The Wonderful World of Bruce
Bruce Everiss's mighty struggles against pesky reality
Official home: http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/bruceworld/
Last updated 2008-04-28, v1.01
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Once upon a time...
There was a company called Imagine. They made games chiefly (but not exclusively) for the ZX Spectrum and went from number one at Christmas 1982 to spectacularly bust in July 1984. Exemplary news reporting by the Speccy mags of the day, plus interviews with former staff, plus the happy coincidence of a BBC documentary programme called Commercial Breaks intended to publicise Britain's new wave of entrepreneurs but filming at just the right time to cover the complete collapse of Imagine live on camera, all established the uncontested facts behind Imagine's self-destruction: the company was ridiculously, comically, farcically mismanaged.
(Quick roundup of events for beginners: Crash ish 7's news piece; Crash ish 12's in-depth Imagine post-mortem; Commercial Breaks programme on Youtube, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and transcript. There are many more sources. Imagine's collapse was perhaps the most thoroughly documented of any software company, not least because it was such a high-profile casualty at a time when home computer games were new and thrilling and a shining British success and fortunes were made overnight.)
Fast forward to 2008 and PR bastion Bruce Everiss writes an article saying Imagine were killed by piracy.
This is surprising news to many people, including the Bruce Everiss of 1984 who (as Imagine's head of PR / Operations Director / Technical Director / ex-above) appeared in all the Imagine-related news and interviews, and the television documentary, and wrote a special article for Your Computer magazine (Part 1, Part 2), consistently blaming the ridiculous, comical, farcical company mismanagement and who, over the next 24 years, did not at any point recant any of his statements nor otherwise challenge the extensively reported, universally held, factually supported view that Imagine self-destructed.
A discussion ensued on Bruce's blog with participants citing mag articles, statements by creditors (some of which were those very mags), Bruce's own extensive interviews at the time, Bruce's own mag articles, the comprehensively documented timeline of events, lots and lots and lots of facts and the BBC. Bruce for his part valiantly fought his corner by ignoring everything, repeatedly editing his own posts to (er) revise his revisionist history, approving then publishing then erasing contributors' messages for no qualifiable reason and, on the night of 2008-04-25, quietly deleting 85% of the discussion, rewriting his own posts to alter his statements just one more time and locking the thread.
Alas, those unsporting contributors, perhaps remembering Drivergate, had been diligently taking snapshots of the thread as it evolved. Quite a bit of hard work later and the original, complete, unedited thread was recovered from various archives.
This is the story of Bruce Everiss vs Pesky Reality.
Enjoy.
Peter Perpendicularly,
2008-04-28, v1.01
NB: the pages have been lightly edited in these ways:
1. The online ads have been omitted.
2. The pics and stylesheets are saved locally rather than leeched from Bruce on Games.
3. Some referenced articles (eg Bruce's non-piracy-blaming Your Computer feature) are also available as local copies for convenience.
4. The squiggly punctuation has been straightened so all browsers can display the page properly.
5. As a result of previous steps you can download the whole thing as a self-contained zip for offline reading. (See below.)
Archive links
Bruce Everiss vs Pesky Reality
Official Bruce on Games thread: http://bruceongames.com/2008/03/25/piracy-imagine-software-and-the-megagames/
The original and Bruce-edited version of the page, presented as an enlightening list of parallel entries.
Piracy, Imagine and the Megagames
Official Bruce on Games thread: http://bruceongames.com/2008/03/25/piracy-imagine-software-and-the-megagames/
The original, recovered page, complete from 2008-03-25 to 2008-04-25.
Piracy Part II
Official Bruce on Games thread: http://bruceongames.com/2008/04/23/game-piracy/
The original, recovered version of Bruce's follow-up article which mysteriously repeated exactly the same thoroughly discredited claims as Part I and equally bafflingly deleted messages helpfully reminding him of that.
Everything as an offline zip
1.1mb, unzips to 1.7mb. Open "index.html" to start. (Last updated 2008-04-28, v1.01.)
Disclaimer. I appear in both threads (as Peter Perpendicularly, obv, though in fact I'm J Nash) (Gasp! - Nobody) but have reconstructed the pages with impartial rigour from 16 archive snapshots of the threads taken between 2008-04-11-9.02pm and 2008-04-25-11.00pm. There's some page styling as listed above but message contents have NOT been altered in any way. All posts are as originally approved and published by Bruce Everiss. On a personal note, in Imagine Piracy I make 2008 minus 1984 into 14 and in Piracy Part II I get the number of Ultimate games with Speedlock wrong (three, not two, despite correctly listing them in Part I) and imbecilically manage to read "November 1984" as "November 1985." If only there were some kind of mechanism to alter the established past.
Advert! Speaking of Drivergate I'm currently in the middle of converting the existing Explorer-only "MHT" files to plain HTML so everyone can read what happened, as well as adding some all-new recovered pages I've since disinterred by absurd lengths, in preparation for the splendidly purposeless feature-for-my-own-entertainment Driver 3 II: Electric Boogaloo. If you have ANY relics of the various Driver threads such as "Driv3r Reviews. Were PSM2 & XBW honest?" (Part I or Part II) and "Atari People Infiltrate Gamesradar" all of which were brutally suppressed by Games Radar over those summer months in 2004 -- MHT, HTML, scraps of text, anything at all -- or you were there and know ANY of the facts behind the crackdown, write to me at drivergate.returns@falsebit.gmail.com (remove the falsebit). Sources protected, discretion guaranteed, though obviously don't use work computers if you're worried about reviving a four-year-old scandal efficiently evaporated from public memory that's nowhere near as fun as reconstructing a confused 50-year-old PR man's public fistfight with his 1984 self. If you can't trust someone posting as a made-up name online, what's the world coming to, eh?