Bruce Everiss vs The World - The oxygen of publicity.
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I’ve mentioned it a couple of times before, but what started out as a slightly curious incident of one man revising history has began spiralling across various internet sites in almost Smart-ian proportions. Only at least Mr Smart had the decency to appear under his own name on most occasions.
For those who aren’t aware, Bruce Everiss was, once upon a time, the operations director of Liverpool based software publishers Imagine. Imagine crashed and burned in the most spectacular fashion, incredibly publicly too with their demise being filmed for the BBC in the wonderful documentary Commercial Breaks ( Watch it on YouTube - [1],[2],[3]). In fact, the demise of Imagine was one of the most well publicised and documented deaths of a software company in UK history. They died for a myriad of reasons - substandard games, financial mismanagement and the infamous megagames. Which is why, nearly 25 years on after their demise - Mr Everiss rewriting of history to say that piracy was to blame is boggling in the extreme. Especially when there’s many a lesson we can still learn from the company going under.
Good things did come out of the death of Imagine, some of the coders went on to form Denton Designs - one of the foremost software houses for the Speccy. Psygnosis was, in many ways, formed from the ashes of Imagine. Brucey himself moved onto Codemasters and promoted the Darlings in a way previously unknown. Of course, not all things that came of Imagines death were good. Banks became wary of funding small start ups viewing them as a risk - no one wants to have their cash behind the next potential Imagine.
At the end of March, Bruce Everiss posted an article detailing his own version of events. Primarily pointing the finger at playground pirates. Word gets round and confusion reigns. His version of reality doesn’t tie with any accepted wisdom about the company, worse still - it doesn’t tie in with a reality Bruce himself had documented on many occasions (linky 1 and 2). 7 days and over 200 comments later (many deleted or revised, see the opening link) and Bruce of 2008 finds himself repeating the statement that it was piracy ad infinitum - refusing to acknowledge that he is, to all intents and purposes, revising history. The story and successive comments so bizarre it makes RPS Sunday Papers and even the B3TA newsletter.
All would be reasonably fine in the grand scheme of things, but it would seem that Mr Everiss doesn’t know when to stop. Having been suppressing comments since the incident and deleting a huge number (at one point in the remnants of the thread he refers to me by name, but oddly enough I’m nowhere to be seen - all my comments nuked), Mr Everiss is now presenting a seriously one sided and edited view of things.
A few days ago, a post appeared on Mr Everiss blog detailing how he’d discovered the website of a real pirate. A pirate he found whilst casually browsing RLLMUK (a large gaming forum). What Bruce neglects to mention is the pirate he miraculously discovered is one of the major contributors to the now deleted Imagine discussion who point by point annihilated Bruce’s version of events. He also neglects to mention that he didn’t just stumble upon this in RLLMUK - he joined under a fake name and posted it himself to back up his story.
Not the first time he’d done this, in another thread on RLLMUK he’d shown up to refer to Stu as The Reverend Bellend to once again rubbish Mr Campbell. He even turned up over at Minter’s forum using the nickname he coined for Stu and attempted to do the same. His posts rapidly slipping into the plain bizarre before a very quick banning. When caught out - his excuse?
“It’s a bit difficult to fit in on a site where everybody is socially dysfunctional.”
Mr Everiss didn’t just happen to stumble upon a so called pirate, the entire situation has been clearly engineered and if I were a betting man, I’d say it’s for someone having the audacity to speak out against an article so perilously wrong it chafes. The links above (bar the Minter one) predate the “Look! I’ve found a pirate!” post.
You’ll notice I’ve not posted any links to Bruce Everiss blog here - if you really want to find out where he is, google it - or wait for him to turn up on a forum you attend and spam his blog there. Normally, I’d happily supply links but as the main aim of Mr Everiss campaign is to boost his pagerank via any means possible - I’ll not join in that particular game. VGChartz forum readers will already be aware of this particular technique. I just want the other side of the story told and so, here it is. For the world and Google to see.
So kids, be careful out there on the internet because not everybody is quite what they appear. If nothing else, the lesson here is never take things at face value. When you stumble upon a blog on the internet, even this one, let it be known there’s always more than one side to every story and sometimes the most innocuous of posts has more than a little back story to it.
