The Grimoire Thing Just Gets Weirder

A few posts ago I wrote about "Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar".  This is a rather mythical game amongst RPG aficionados because, as I said then, it has reputedly been in development for the past 17 years.  Its story (which is long and strange) is irreversibly entangled with that of its creator Cleveland Mark Blakemore (who might not be long but sure is strange.)

I probably don't have the space to fully cover that story here but I can give you the basics.  Cleve has stated that he started developing Grimoire as a direct consequence of his experiences working for an Australian company in the mid 90s, who Sir-Tech had asked to make a follow up to their seminal game Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant.  This game was supposedly called "Stones of Arnhem" and he described a project full of incompetents, run by an Australian actor Max Phipps (he was in Mad Max 2, here he is),



which devolved into a total mess and was eventually canned by Sir-Tech before anything meaningful was created (but not before they wasted $250,000.)

Cleve makes some, frankly, pretty unbelievable claims about this time in his life (most of which don't bear to be repeated here) and he describes a number of the monsters created for the game, which were mostly based around aboriginal mythology or creatures from the outback, but which also included "the rectum gobbler" and something he christened "the penisaurus".  His version of events paints a damning picture of a project team out of control and completely disconnected from the Sirotek brothers at Sir-Tech.  He details an almost Kurtzian situation, with the leaders heading off on their own doomed jaunts into the creative jungle and nobody (except him) able to tell them that having monsters based on reproductive organs was not necessarily a great idea.  He says that he eventually had to quit the project as it was having a deleterious effect on his mental health, the scars of which he still bears today.

The problem was... no reference to Stones of Arnhem existed on the web (apart from Cleve's own words, and a comment on one website from somebody who purported to be his erstwhile partner, Michael Shamgar) so people found it difficult to believe him.  Add in to this that Cleve's online persona is often extremely offensive, totally unconcerned with the niceties of political correctness (or common politeness) and will say that stuff is true which appears to bend the rules of reality itself (for example that he killed all those Mexicans with the jawbone of an ass during the LA Riots, or whatever that story was.)  He's been trolling gaming sites since the early days and has annoyed or exhausted countless numbers of people.

So you can imagine the reaction when he fronts up with "Oh yeah, by the way guys, did you know there was almost a follow up to Wizardry 7 that was being made in Australia and had dick monsters in it, and transsexual furries killing each other and shit?  And I was, like, the lead programmer on it and spent all my waking hours trying to save it, but it never got made because the project manager got taken into a sanitarium, and hey, have I told you about the time I got hit by a truck but survived cos of my titanium skeleton?"

I mean we've all encountered them; people who make stuff up, who turn themselves into something they're not and try to counteract some kind of deep-seated inadequacy in their very heart by sticking lies up on the internet.  Come on!  This is some kind of bizarre joke isn't it?  A Penisaurus?  Rectum gobbler?  These are just the rantings of a disgruntled, delusional lunatic, a madman, don't pay any attention to it, it's obviously completely untr....

Oh.

Right.

Turns out that Cleve might have a point after all.  Because, in a completely bizarre turn of events, somebody has turned up AT JUST THE RIGHT TIME to provide him with at least partial corroboration.  An ebay user with the "name" of "hotalibl" says that he bought the remains of Sir-Tech, including all of their documentation, sealed games, artworks and so on.  He's even put 50 lots of it up on ebay, with another 50 to go up next week. (Click the link above to see the list.)

Amongst commonplace items like sealed first editions of different games, signed artwork and design documents the auctions include such gems as the letter canning the Stones of Arnhem project

and um... Cleve's resignation letter....

Of course I should probably make it almost legally clear that this doesn't mean that any of Cleve's other claims are in any way true, but you know, that picture does kind of fit his description, sort of almost exactly, and there's a lot of evidence there that "Stones of Arnhem" existed and that he worked on it before resigning and, if that's true, then... well maybe it's best if we don't think about what that might imply...

Oh and, while we're here, Grimoire has a new pitch video as its resolution has been updated.  Demo due end of this month.  Apparently.  The Indiegogo campaign is still running.

Further Reading:

If you want to read the full story go here (be aware it is 50+ pages.)

A demo of the game was released in February 2013 - read about it here



Grimoire : Heralds of the Winged Exemplar

Making games can be a difficult business.  There are numerous examples out there of  games which have taken years to create, or which have just disappeared forever.  There are thousands of them that have fallen by the wayside, thousands more that never got past the planning stage.  The eternal highway that we call "gaming" is littered with the burnt out wrecks of projects that aimed too high, too low or in just the right place, but which were driven by idiots.

However, there has never been anything quite like Grimoire.  Grimoire splits opinions, it may be the greatest dungeon crawler ever created - it may never be completed.  Its um.. eccentric developer Cleveland M Blakemore first started working on it in 1995 - in the wake of a disastrous spell at legendary software house Sir-Tech.   He was allegedly employed on the follow up to Wizardry 7, one of the greatest RPGs ever made - but the project quickly descended into acrimony, penisaurus's and 9 inch dildos hanging off shower rails.  Rattled, but unbowed, Cleve picked himself up off the floor, squared his impressive shoulders and set out to make the RPG to end all RPGs.  To make the RPG at the end of time.  To make history!

Now finally, 17 years later, Grimoire has been shown to the public, on Indiegogo. Even if you have no interest in old-school RPGs you should still watch the pitch video as it is hilarious.

Sounds good huh, but unfortunately Cleve is also a little bit strange.  He describes himself as a Neanderthal, a lunatic and famously, in the pitch video for Grimoire, as a madman.  It has taken him 17 years to get Grimoire to where it is today and he has promised faithfully many times during that period that THIS TIME it's ready and that it will be released imminently - needless to say none of these promises were ever fulfilled.  If you combine this innovative approach to building customer confidence with his frequently offensive interactions with the outside world (oh, and he lives in a vault too, by the way) then you can see that the man has a bit of work on his hands if he wants to convince the paying public that they should support him. 

Now Cleve isn't stupid, he knows that people are lacking faith in him and he needs to convince them that he is dependable, committed and that there will be a good game at the end of this to reward their pledges of support.  So... how does he react?  Well, there is the good and then there is the bad.  On the one hand Cleve can say something that seems almost painfully honest, he can respond to criticism in a way that makes it clear how passionate he is about all this.  But then he also can't resist sticking the boot in to other games developers, on their own Kickstarter page no less.  He's an enigma.  That's what he is.  He's the main reason why the game splits opinions.  The game itself looks good.  Assuming it's mainly bug free and playable then it demonstrates a lot of things that people are looking for at the moment.  A genuine old school experience, something authentic, something different and something that is a labour of love.  The problem that many people have is who has made it.

What it comes down to is, do you want to play something that's come out of this man's mind?  Personally speaking (and I would like to make it quite clear that I am not responsible for any money you may lose backing this) I do.  God yes because, if nothing else, I am quite sure that it will contain plenty of WTF moments.  In a world full of identikit AAA games or play it safe indie odysseys this promises to be a madcap ride through the imagination of somebody who is anything but boring.  To my mind that makes it worth the money on its own.  You may not like Cleve, or you may think he's some kind of hero, whatever, any game that he has spent this amount of time and effort on is not going to be boring.  So, really, what have you got to lose?  It's only money.


About a month after this was written the story behind Grimoire took another, bizarre, twist.  You can read about it here.

And a demo was released in February 2013.  See this.