current form before it will have to be revised yet again, to keep pace with changing technology.
The Duke franchise is still potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Despite more than a decade of waiting, the excitement over the game is still remarkably high; its die-hard fans might be the most patient on earth. But if they want to play Duke Nukem Forever anytime soon, they’ll need more than patience: They’ll need a miracle.
Contributing editor Clive Thompson (clive@clivethompson.net) wrote about netbooks in issue 17.03.
Christmas is fast approaching and we are all geared to the festivities, and busy doing the last minute shopping with many people shopping right from the Black Friday and some take a more tense stance and start shopping a little later. The major part of Christmas shopping goes towards buying decorative ornaments which cling to the Christmas tree in the most beautiful manner.
We being the geeks would always want to buy something that would reflect our true personalities. Hence, if you are a video game fan and would like to decorate your Christmas tree in terms of video games and consoles, here is a list of cool Video Game Inspired Christmas Ornaments that we found across the web.
I am sure it is not only exciting but a real fun way to celebrate the Christmas by having a video game themed party on the eve of Christmas and also on the day of Christmas. Though traditionalists may disagree, we all can go ahead and celebrate the nativity of Jesus in the geekiest manner possible. Surprisingly, many people seem to have already thought of Video Game Christmas tree ornaments.
Console Inspired Ornaments
Here are some cool ornaments that have been inspired by consoles from many different generations. It would be amazing to have a tree which is full of console inspired ornaments.
The Xbox 360 and Xbox arcade ornaments look so beautiful that you would want to play video games even on the day of Christmas.
The PS3 Slim ornament reminds you that this is one of the sleekest consoles available this Christmas. Do you think there could be a better console by the next Christmas?
The NES inspired ornament brings back memories of a long gone childhood, and also reminds us to enjoy this Christmas for years are passing by swiftly.
When we think of consoles, we cannot really forget controllers. So how could we miss the ornaments that are inspired by controllers! I am sure all gaming fans would love these sleek ornaments that have been inspired by various gaming controllers. A Christmas tree with these controller ornaments hanging would make for a complete geeky Christmas.
With consoles and controllers having been taken care of, how could we forget those lovely games from the good old days? What comes to my mind first is Pacman. Here are some really cool Pacman Tree Ornaments hat not only look chic but also quite geeky as well. You could get your friends for a Pacman themed Christmas party!
With Pacman being mentioned, we cannot leave Super Mario Brothers behind. This happens to be a favorite game all across the world and thanks to which there are hundreds of Mario inspired ornaments already available. These Mario Mushroom Christmas tree ornaments, stars and characters complete your Mario themed Christmas party!
If you are a wacky guy and always loved games that are slightly different, you would certainly be a huge fan of Gears of War. This game was damn popular many years ago and it still is and that is perhaps why you should consider Gears of War Christmas Tree Ornaments as well. This particular one here looks really vicious and kick ass.
Much before we began to play using the consoles, most kids used to play video games on those arcades. Moreover, arcade games were and are still popular today because they are so cool. So, after discussing games and consoles, it is only natural that we try and get some ornaments that are inspired by Arcade gaming. The Galaga and other games are still cool and hence these Arcade inspired ornaments would make for a great Christmas tree decoration theme.
Princess Peach and Toad, Yoshi, and others have left an indelible impression on our then-young minds. Nintendo was partly responsible for the great deluge of games that we saw during 90s and hence, one must really pay tribute to Nintendo this Christmas just as one would pay tribute all other things that have passed in our lives and given us happiness. After all, Christmas is all about counting our blessings and Nintendo is one of the blessings! These are really cool ornaments, if you asked me.
Call him Rock Man, or call him Mega Man and it really doesn’t matter. This video game character is one of the most popular all across the world and perhaps will remain so for many years to come. You could check out these cool Mega Man inspired ornaments and relive the days of those glorious video gaming days when we played games incessantly.
EarthBound is the favorite game of many people too. Who can forget Giygas on the day of Christmas? Here is an amazing Giygas inspired ornament which decorated the some lucky video game fan’s Christmas tree.
These and many other ornaments can be appreciated and bought all across the Internet and I am sure a Video Game themed Christmas is going to be a lot more than many other themes.
Extreme gaming - strap an Epson HD ready projector to your front, a PS3 to your back and take gaming to a whole new level. This is Need for Speed taken to new heights...