[in the interests of full disclosure - I appeared in the original Imagine thread as Oddbob, I'm in the Minter thread as...wait for it... Oddbob0 and read and contribute the odd missive to Stu's forum as I do to many others. I read but don't post on RLLMUK and as usual, am rubbing myself in flour whilst looking at your webcam. I also purchased Imagine's Pedro and have regretted it ever since. I also have nothing personally against Bruce Everiss nor his career to date, I just *really* can't stand it when people are less than truthful and honest.]
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Mersey Remakes is the home of Retro Remakes administrator Oddbob.
Here you can find his rants, freeware retro remakes, development blog and game reviews.
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Recent Comments
tim on 
I agree, never believe what you read on the internet. Here’s proof of that: [link removed by admin due to spam]
1) You are guilty of that which you accuse me of. By writing this article you are seeking the oxygen of publicity. It is called hypocricy.
2) You miss the bigger issue here. I am anti piracy because, working in the game industry I have seen the damage it has done. The pirates and piracy apologists attack me for this. As your article aptly demonstrates.
3) The pirate I exposed is selling counterfeit games and music on his website. This is undeniable. Yet you don’t criticise him, why not?
4) You report many things in your article as fact. But how do you know them? Because you read about them. And this is precisely what your article warns about. You ought to take some of your own medicine.
5) I was a director of Imagine software. I was there and know exactly what happened. My critics were mainly schoolboy pirates. Who do you think knows most about what happened at Imagine?
6) As I write this I have one of the top stories on N4G, earlier this week I had two stories on their front page. I am in the current issue of Marketing week, have articles in Seeking Alpha and MCV. A couple of weeks ago I was on Sky News. My site gets tens of thousands of visitors. A few retro hippies make very little difference.
7) You slag me off for deleting blog comments. I bet you delete this. Now you can see what it is like to be on the other side of the fence.
good god bruce, give it up.
Another thing you fail to mention is that the threads about me on Rllmukforum, World of Stuart, Yak Yak, Worldofspectrum etc weren’t started by me. What is wrong with me joining a thread talking about me? And you complain about me using a “fake name”. Yet this is precisely what you do on this blog and on all the forums you visit.
And to give you an idea of traffic. According to analytics (which is a lagging indicator) I have had 1,815 unique visitors so far this morning. Out of these 36 visited the Piracy, Imagine Software and the Megagames thread.
I write an article every weekday on a wide range of topics to do with gaming. Quite a few of these articles have become popular and attracted lots of traffic. That is why my site is so busy.
Bruce my dear, I keep an open comments policy. It doesn’t mean I’m going to bother responding any further to you - but your comments will remain for eternity.
*Especially* considering they do nothing but back up my article.
Enjoy your pagerank! I’ve got a life to live…
“What is wrong with me joining a thread talking about me?”
I took exception to you joining under a fake name with the sole intention of anonymously supporting yourself and running down Campbell.
Honestly, it’s a wholly sad way to act and the only reason you got found out so quickly is no one apart from a stealth Bruce would support the ludicrous arguments you’ve been making recently.
Let it go man.
“5) I was a director of Imagine software. I was there and know exactly what happened. My critics were mainly schoolboy pirates. Who do you think knows most about what happened at Imagine?”
Who has more to gain from removing the burden of guilt from themselves, you - an, out of work marketing guy who was partially responsible for the UK video games crash, or everyone else in the world?
It’s obvious you were trying to get a blot off your CV that potential employers would look at and think “hey, this guy was in a company that went tits up so bad that banks turned their backs on gaming companies for years” and you want to rewrite history so that you don’t look so bad at an interview.
Shame that it backfired and now you are pretty much the laughing stock of the entire internet.
If posting links to your blog under a plethora of fake names isn’t attention whoring then I don’t know what is, sorry.
The sad thing is, for you, that you have probably attracted potential employers with this activity and now they wouldn’t touch you with a light-year long barge pole just because you are too much of a risk and a virtual loose cannon.
Please take it on the chin and move on - try to learn about this century and how the world works NOW - because you obviously don’t have a clue.
“5) I was a director of Imagine software. I was there and know exactly what happened. My critics were mainly schoolboy pirates. Who do you think knows most about what happened at Imagine?”
There’s also the other point of if you really knew what was going on at the time surely you could have taken some steps to stop Imagine’s collapse. You were in charge of day to day operations after all.
It’s often the case that those involved in a failure of this type do not understand the key factors for the events they’ve been a part of.
