In my last post, I provided the URL to what I thought was possibly the worst video game ever made.
I was wrong.
DaveVB left a comment with a reference to the game he suspects is the worst game ever made.
He was right.
I watched the gameplay videos, and couldn't believe it. There are no words. You just have to go see for yourself. I laughed. I laughed 'til I cried, and then I stopped laughing and simply cried.
Aside from the accomplishment of having run up against the physical universal limit for idiocy, the fact alone that the game was available for review is astonishing.
There's a process to these things. To get even the most offensively stupid thing made, people often need to work together and take it step by step. This doesn't just go for video games, but for most of the products in this world that were tarded, tarded again, and so retarded.
This video game is a good example, though.
Think about it. People had to:
- Come up with the idea for the game.
- Pitch the game to someone.
- Get the game approved for development.
- Get development funded.
- Produce milestones along the way to show how awesome the game is going to be.
- Finish development.
- Have the associated materials created - artwork, the box, manuals, keyboard shortcut guides, etc...
- Have the game published.
- Get retailers to carry the game.
- Get the game distributed.
I'd add "Sell the game," but I don't think that was a problem they had to face.
This is a long process. From inception to completion of the project, months must have passed. From the look of the game, it could have just been days, but because the devs were so clearly inept, I'm assuming it took them a long time to round up a bunch of demo/example code they could paste together around a few ghastly 3D models.
How does this happen?
How is it that projects like this get funded and completed while other projects - projects that don't suck dog balls - are never given a chance?
There are many factors here. Networking, nepotism, and other factors unrelated to the product can come into play, but these aren't the things I'm thinking of.
--- The Rodawgg's Very Own Experience with Money Thrown From and To Stupidity ---
It was about seven years ago when a friend-of-a-friend contacted me about starting a business.
I won't use any names, as I think he's part of the mafia and would have my intestines pulled out through a hole in my knee if he found out I was talking about him. For the sake of this post, we'll call him Francis. I like that name. It's a little girly-boy's name. Now I really hope he doesn't find this. I don't think he'd like it if he found out I gave him a little girly-boy's name.
Francis has an uncle. Francis's uncle isn't intimidating at all. He's a weaselly little man who'd look right at home in a dilapidated old GMC van with tinted porthole windows in the back and an airbrushed tiger on the side, parked outside an elementary school.
We'll call the uncle Piddlesworth.
So, Francis and Piddlesworth.
Francis, aside from running a construction company, made a little money on the side selling huge quantities of cocaine. I don't know exactly how much he made. He wouldn't tell me.
I tried to find out once how much money someone makes by selling coke. I had this conversation with Francis:
Rory: So... you're probably the only coke dealer I'm ever going to meet, and I'm curious - how much money do you make? You must rake it in.
Francis: [befuddled] You don't ask that question. It's not polite to ask questions like that about business.
Rory: Uh. You're a coke dealer. That's not business so much as it is crime. And I can't look up the average income of people in your line of work the way I could, say, a doctor. So... how much?
Francis: ...
He didn't answer. I eventually got it out of him that he kept about $40,000 in cash in a mattress in his house, though he wouldn't disclose which mattress. It's not like I could have gotten to it anyway. Most of the rooms of the house were connected by a central room - a hub of sorts - and the main decoration in the room was a small pen in which there were, like, fourteen rottweilers drooling and licking blood off the floor from whatever/whoever was fed to them earlier that day.
Anyway, Francis wanted to branch out into a new area of business - diversify his portfolio, if you will. He wanted to get into tech. Tech, construction, and coke. A true Renaissance man. He had a stupid haircut, too. All the money in the world, and he looked like a lumpy mushroom.
A lumpy mushroom who needed help.
That's when he came to me. Rory Blyth. The Smartest Man in the World. Soldier of fortune. Genius. Friend of Man. The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals.
Messiah.
He and Piddlesworth wanted to meet to discuss a multi-billion dollar idea. Coke tends to lend people a little extra confidence and effect delusions of grandeur, or, in the case of these slappies, delusions of slightly above average intelligence.