Tongue firmly in cheek, University of Pittsburgh student Ben Korman has penned a column decrying the way turtles are portrayed and treated in Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. series of games.
While the in-game amphibians reptiles in question are labeled Koopas, Korman notes that, “The playful branding of these enemies is semantic at best.”
He continues:
These games, first and foremost, graphically depict innocent, healthy turtles being slaughtered by the hundreds at the hands of human characters. The main character, Super Mario, is consistently rewarded for these atrocities.
Are we really to believe that shelled amphibians were simply chosen arbitrarily as the series’ most pervasive antagonists? Was Bowser, the chief nemesis in the series, portrayed as a belligerent power-tripping-maniac-turtle-thing with no specific message in mind? Is the shelled community simply a capricious victim here?
GP: Excellent satire which shows that we sometimes forget that games are here for our entertainment and that maybe, just maybe, sometimes we take them a little too seriously.
It's Black Friday which is an official Geekspazz holiday. Stay tuned because within 5 hours we'll be reporting live from our adventures on the road to Staples, Guitar Center and parts unknown!
Click the link to follow our exploits live on the very geekspazzy website Qik.com which lets you broadcast video from your smart phone!
Headphones have a magic way of tangling themselves in inexplicably complicated knots. Many techniques for keeping headphones tangle-free work but they badly kink and over tighten them in the process. Use an over-under wrap for easy and cord-friendly storage.
Over at HackCollege they tested out a bunch of different cord-wrapping techniques with the goal of finding a technique that was easy to use, didn't impart kinks or curls to the headphone cord, stress the headphone jack, or require any fancy undoing to return the headphones to their natural state. They ended up using an over-under wrap held in place with a simple twist tie. Watch the video below to see it in action—you can jump to around the 1 minute mark to skip the intro and get right into the technique.
Microsoft has banned as many as one million users who hacked their Xbox 360 consoles to play pirated games from the company's Xbox Live service in a bid to counter piracy. The move triggered an avalanche of cheap "chipped" Xbox 360 consoles for sale on Craigslist and a public outcry from users is expected.
The ban from the Xbox Live service is reported to affect anywhere between 600,000 to one million Xbox 360 users who altered their console in order to play games downloaded illegally from the Internet. Microsoft says that this violates the Xbox Live terms of use, and consequently access to the service has been cut.
The launch of the widely expected Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 game for the Xbox 360 probably is what triggered Microsoft's move. Illegal copies of the game have reportedly showed up on various download sites, days before its official release.
Microsoft says the Xbox Live online gaming service serves more than 20 million users worldwide. The Redmond giant added that modifying the Xbox 360 console to play pirated discs violates the Xbox Live terms of use, hence voiding the warranty and resulting in a ban from the online gaming service.
Microsoft also reassured those who purchased a genuine copy of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 game and played the game on an unmodified Xbox 360 that no action will be taken against them. But many are out of luck, as one Xbox 360 gamer explains his ordeal of being cut off from the Xbox Live service in a BBC report. He also explains how he saved almost $1,000 by playing illegal games on his hacked console.
A banned Xbox 360 console from the Xbox Live service does not render the console useless though. Users can play games, but the online multiplayer service will not be available to them. The only way to get back using the service is to purchase a new Xbox 360 console, without any modifications to it.
Following this ban, a large number of modded Xbox 360 consoles are being put up for sale on sites such as Craigslist. The average price for such a console is now around $90, much under the normal market price of around $200. Precaution when buying such a console is advised, as Microsoft warned that anyone who accidentally purchased a modded Xbox 360 console would not receive any help or compensation from the company.
It is yet to be seen whether the mass of banned Xbox 360 owners will migrate to competing gaming consoles, such as Sony's PlayStation 3. If you were banned from the Xbox Live service, please share your experience in the comments.
Secret copyright treaty leaks. It's bad. Very bad.
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:
* That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
* That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
* That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.
* Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)
The ACTA Internet Chapter: Putting the Pieces Together
PDF | Print | E-mail
Tuesday November 03, 2009
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotations continue in a few hours as Seoul, Korea plays host to the latest round of talks. The governments have posted the meeting agenda, which unsurprisingly focuses on the issue of Internet enforcement. The United States has drafted the chapter under enormous secrecy, with selected groups granted access under strict non-disclosure agreements and other countries (including Canada) given physical, watermarked copies designed to guard against leaks.