“The pirates and piracy apologists attack me for this.”
No, Bruce. They attack you for talking complete garbage, desperately trying to suppress the facts when people comprehensively prove you totally wrong and you can’t bluster your way out of it, then spamming every forum you can find with your misinformed, deluded rubbish until you get banned for being an idiot, then trolling them with fake accounts until those get banned too. You’re an absolute laughing stock across the entire English-speaking internet. Keep it up!
That link again, folks:
http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/bruceworld
“4) You report many things in your article as fact. But how do you know them? Because you read about them. And this is precisely what your article warns about. You ought to take some of your own medicine.”
You need to reread the article. There’s very little of it asserting anything about Imagine or its demise, it’s primarily about what you’ve posted yourself, your behaviour and the what the reaction has been to that on the internet.
All of these things are a matter of record.
Bruce, I’m not sure about the whole point of your blog? Are you hoping to get work out of it? If so, you are really doing yourself no favours at all and have just made yourself a laughing stock across the internet and beyond. Try Googling yourself and you will find the huge amounts of threads started about your revisionist blog, which all state the same thing - “what is he on about”?
If you hadn’t deleted numerous comments on your blog (that were not rude or off-topic) then you might have had a bit more support. There was quite a few well-argued points by people, but because you didn’t agree with the comments, you miracuously made them disappear.
You seem to think that getting a whole lot of people talking about you equates to being a fountain of knowledge but judging from your baffling views, then you couldn’t be more incorrect.
Of course I would post all this on YOUR blog Brucey, but you seemed to have banned my comments full stop.
Bruce changes his views on his blog more times than his underwear.
“I think many commentators are underestimating how big the shift in the balance of power will be with GTA IV.
Also I am hearing a lot of anecdotal evidence of Wiis bought by casual gamers gathering dust.”
Then later….
“Certainly over the year I expect Wii Fit to beat GTA IV for revenue. “
It’s funny that now-bruce can’t even agree with 20-minutes-ago-bruce … we already knew he doesn’t agree with 20-years-ago-bruce. LOL
Bruce, claiming piracy is delusions of grandeur
The games were returned to Imagine not because they were copied, it was because they were utterly, undeniably SHITE and people took them back to retailers claiming they were faulty. End of story. Stop whining.
Mike Hunt and Caffeine Kid. There is no incompatibility between those two remarks. I don’t even understand how you can think that there is. With 25 million sold and 25 million a year production the Wii can sell massive numbers of the right games. When it comes to revenue, which is what I am talking about Wii Fit has the advantage of being expensive so need less units to generate the same income as most other games.
GTA IV is changing the landscape right now which is one reason why that article predicts a Wii price drop in Q3/4 to keep the demand up.
And, yes, many Wiis are now gathering dust. Their casual gamer owners have tired of them and moved on to other things. I did not say all Wiis are gathering dust. You can read the whole article here: [link removed by admin due to spam]
Like all of my articles it is designed to provoke thought, obviously sometimes I fail.
LOL
Bruce, whilst I operate an open comments policy - I will not tolerate spam links. Now, I have a choice - I can either edit them out or flag them on askimet. I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to do the latter thus potentially effecting your attempts at furthering your pagerank across the blogosphere and likely depriving you of the ability to defend your stance on this article, so I’m requesting politely that you cease treating this as yet another PR opportunity and refrain from the constant link backs.
If anyone wishes to discover more of Bruce’s “wonderful” work then they’re free to click on his tag and be magically transported to his little domain on the internet. In the meantime, I’m removing all link backs and flagging any edits accordingly.
You’re welcome to take issue with this decision and post any complaints in the comments section of this article as you see fit, but any further link backs to your articles will be deleted. Any comments will, of course, remain intact.
Actually they weren’t spam, they were valid illustration of points I was trying to make. As anyone can see.
I see you are removing my links and not other people’s. Presumably you have a good reason for this.
Bruce, can you REALLY be complaining about selective editing of posts?
Then I highly recommend you learn to make your points without having to link back to your articles to do so.
No need, you have done it for me.
“Bruce, can you REALLY be complaining about selective editing of posts?”
To be fair to Bruce, it’s not like he brutally expunged dozens of comments from his own blog comments thread or anything.
Keep going, “Do an Everiss” will have its own Wikipedia page in no time.
Probably put there by Bruce, now I think about it…
Another thing I don’t understand is you guys complaining that I joined lots of forums under different names to generate traffic.
