Posted by IN.DO.GU.TSU on 6/16/2007, 11:18 pm The Peemeister already has a fairly successful and positive life outside of the Internet, with a girlfriend, a new apartment, steady employment at a medical facility, and (probably) a loving relationship with his family. I'm guessing that in 2007, he probably did some soul-searching and asked himself some important philosophical questions, like whether he even needs an Internet following, or whether he should continue designing games for a long-dead medium that's not even compatible with the currently-available Windows build. Maybe he saw a systematic cutting of all online ties as a step in the right direction. Anyone familiar with RPG Maker's history should know that Brickroad was in on it from the beginning; before Gaming Ground Zero was called "Gaming Ground Zero," they were a small hobby gaming site called "The Heresy," and one of the games they hosted was the original RM2K version of Kinetic Cipher. Back then, the people who would later form GGZ and Gaming World were more or less united, there were no "wars," and everybody was concentrating on one thing: producing RM2K games without worrying about custom systems or original graphics or any bells and whistles and snobbery of any kind. It was during this time period when everybody and their mother was working on a game (quite literally, in QHeretic and Wishmoo's case), and an innumerable amount of classic amateur RPGs came out of this frenzy of creativity. (Many, like Chapino's games, became classics due to their sheer lack of artistic merit. Who could forget the Baker's Quest trilogy? "Me baker, me baker, tra la la la la...") It's hard for many RPG Maker fans to believe, but Brickroad was one of the people in Wishmoo and QHeretic's trusted circle; they felt he was an emerging young talent. The same went for Illustrious, Sovan Jedi, and a few others who would later become bitter enemies of the GGZ team. Before a tragedy occurred in the middle of 2001 (which coincidentally happened within days of Shichimenchouken's grand unveiling on GGZ), the GGZ and GW "oldbies" would spend hours chatting on IRC and discussing game ideas. One story Felix Trapper likes to tell the Brasington team is how one night on IRC, he and Illustrious were joking about how "Ze," another person in the chat room, had a nick that sounded like a mythical bird or something. Weeks after this discussion, when Illustrious finished a demo of "Forever Across Dreams," there was a side quest about raising a pet bird (named -- you guessed it -- Ze) in a Tamagotchi-like fashion. Then "it" happened, and although neither Trapper nor I know exactly what "it" was, it caused Brickroad, Sovan Jedi, Illustrious, and many others to develop a strong hatred for GGZ and form their own separate community. Bartek "Bart" Gniado's RM2K message board, known as "Gaming World," became their gathering place, where they expressed a strong disdain for outsiders' creative efforts, and formed a fairly elitist code of opinion. New users ("newbies") who joined GW to advertise their works were ridiculed and even banned if they could not live up to GW's standards. And as Trapper joked about in an earlier post, voicing any amount of support for GGZ, its projects, or its members was a punishable offense. Over the years, GW members began to collectively dislike projects from their own oldbies, including Kinetic Cipher, the Legion Saga trilogy, and Phylomortis 2 (the latter due mainly to its "nobody-talks-like-that-IRL" script and dialogue), but those games' creators were still well-tolerated and "part of the gang" because, after all, they weren't GGZ members. GW's own style of posting and jargon took on a rather insulting and scatological bent, not unlike 4chan or Encyclopedia Dramatica, in which "groupthink" (to use Brickroad's own term) became the norm, no matter how reprehensible the action or discussion. In 2007, the Peemeister weighed his upwardly mobile "adult" life against his Internet dealings with GW's horde of puerile, hive-minded teenagers, and said "Enough already!" He railed against GW on his own message board, and although he didn't make any of these points, it's safe to say they were the underlying reasons why Brickroad did what he did.
There's a reason why Brickroad cancelled his popular and well-known RPG Maker project after pouring his heart and soul into it ever since Don Miguel's RM2K translation first hit the Internet. He explained it perfectly in that news article on his website, and to make this decision all the more final, he "spoiled" a large number of further plot developments on his message board, thus removing all surprises from a possible project revival. He did what he had to do, and I don't think any amount of begging from his fans would bring Kinetic Cipher back from the Great Realm of Cancellation.
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