Despite the efforts to combat leaks, information on the Internet chapter has begun to emerge (just as they did with the other elements of the treaty). Sources say that the draft text, modeled on the U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement, focuses on following five issues:
1. Baseline obligations inspired by Article 41 of the TRIPs which focuses on the enforcement of intellectual property.
2. A requirement to establish third-party liability for copyright infringement.
3. Restrictions on limitations to 3rd party liability (ie. limited safe harbour rules for ISPs). For example, in order for ISPs to qualify for a safe harbour, they would be required establish policies to deter unauthorized storage and transmission of IP infringing content. Provisions are modeled under the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, namely Article 18.10.30. They include policies to terminate subscribers in appropriate circumstances. Notice-and-takedown, which is not currently the law in Canada nor a requirement under WIPO, would also be an ACTA requirement.
4. Anti-circumvention legislation that establishes a WIPO+ model by adopting both the WIPO Internet Treaties and the language currently found in U.S. free trade agreements that go beyond the WIPO treaty requirements. For example, the U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement specifies the permitted exceptions to anti-circumvention rules. These follow the DMCA model (reverse engineering, computer testing, privacy, etc.) and do not include a fair use/fair dealing exception. Moreover, the free trade agreement clauses also include a requirement to ban the distribution of circumvention devices. The current draft does not include any obligation to ensure interoperability of DRM.
5. Rights Management provisions, also modeled on U.S. free trade treaty language.
If accurate (and these provisions are consistent with the U.S. approach for the past few years in bilateral trade negotations) the combined effect of these provisions would to be to dramatically reshape Canadian copyright law and to eliminate sovereign choice on domestic copyright policy. Having just concluded a national copyright consultation, these issues were at the heart of thousands of submissions. If Canada agrees to these ACTA terms, flexibility in WIPO implementation (as envisioned by the treaty) would be lost and Canada would be forced to implement a host of new reforms (this is precisely what U.S. lobbyists have said they would like to see happen). In other words, the very notion of a made-in-Canada approach to copyright would be gone.
The Internet chapter raises two additional issues. On the international front, it provides firm confirmation that the treaty is not a counterfeiting trade, but a copyright treaty. These provisions involve copyright policy as no reasonable definition of counterfeiting would include these kinds of provisions. On the domestic front, it raises serious questions about the Canadian negotiation mandate. Negotations from Foreign Affairs are typically constrained by either domestic law, a bill before the House of Commons, or the negotiation mandate letter. Since these provisions dramatically exceed current Canadian law and are not found in any bill presently before the House, Canadians should be asking whether the negotiation mandate letter has envisioned such dramatic changes to domestic copyright law. When combined with the other chapters that include statutory damages, search and seizure powers for border guards, anti-camcording rules, and mandatory disclosure of personal information requirements, it is clear that there is no bigger IP issue today than the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement being negotiated behind closed doors this week in Korea.
Update II: InternetNZ issues a press release expressing alarm, while EFF says the leaks "confirm everything that we feared about the secret ACTA negotiations." Electronic Frontiers Australia provides an Australian perspective on the ACTA dangers.
-----
Leaked ACTA Internet Provisions: Three Strikes and a Global DMCA Commentary by Gwen Hinze
Negotiations on the highly controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement start in a few hours in Seoul, South Korea. This week’s closed negotiations will focus on “enforcement in the digital environment.” Negotiators will be discussing the Internet provisions drafted by the US government. No text has been officially released but as Professor Michael Geist and IDG are reporting, leaks have surfaced. The leaks confirm everything that we feared about the secret ACTA negotiations. The Internet provisions have nothing to do with addressing counterfeit products, but are all about imposing a set of copyright industry demands on the global Internet, including obligations on ISPs to adopt Three Strikes Internet disconnection policies, and a global expansion of DMCA-style TPM laws.
As expected, the Internet provisions will go beyond existing international treaty obligations and follow the language of Article 18.10.30 of the recent U.S. – South Korea Free Trade Agreement. We see three points of concern.
First, according to the leaks, ACTA member countries will be required to provide for third-party (Internet Intermediary) liability. This is not required by any of the major international IP treaties – not by the 1994 Trade Related Aspects of IP agreement, nor the WIPO Copyright and WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty. However, US copyright owners have long sought this. (For instance, see page 19 of the Industry Functional Advisory Committee report on the 2003 US- Singapore Free Trade Agreement noting the need for introducing a system of ISP liability). (Previously available at http://www.ustr.gov/new/fta/Singapore/advisor_reports.htm.)