This is just not true.
I only joined two forums that were already talking about me. Rllmukforum and Minter’s forum. After they had been sending traffic to my site for days. So I gained no traffic benefits. I also made it pretty obvious that it was me posting.
The only reason I joined was to wind up the people who were taking all this so seriously and to have a laugh.
Which is pretty obvious to anyone who goes and looks.
And for all those getting self important about forum behaviour I suggest they go to Stuart’s forum and see the litany of names I have been called on there for the last two weeks. Often by Stuart himself.
There are lots of double standards round here.
Bruce,
Its not 1984 any more - you don’t have to do PR stunts to publicise your ill-informed blog. You’re doing a good enough job by disagreeing with 95% of the rest of the people using the internet. Oh and I do wonder whether some of those ‘I agree with Bruce’ posters on your blogs are just aliases that you have made up…
You genuinely do seem to be locked into your own little world where only your views are 100% correct.
Oh Bruce, you’re such a dreadful liar.
“I also made it pretty obvious that it was me posting.”
Yes, but not intentionally. Perhaps in the Revised Bruce Edition of events. But the number of people who take that seriously amounts to something in the region of one.
As a matter of record, the only stuff removed from the comments section is as follows:
Comment #1 - a link to an article on Bruce’s site covering his opinions on the press. Approximate relevancy to the discussion: zero.
Comment #15 - a link to an article on Bruce’s site discussing the Wii. Evidently already read by the previous commentator Bruce was responding to so again, not relevant to the discussion.
Ta! As you were…
If only it was as easy to delete the elephants in the room…
Oddbob, a very well written summary of the recent events, let’s call them collectively “Bruceapolooza”. It’s quite something that in the last couple of days I have been unable to go to any of my usual web haunts without spotting garbage from El Revisionista. If nothing, it’s been highly entertaining.
Bill
And I had an open comments policy on Bruceongames. Where I welcomed constructive debate and criticism of what I had written. If you don’t believe me go and look. I have written coming up for 300 articles and there are loads of critical comments. I didn’t even authorise individual comments, they appeared automatically. Everything went up uncensored (except for profanity).
Then Stuart and his sycophants arrived in ultra agressive attack mode and, quite frankly I didn’t know what had hit me. I was in two minds. I wanted to keep my open policy but I didn’t want reasonable debate on the blog destroyed by a handful of zealots.
Then it escalated as they plastered it all over the internet. So I was left with no option but to delete the rubbish. Implement a comments policy. And vet every comment.
My blog has returned to normal now. I am authorising all but silly posts.
Meanwhile I still have no explanation for the two weeks of personal insults on Stuart’s forum. That is far more worthy of criticism than anything that I have done.
And nobody seems to have grasped the nettle that he is selling other people’s work on his website. He is profiting from piracy. All I hear are the usual excuses.
And I repeat, all the stories on all the forums, including this one, were started by other people, not me. And I only joined in two of them. And then just for entertainment value as anyone with a brain can easily see.
If you had said “Ok, it’s a fair cop” then it wouldn’t have gone on for weeks and people might have had respect for you for putting up your hands and admitting you were trying to rewrite history, including rewriting your own words from the past and your own 80s opinion of the fall of Imagine.
It seemed that there was a great weight of evidence against your new stance but you deleted it all.
Saying I was there doesn’t automatically mean anything.
Just for example if one of the prison guards at a concentration camp said “no one died here we looked after everyone really well” would that mean anything? No, because there is a wealth of evidence to the contrary over decades.
Probably a bad example but I’m sure you get the point.
The link above to Video Game Chartz is pretty damning too as that all happened before Stuart-Gate and you really seem to have made a lot of friends over there to be banned for endless spamming and crying for attention.
Some of your blog is not terrible, but most of it is pretty ill informed, which doesn’t bode well when you are supposed to know the industry inside and out.
Please accept that you are wrong and accept responsibility for your actions and the actions of the other board members of Imagine - you never know people might actually stop calling you a liar then.
“I wanted to keep my open policy but I didn’t want reasonable debate on the blog destroyed by a handful of zealots.”
Oh my goodness, I think I might actually *die* laughing. And I suppose I’m also responsible for you behaving so badly that you got banned from YakYak and banned TWICE from RLLMUK, two places on the internet where I’m about as popular as Hitler with halitosis.