The basic idea was actually sound. I don't know that it would have made billions of dollars - not even with my involvement - but it had the potential to make us tens of dollars each month, so I was on board. Not for any pay up front, but for the promise of the dream. Ice-cream money... bus fare... I'd never want for loose change again if this project succeeded.
Francis, being in construction, knew a thing or two about the construction business. Or at least he had a couple working theories about things in the construction business. Ballpark figures. Gut feelings. Blind guesses. Answers from reading tea leaves. Advice from fortune cookies. As much knowledge about the construction business as a Frenchman has about soap.
Whatever.
Whether through conscious thought, overhearing someone else talking, or, most likely, divine intervention, Francis had an idea.
He wanted to build a site where brokers of used construction equipment (bulldozers, jackhammers, union strikes, etc.) could post their stuff and then auction it off. It was like eBay except that it was focused at this one niche, and nobody would ever use it. Otherwise, the similarities were striking. eBay had a web site - we were going to have a web site... I'm serious. Save a few superficial differences and eBay's profitability, they could have been the same site. Only their mothers could tell them apart.
I agreed to do it, and I did it. I'm a man of my word. If I say I'm going to do something, and if you believe me, I can seem very reliable.
This detail will matter not a whit to my non-geek readers, but I built the site using JSP. If I recall correctly, I used PostgreSQL on the back end because I didn't like the way MySQL performed a lock on your server farm every time you wanted to look at a record.
It worked. It was slick. We needed a graphic artist to come along and wipe some of the vomit off the UI, but it was functional.
So far so good, right? We had a working site based on a solid idea from someone who lowered the average IQ of a room by walking into it. This is an accomplishment considering he had already lowered the average IQ of every living thing on the planet including rocks and dirt and algae just by being born. It's like an intellectual version of the limbo. This guy was a natural. The answer to "How low can you go?" was "Very."
Along the way, Piddlesworth - because he was the oldest - had appointed himself the Business Manager. That's like being named the Treasurer of a Tree House Club when you're a kid. There's that one kid who has nothing at all to contribute, but everybody's too nice to send him home to be stupid by himself, so you make him the Treasurer. The post is made all the more useless because there's no money in a children's Tree House Club. The Treasurer has nothing to manage, and that's good - that's how you want it. Give the stupid kid a title, but no power. It's like the Royal Family.
Despite his lack of worth as a human being, Piddlesworth had things he wanted to bring to the "business," and he was insistent about it. Like a male cat in heat during the spring who smells your female cat and claws at your door and makes that weird "RRRRRRRMMMMMMMRRRRRRROOOOOOOOWWWWWWMMMMMMRRRR" noise, apparently Cat for "Bring out the shiznitches or I'm going to sneak in and pee in your shoes the first time you leave the window open this fine season," Piddlesworth wouldn't give up.
Since I didn't want Piddlesworth going #1 in my shoes, I heard him out and tried my best to honor his wishes while not laughing and also not barfing in my throat so I could choke and die rather than endure the Sledgehammer of Maximum Stupidity he wielded with such grace.
Piddlesworth had at some point in his life, despite his being a chance evolutionary dead-end mutant of simian life, managed to amass a little money. $10,000. That's what he had.
He had these $10,000 when he was living in LA. It was gas to power the Stupidmobile.
This "man" hired a team of voice actors, brought them into a studio, and then paid them to read various children's fairy tales into microphones for preservation on tape-based media. The stories were all in the public domain. Stuff children love that was written in Middle English and requires an advanced degree in Useless Skills to be understood. Anybody who's ever been outside or gone out on a Friday night is SOL.
If you aren't familiar with children's literature of a few hundred years ago, think "The Canterbury Tales," only more depressing. If you aren't familiar with "The Canterbury Tales," then you're stupid. Still, to give you another reference point should your ignorance get in the way of my story, just imagine what would happen if Free Willy had been written and produced in France. That's kind of like old school children's stories. Sad and scary. Not at all suitable for children.
$10,000 spent on audio recordings of children's stories from a time when children didn't have time for children's stories because they were too busy shoveling shit, being sold, or married off to high falootin' families that had, like, a hundred times more shit to shovel than any of the other poor bastards who lived in the ghetto. There was no such thing as focus-groups back then, so there wasn't much feedback on the quality of these tales.