Second and more importantly, ACTA will include some limitations on Internet Intermediary liability. Many ACTA negotiating countries already have these regimes in place: the US, EU, Australia, Japan, South Korea. To get the benefit of the ACTA safe harbors, Internet intermediaries will need to follow notice and takedown regimes, and put in place policies to deter unauthorized storage and transmission of allegedly copyright infringing content.
However, contrary to current US law and practice, the US text apparently conditions the safe harbors on Internet intermediaries adopting a Graduated Response or Three Strikes policy. IDG reports that:
“The U.S. wants ACTA to force ISPs to "put in place policies to deter unauthorized storage and transmission of IP infringing content (for example clauses in customers' contracts allowing a graduated response)," according to the [leaked European] Commission memo.”
Let’s reflect on what this means: First, the US government appears to be pushing for Three Strikes to be part of the new global IP enforcement regime which ACTA is intended to create – despite the fact that it has been categorically rejected by the European Parliament and by national policymakers in several ACTA negotiating countries, and has never been proposed by US legislators.
Second, US negotiators are seeking policies that will harm the US technology industry and citizens across the globe. Three Strikes/ Graduated Response is the top priority of the entertainment industry. The content industry has sought this since the European office of the Motion Picture Association began touting Three Strikes as ISP “best practice” in 2005. Indeed, the MPAAand the RIAA expressly asked for ACTA to include obligations on ISPs to adopt Three Strikes policies in their 2008 submissions to the USTR. The USTR apparently listened and agreed, disregarding the concerns raised by both the US’s major technology and telecom companies and industry associations (who dwarf the US entertainment industry), and public interest groups and libraries.
How does this fit with the oft-repeated statement of the USTR that ACTA will not change US law, which justified the decision to negotiate ACTA as an Executive Agreement outside of regular US Congressional oversight measures? That remains to be seen.
The safe harbors in the US Copyright law require ISPs to adopt and reasonably implement a policy for termination of “repeat infringers” “in appropriate circumstances”. US law currently gives ISPs considerable flexibility to determine what are “appropriate circumstances” justifying the termination of a customer’s Internet account. If the leak reports are correct, this would no longer be true. Instead, ISPs would be required to automatically terminate a customer upon a rightsholders’ repeat allegation of copyright infringement at a particular IP address. Could the USTR be relying on the somewhat specious distinction between a Three Strikes law, and its implementation by a policy adopted by ISPs as part of a gun-to-the-head self regulation regime?
According to IDG, the leaked European Commission memo also states that the US Internet chapter is "sensitive due to the different points of view regarding the internet chapter both within the Administration, with Congress and among stakeholders (content providers on one side, supporters of internet freedom on the other)."
That’s hardly surprising, given that the ACTA text appears to leave the door open for major changes to the existing national Internet intermediary liability regimes that have been the global status quo since the mid 1990s, and which have underpinned both tremendous Internet innovation, and citizens’ online freedom of expression and the rich world of user generated content that we take for granted today.
European citizens should also be concerned and indignant. As reported, the ACTA Internet provisions would also appear to be inconsistent with the EU eCommerce Directive and existing national law, as Joe McNamee, the European Affairs Coordinator of EDRi notes:
"The Commission appears to be opening up ISPs to third party liability, even though the European Parliament has expressly said this mustn't happen," McNamee said, adding that ACTA looks likely to erode European citizens' civil liberties.”
Last, but by no means least. ACTA signatories will be required to adopt both civil and criminal legal sanctions for copyright owners’ technological protection measures, in line with the US-Korea (and previous) FTA obligations. They will also be required to include a ban on the act of circumvention of technological protection measures, and a ban on the manufacture, import and distribution of circumvention tools. This will reduce the flexibility otherwise available to countries drafting these sort of laws under the WIPO Copyright Treaty and WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty. The majority of WIPO’s Member States rejected the circumvention device ban sought by the US delegation in the draft Basic Proposal for the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty. Because ACTA is intended to create new global international IP enforcement standards, including these provisions will allow US negotiators to achieve what they have not been able to do to date – ensuring that the US’s overbroad implementation of the WIPO Internet Treaty TPM obligations becomes the global standard.