[This link was the first link in my post - I've removed it so at least we can remove the focus from the link being posted again - Bob]
Judge for yourself, folks! (And remember, that’s just the stuff Bruce actually deleted, never mind all the polite, reasonable posts he simply refused to approve in the first place. All 180+ of those purged posts were considered acceptable by Bruce in the first instance, until Bruce realised just how bad they were making him look.)
So it is alright for Stuart to put links in his comments but not me.
I understand. Completely.
Oh, and Bruce is lying as usual. I haven’t had a post allowed on his blog for over a week, including perfectly polite, reasonable questions like “What do you consider the minimum acceptable age for a child to play GTA IV?”
Oh, and my link is to SOMETHING THAT’S ALREADY LINKED TO ON THIS PAGE, you unbelievably dimwitted dolt.
Stuart is rather proving my point for me.
He is just incredibly nasty.
I have had to put up with this all over the internet for two weeks now.
Including him spamming my personal email.
I own and run a very successful forum in a non gaming area. And it is a very nice place indeed. Incredibly popular with the members and no bad behaviour. I hardly have to administer it. So I know about online behaviour. And there really is no excuse for Stuart’s complete lack of civility. On my blog all his posts now automatically go to spam which is the right place for them, as anyone who has prior experience of him will know.
More lies, Bruce. Sending someone email is not “spamming”. I sent you a total of seven short emails in nine days, four more than you sent me. And if you don’t want to be treated with contempt, maybe you shouldn’t act like such a pathetic, hypocritical, lying coward.
Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies. 25 years and it’s all you know how to do.
Bruce Everiss, Chief Iceberg Spotter on the Titanic:
“In 1912 the Titanic was sunk by pirates. While many have claimed that an iceberg was involved, this is not the case. They were not there, and I was. It was pirates. They rammed the front of the boat with their incredibly cold ship, and then laughed as it sank. This is just typical of pirates. Sinking ships is NOT a victimless crime, despite everyone’s claims. People who say an iceberg hit the Titanic are sycophants supporting the actions of the big, white, floaty, frozen pirates who sank the boat which I was in charge of not sailing into icebergs.”
Bruce’s art web site isn’t that bad to be honest. What I would say about is I wish he’d live up to the standards of behaviour he requires of his own forumites on the various forums he visits around the net.
Specifically banning people from advertising or posting links to drive traffic to their own websites. All posts that do are instantly deleted on Bruce’s forums.
http://www.artforums.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2
His constant blog promotion is starting to ruin one of the places I like to post on.
Bruce, why do you think you were banned from at least two forums this week, one of them twice?
I’m sure the internet and its wife was already aware of this but just in case anyone isn’t quite so sure yet:
Stuart Campbell is abrasive and rude.
I know, I know, shocking. However, I’m not entirely sure how Stu being rude alters the timeline I’ve documented in my post or any of the other facts I’ve highlighted here.
“9) Do not post any weblinks when you post or put any weblinks in your signature until after you have made 10 genuine posts to the forum.”
Oh no, I’ve laughed my pelvis out.
Bruce, as a relative outside with not much interest in games, but quite some interest in “Intellectual Property” issues, I ask you please to try some deep introspection to look at how you appear to a dispassionate observer. You appear defensive, deluded, mendacious and, above all for a man of your years, astonishingly childish. Whether you actually have any of these characteristics within is not for me to speculate; but any mildly observant positivist would find it difficult to *perceive* any or all of the characteristics I describe.
but any mildly observant positivist would find it difficult NOT to *perceive* any or all of the characteristics I describe, I should say.
FWIW Piracy was the undoing of Imagine and a whole swathe of 8 bit publishers. If schoolboys like Stuart are stealing your product (which he freely admits to in articles on his website) then where is the money going to come from to pay the wages?
I have read a lot of articles just recently from back then. And time after time after time the publishers are complaining about piracy and how it was hurting the business.
Piracy is not victimless. It is theft and the people who do it are thieves. Twice I have been employed by game companies that were hammered by piracy so I have seen the damage that it causes.
People who try and blame the demise of Imagine on anything other than piracy do not know what they are talking about. Sure, there were other problems at Imagine. There are in any company. But they did not bring Imagine down. Piracy did.