As a mental exercise just now, I sat and stared at the wall for ten minutes while trying to think of a worse way to spend $10,000. All I could come up with was an enema. A really, really big, really, really fancy enema.
And how, I'm sure you're asking, does this foolish project figure in to the construction machinery auction site?
Piddlesworth wanted to have a landing page page for the site where the user would make one (1) of two (2) choices:
1. Enter the auction portion of the site to buy and sell equipment at rather high prices. This area would appeal mainly to businesspeople who represent major manufacturing companies.
2. Pay $100 for lifetime access to the audio recordings of children's stories you could go and download for free, and not be able to understand for free, from Project Gutenberg.
Side by side. Same page.
I'm not kidding.
It'd be like walking into your Swiss Bank to make a six-figure withdrawal, but being lured away at the door to ride a pony while eating cotton-candy. Or churros. Churros are good, but I don't think they have them in Switzerland. Or cotton-candy. Do they have cotton-candy in Switzerland? What about ponies?
I obviously didn't do my research here. If only there were a way to go find the answers to these questions and then come back to update the text.
Too late now.
The partnership ended a couple weeks later. Francis and Piddlesworth called me to a meeting at a Ramada Inn on the edge of town. That alone could have dissolved our relationship, but I wanted to give them a chance. Part of me was resistant to the thought that human beings can be so mentally deficient. I wanted to see them do one smart thing, and, at this point, "smart" was a term I'd adjusted to put success within their reach. I set my standard according to a study in which bonobo chimps preferentially ate their own poop rather than receive electric shocks while self-administering heroin. There was no right answer, so I figured a win was guaranteed, and I could move on, my faith in humanity restored.
There was a lawyer there. We were going to make our company official. We'd been advised to form an LLC. I felt like I was sitting in front of a judge, pen in hand, being asked to sign a marriage certificate so I could spend the rest of my happy life with Mrs. Frogbottom, known throughout the carnie world as The Living Armpit of Halitosis County.
Just as I'm protecting the identities of Francis and Piddlesworth (more accurately, protecting myself), I won't give the name of the lawyer. For the purposes of this tale, we shall call him Moron. Has a nice ring to it.
Moron was three hours late and had smeared lipstick and an STD on his face when he arrived. He smelled of urine and herrings.
He greeted us, calling us "gentlemen," and produced a stack of paper from what looked like a doctor's bag. Like the rest of him, I didn't ask.
I wondered why there was so much paper for what should have been a more or less standard set of forms that lawyers had perfected over the years. What I didn't take into account was that you generally have to write larger when using crayons. Plus, every few pages there were pictures of things - dogs, cats, kids holding balloons. I'd never seen illustrated business forms before, and I wondered why more people didn't use them. Because, I realized, most businesspeople are in it for the money. That was why.
I stood up, punched everybody in the face, and went home.
Had I stuck around and signed the forms, I would have been stuck in this business until I filed for a divorce and entered the witness protection program.
And that, my friends, is how really stupid businesses come to be. Idiots somehow make money and then want to make more, but they can't repeat the accident that led to the initial acquisition of dough.
Oh, and Piddlesworth wanted to name the company "Iddybot" - oddly, the domain name was available.
Iddybot.
What the feck is an Iddybot?
Form small groups and discuss.
[Gratuitous Links to my Homies - Not Part of the Post Above] [Learn More]
- Kellyhelderboobs - I was introduced to this site by a friend of mine, and this girl is funny. She's recruited a few friends to start a sort of blog-magazine thing. I've tried to do that a few times over the years, and it always fell apart, but maybe she can hold it together. Regardless, she's a good writer, and her writing's fun.
- Clifton Craig - Mr. Trash-Talky Coder Guy. We've been meaning to do a sort of Battle of the Geeks over video iChat - to be recorded and made available for your enjoyment. Because my schedule's sort of a wet slippy thing that's constantly flicking around and getting stuck to stuff before breaking off and getting affixed to the bottom of someone's shoe, we haven't gotten it done, but we shall. Oh, yes, Cliff - we shall!
- Yuvi - Yuvi did something really cool for me this week. Long story, but it was quite an honor. So, thanks, mister :)