In a couple weeks the film 2012 will be released, and with its promise of big budget special effect laden scenes of mass destruction, and John Cusack moodily blundering his way through relationships while listening to indie hits form the 80s, movie nerds are creaming their saggy, unfashionable pants in anticipation. Alongside that, talk about doomsday prophecies have also reached a fever pitch, particularly those that relate to the so called 2012 apocalypse.
Apocalyptic warnings have always been attractive to a certain type of person - bearded men without jobs primarily - and now that a lot more people are unemployed (and presumably bearded), anticipation of a world where our credit card debts have been wiped clean by a horrible calamity is building. What’s a couple billion dead if it gets Citibank off your ass, right? So, to see if there was any truth behind this 2012 phenomena, and track down where it originates from and what it could mean, I interviewed some of the leading specialists on history, science and new age studies from around the world.
___ The Mayan Calendar
According to Dr. Jorge Estrada, an Archaeologist from the University of Caba, and an expert on Mayan an Olmec studies, the Mayans used a cyclical calendar, where every 144,000 days (approximately 400 years) constituted a unit called a “baktun.” Several Mayan records warn that after 13 baktuns have elapsed from year 0, “something” would happen. What that “something” entails is far from clear. Inscriptions seem to indicate that after the 13th baktun elapses, “Black… will occur” followed by the descent of “Bolon Yookte K’uh.” Who or what a Bolon Yookte K’uh is - aside from a terrible name for a baby girl - is at this point unclear. Inscriptions found elsewhere describe Bolon as a god of war, conflict or the underworld.
Artist’s representation of Bolon Yookte K’uh
So, to date the arrival of the apocalypse, we have to do a little math. Because the Mayans never heard about all the good work Jesus did, their year 0 is a little different than ours, and when that’s taken into account, the 13th baktun is supposed to elapse on December 21st or 23rd, 2012. Great. Because the holiday season isn’t stressful enough.
“I swear to God, I wish a tidal wave kills your parents.”
Dr. Estrada doesn’t put a lot of stock in the doomsday scenarios, but during our conversation, he did begin talking very excitedly about some new inscriptions he’d uncovered recently that shed some light on Bolon Yookte K’uh. His translation hasn’t been published or peer-reviewed yet, so take it with a grain of salt. The inscription appears to tell a story of Bolon Yookte K’uh meeting a “man-boy from the land of sparks and whispers.” This half-man apparently confronts Bolon Yookte K’uh on the day of reckoning. After that point, the inscription is badly damaged, and little else after that is legible, except for a glyph meaning “terrible violation.”
___ Timewave Zero & the I Ching
Timewave Zero is a theory once proposed by a man called Terence McKenna. McKenna believed that the universe has a sort of interconnectedness which ebbs and flows over time. Ultimately this “timewave” will reach a crescendo, at which point shit will go down. The exact nature of the shit is uncertain, though from his studies of the ancient Chinese text the I Ching, and a computer program of his own invention, McKenna believed that it would happen in late 2012. It’s worth pointing out here that McKenna’s theories have been criticized on the basis that he had never, not once in his life, not been on drugs.
Press F3 to invert polarity of horseshit
Still, his theories have been taken up by others, and I managed to speak to one of them. Daryl Kilsman of Santa Cruz, is an expert teleologician, which is a word I think he made up right on the spot. I also feel it’s worth pointing out that I’m pretty sure I could actually smell this man over the phone. Kilsman has refined McKenna’s work, and by converting the output from McKenna’s Timewave program into a series of I Ching hexagrams, like some sort of Ouroboros of bullshit, he claims to have found another message. This message, told in the maddeningly vague manner of all I Ching prophecies, simply states the following phrases “Purveyor of cracked scrolls,” “Heaven Beast,” “Danger,” and “Great Humbling Penetration.” Kilsman offered to share his interpretation of this with me, but by that point I had set the phone down to get some fresh air.
___ Geomagnetic reversal
Geomagnetic reversal is a term used to describe an event where the earth’s magnetic poles will flip over. There’s geological evidence to suggest this has happened multiple times in the past, and that it is in fact long overdue. There’s absolutely nothing to tie geomagnetic reversal to the year 2012 however, and whether such an event would be apocalyptic or merely a nuisance is again, completely unknown.
Because no-one of any repute at all will talk about this, I decided to take a compass, a globe and thirty three dollars to Madam Shandra, an “Attuned Plane Walker” and “Experienced Masseuse” whose flier ended up in my hands while researching an unrelated project. Madam Shandra greeted me warmly, and after I explained who I was and showed her I did in fact have thirty three dollars, she seemed eager to help.