Just as it destroyed the PSX market and currently is destroying the PSP and boxed PC game markets. These facts are irrefutable. There are countless articles and comments from industry leaders to support this. Also just look at the download stats on the Bit Torrent sites that have them. The thieves know that there is zero chance of being caught and punished for their crime.
But they are stupid. If there is no money to develop games then games won’t be developed. So the release of new boxed PC games and quality PSP titles has dried up enormously. The pirates destroy the industry.
Ah, classic Bruce. Ignore every single fact that contradicts and smashes your argument, refuse to answer any polite and reasonable questions anyone’s asked you, and just doggedly keep on lying.
Has anyone ever said in your deleted comments “piracy is a victimless crime!”? No I didn’t think so.
Piracy has a small impact on games companies but it’s not enough to destroy a company that makes good games, or even a company that makes shit games like EA if they know what they are doing.
You can scream “Piracy killed imagine” until the cows come home but it won’t change the FACTS that it was in fact destroyed by incompetence and stupidity of it’s management - renting offices they didn’t need, and buying fancy cars.
If they were so concerned about wages this shit wouldn’t have happened would it?
I had my Spectrum until 1990 and regularly bought games for it, and so did millions of other people - I just made damn sure I didn’t buy mickey-taking dross.
Please, please, please wake up and smell reality Bruce.
Wait a second, let me see if I’ve got this right.
So what you’re saying Bruce is that piracy ISN’T a victimless crime? Jimminy, this is complicated.
Bruce, you have a giant red reset button, don’t you? Every time the discussion gets to the point where everyone has painstakingly explained the difference between “copyright infringement” and “theft”, gone through the myriad occasions in the 80s when you explained the demise of Imagine without *once* mentioning piracy, despite numerous opportunities to do so, and established that the PC market IS OUTSELLING THE 360, and of course pointing out that all figures indicate piracy, despite your primary-grade thinking, encourages sales, you hit that button. CLUNK! We’re back to the beginning again!
I think someone should make a page that lays out all the counters to Bruce’s five default-state statements of gibberish, which can be linked to each time the button gets hammered.
Also, this is unquestionably the best thing ever:
“People who try and blame the demise of Imagine on anything other than piracy do not know what they are talking about.”
Bruce, you were given innumerable opportunties to blame the demise of Imagine on piracy twenty years ago, and you never once took them. Instead you cited so many other factors, but never once mentioned these rogue playground criminals. For clarity, could you let us know if you are specifically refering to yourself as not knowing what you’re talking about in the above statement? Many thanks.
Oh, and again, why do you think you were banned from at least two forums this week, one of them twice?
“Twice I have been employed by game companies that were hammered by piracy so I have seen the damage that it causes.”
Hmm. Since on principle we can assume that anything Bruce says is a lie, what was it that Imagine was REALLY hammered by, I wonder? Why don’t we ask Steve Cain, who escaped the catastrophe and went on to found successful breakaway company Denton Designs?
“Sometimes you see things by other people [like Lords Of Midnight by Beyond] and you say ‘I wish I’d done that’. Well, we thought we could produce things like that without having people of the calibre of Bruce Everiss around to cock it up for us.”
http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/040/htsquad.htm
Still, it can’t ALL have been Bruce’s fault, I suppose. Let’s look at an article on Bruce from the media of the time:
“Looking at the back-catalogue of Imagine games it’s difficult to understand how they prospered to the extent that they did. So much of it had to be due to the level of hype they generated, fed to a software-hungry market with few preconceptions. And head of hype was Bruce Everiss.
However, the bubble was about to burst. Much has been made of the effect of the ‘Mega Games’ and they have often been blamed for Imagine’s downfall, but there were many other factors to take into account.
Far more important was complacency and a delusionary belief by directors Dave Lawson and Mark Butler in the the sort of hyped corporate self-image that Bruce Everiss had created.”
http://zxgoldenyears.net/everiss.html
Still, a man can easily find himself the blameless victim of unfortunate circumstances. I’m sure Bruce was a much bigger success at his next company:
“In 1985, Bruce Everiss joined Tansoft, the owners of Oric as managing director and made a typically bullish announcement: “My first aim is to establish the Oric Atmos in its rightful market position.” On hearing this his predecessor, Paul Kaufman, said, “His reputation says it all. The only thing that annoys me about his appointment to managing director is that he is now driving around in what used to be my Mercedes.”
Sadly, Oric was fighting to survive in market completely dominated by the Spectrum and the Commodore. Although it had a foothold in France, in the key market of the UK, it failed to impress. In a trade journal, Everiss said, “Oric’s performance in the UK this year was a total disaster. The company built up massive debts and is scheduled to repay £3.5 million to creditors by March.” Everiss was about to find himself aboard another sinking ship.”
I guess the press can be unfair, though. We should look at a wider range of media if we want to find out the complete truth:
“Imagine was one of the largest software houses, with a glamorous image. Directors Butler and Everiss claimed in June that the company’s problems were shared by the whole industry. Those problems included the epidemic of piracy, the crowding of companies in the marketplace and the surprise sales collapse. Attempts by Imagine to solve those problems included lowering the price of games and then reneging on the promise, sacking senior employee Colin Stokes for allegedly passing information to rival companies, and investing huge sums in a projected series of ‘megagames’ which were to sell for around £30-40. Towards the end straws were clutched at and Beau-Jolly scooped the back list of Imagine games.
Though all those factors played their part, the real reasons for the fall of the house of Imagine could well be financial incompetence and inflated self-importance. One of the hallmarks of the company, dating back to its early days, was an extravagant advertising campaign for all its products and as things got worse the more extravagant that campaign became. Along with the Wrath of Magra, from Carnell, there can be few other games pre-sold as heavily as Psyclapse and Bandersnatch. To date, neither has materialised or is likely to.”
http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/030/sincvoy.htm
“Talking of mothers, Ferrari-lover Bruce Everiss, former operations director of Imagine, has been holding forth to any journalists still prepared to listen to the ‘true’ story behind the downfall of Imagine. In the interests of simplicity, Everiss omits to mention such obscure events as the bugging of Colin Stokes’ telephone, the dawn raid on his house, the accusations flying around that Imagine went so far as to hire private detectives to report on the plans of other software companies. The Gospel according to Bruce now has it that Imagine’s directors were simply young, green, and foolish enough to actually believe all the harmless untruths - sorry Bruce, totally justifiable marketing hype -that St Bruce was telling about the company …”
http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/034/gremlin.htm
“We then called Bruce Everiss and the confusion began to clear. When asked what was happening at Imagine Bruce replied shortly, ‘The company is up shit street. There has been no proper financial control. Not even a VAT return has been done. It makes me sick to think that the people who have worked so hard to make the wealth of Imagine have been left high and dry while the directors of the company have stripped it bare and got away scot free. They did everything to line their own pockets.’”
http://www.crashonline.org.uk/07/news.htm
Ah yes, Stuart in his pathetic attack mode. Not very nice.
Selective quoting really is only ever going to support his narrow and mistaken view.
So he is wasting his time. As usual.
Just separating the truth from your lies as ever, Bruce. The comprehensively-documented facts appear to be that Imagine were brought down by the arrogant recklessness of a serially incompetent marketing man. But I can see why you’d be trying to rewrite history there.
“Selective quoting really is only ever going to support his narrow and mistaken view.”
Selective editing is just as bad, Bruce. Perhaps you could enlighten us why you deleted so many well-written, constructive and totally polite posts from your own comments threads. I have no problem with you removing posts you thought aggressive and rude, but you also removed at least a few dozen comments that were simply discussing events, or that were responding to your arguments in a rational and engaging manner. By deleting them, that’s kind of like winning a pub argument by punching someone in the face.
Nevermind that it *isn’t* selective quoting, but entirely unambiguous statements, in context, that explain the events at the time. Accompanied by links to the full piece to ensure accuracy.
Bruce, why do you think you were banned from at least two forums this week, one of them twice?
RE: #55
“Ah yes, Stuart in his pathetic attack mode. Not very nice”
I refer Mr Everiss to comments #2, #30 and #36.
I’m just nipping the shop, my black kettle needs a pot to match.
“Piracy was the undoing of Imagine and a whole swathe of 8 bit publishers. If schoolboys like Stuart are stealing your product then where is the money going to come from to pay the wages?”
This has been said before, but I’d to say it as well.
1. Lots of people WILL copy your software no matter what, but some people - even people who pirate sotware WILL also buy it if it’s good. I know I would.
2. If the choice was between having to BUY Imagines software, and not copying it…EVERYBODY with half a brain would probably prefer not to play it at all. It was bad and only sold because there was a limited selection of software in the early years.