After dimming the lights, Shandra consulted her astral companion from the Ninth Plane, Toby. Together they confirmed that there was nothing to be concerned of: the Earth’s magnetic field was fine, and would be for another ten thousand years. However, as I was handing over the thirty three dollars, Shandra seized upon my palm, very excited by a scar that I’d had since childhood. According to her and Toby, this mark implied that I was a child of destiny, fated to lead mankind during its darkest hour. When I inquired for more information, she told me that my complete fate could only be unlocked in the course of a special forty five dollar massage.
___ Galactic alignment
The principle behind this theory is that due to a slight wobble in the earth’s axis of rotation, the position of constellations in the night sky will shift slowly over a 26,000 year cycle. And, at or around the end of the 20th century, the constellation that rises during the winter solstice is Sagittarius, which happens to be the constellation hanging over the center of the galaxy. Lunatics have proposed that galactic energy will be beamed directly to Earth during this alignment. And, seeing that 2012 is close to the end of the twentieth century, it would seem proponents of this theory have decided to climb aboard the 2012 bandwagon of crazy.
I couldn’t find any supporters of this theory willing to go on the record; although someone in a related newsgroup did ask me to “STOP LEAKING BRAIN ZETA PROSPECTS OVER THE TORUS.” Browsing said newsgroup though, it seems these people claim the Mayans were aware of the cycles of axial precession when they devised their calendar. They even point out the existence of Mayan symbols like the Hunab Ku, which depicts a spiral pattern that could be a galaxy, and the Kwantk Phnag sequence, which they claim to be a representation of the apocalypse. This sequence depicts the Hunab Ku lined up above a temple, where priest/astronomers watch as a large bear forcibly has sex with a man.
___ Nibiru collision
This is where we find the real cask-strength crazy. Extra terrestrials have supposedly been sending zeta waves to receptive individuals on earth, warning that a rogue planet called Nibiru would soon arrive in the solar system, wreaking havoc. Whether it collides with the earth or merely rips us apart via tidal forces is unknown, possibly because it’s completely, completely made up.
I traveled to the University of Portland, where I spoke with Dr. Jennifer Feits, who studies people who have claimed to be contacted by extra terrestrials. Feits explained how these stories become self reinforcing as they spread throughout the community. Susceptible individuals will hear a story, then realize/claim they had a similar experience themselves. Basically these people feed off each other, their shared fictions seeming to give further proof that there’s some truth they’re peering in on. In her research, Feits has gone to some length to isolate such individuals, to see if their stories matched up when kept independent of one another. And in all cases but one, they never did.
The anomalous story was an interesting one. Several people have all independently told a vivid story of a an emissary from Nibiru, who for all intents and purposes looked like a grizzly bear, and answers to the name Balon. Balon travels to Earth, where he randomly selects a representative for the planet. This one is described as a foolish and vain man with thin arms. During their meeting, the representative angers the great space bear with his terrible manners and sweaty neck. At this point the space bear vigorously molests the representative in front of the whole world’s press and dignitaries. “Everyone felt very embarrassed for this pathetic figure,” Dr. Feits said, looking at me curiously. “Apparently he did not comport himself very well, either as a representative of humankind, or even as a man. Lots of weeping and wailing,” she concluded, grabbing one of my arms and squeezing it experimentally. After I wriggled out of her grasp, she continued her story with a shrug. “Anyways, after that Bolon decides that the people of Earth are too pathetic to even be worth destroying. He returns to Nibiru and the planet continues on its way, leaving humanity alive and unharmed.”
“And, uh, what happened to the Earth’s representative?” I asked.
Dr. Feits looked at me blankly. “Who cares?”
____
As you can see, the threat of a disaster in the year 2012 is both real and too great to ignore. I encourage all loyal readers to donate thousands of dollars every day to the Prevent-Space-Bear-Rape-Fund, which will provide funding for protein shakes, free weights and Krav Maga lessons for the earth’s representative as soon as he steps forward, along with forty five dollar massages for the administrator of the plan, who, until further notice, will be me.
Front and center in the photo sits a large guy with a boyish face. You can’t tell from the picture, but he had gotten choked up when he made the announcement. His name is 
Tongue firmly in cheek, University of Pittsburgh student Ben Korman has penned a column decrying the way turtles are portrayed and treated in Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. series of games.