Bruce, I’ve had a good many laughs over the couple of weeks or so, but I wouldn’t even care to go to your webite again to read any of those 300 articles because I couldn’t imagine anything worthwhile in them.
…oh, and one more thing;
>”I own and run a very successful forum in a non gaming area.”
Bruce, you’re only successful if your blog is popular and making money for you. You just have a blog and anyone able to spend £1 a month on hosting can have that. You’re using too many, too fancy words to describe something that doesn’t need it.
Please just leave the internet…and close the door behind you.
A few idle thoughts now things have quietened down a tad…
Soks @#60, personally I wouldn’t even class that as successful. I’d be more inclined to not measure success by statistics or earnings but by my actions as a human being.
Quick digression…
As you’re well aware, I run a successful site myself - one that sees the good work of the community featured in magazines across the world and on the web on an increasingly regular basis. I can’t remember the last time a month went past without the work of one of the RR community appearing in at least one UK magazine, this is a good thing.
None of this adds to my worth or justifies my existence on the planet, it’s something that anyone with a bit of time, effort and passion could do.
Strangely, despite our traffic eclipsing Bruces on a daily basis, I’ve never once had to actively promote the place myself nor did any of the previous administrators. I let my work and the work of others speak for itself. Funny how that works. No sensationalism, no shock horror stories, no goading, no baiting - just chug along fighting the good fight. To use the Wayne’s World mantra “If you build it, they will come”. Or to turn it around for the internets “If your content is good enough, they will come”.
I’m more proud of a community that can create the most accessible game outside of academia than I ever would be of any traffic data or statistics. I’d also sooner be a reader/contributor of/to a site that’s wired up to help each other out, help out others and generally do good things than I would a reader/contributor to one that holds everyone in utter contempt.
Whilst Stu is being abrasive (but hey, that’s Stu) to one person in this comments section - I can’t help but note the utter contempt Bruce treats *everyone* with.
His blog is littered with abuse and generalisations. Upon his first appearance here he manages to insult the entire readership (how to get off on the right foot lesson 1), me (how to get off on the right foot lesson 2) and anyone who doesn’t agree with his version of the world (which at least count was the entire population of the planet Earth minus Bruce Everiss).
An attitude summed up in this choice completely out of context selective editing blah blah blah quote from an article on his site:
“Quite simply, if you are a publisher of PC games, it is best to regard all potential customers as thieves.”
And that’s the problem I see with the impression Bruce gives of Bruce’s view of the world. The only thing I’m left coming away with from reading his articles and his commentary here and elsewhere is a bitter aftertaste.
The impression that Bruce believes that everyone else is a liar, a thief, a cheat, a hippy, scum (insert random generalisation and insult here) or below him unless they agree with his world vision. And they should be treated with contempt and disdain.
That’s not something I’ll ever get my head round. It’s spreading hate in exchange for a few meaningless figures.
I can’t get on board with that, sorry.
The thing is, the comments I’ve made about Bruce knowing nothing but lies for the last quarter-century weren’t just a jibe - it’s literally true.
Marketing people ARE professional liars, spin doctors whose job is to get people to believe stuff that isn’t true. In Bruce’s world, anything that you can get people to believe effectively BECOMES the truth, and any contradictory fact that you can suppress ceases to exist. It’s all about control of the flow of information, as his actions on his blog demonstrate so starkly.
It’s straight out of “1984″: Ignorance Is Strength. As long as you control what’s printed, you can lie through your teeth - “I deleted 90% of the posts in the thread in order to promote debate” - and think you’ve gotten away with it, because whatever people remember, the only actual visible evidence is what you allow to be seen.
Of course, if - as I imagine genuinely came as a nasty surprise to Bruce - the entire internet unites against your hamfistedly transparent attempts at censorship and manages to publish the truth, things get a bit stickier and you have to run around fighting a desperate rearguard action, creating fake forum accounts to invent support, trying to switch the subject in a panic etc.
A *good* spin doctor, however, knows that sometimes you just have to admit defeat, as the inescapable facts give you no choice but to at least superficially back down. Coca-Cola brought back Classic Coke (and pulled Dasani). Gerald Ratner resigned. Gordon Brown isn’t trying to pretend that he’s pleased about the council elections today (even though he probably isn’t going to actually change his policies) because he knows he’d be a complete global laughing stock if he tried, and would lose whatever credibility he has left. Bruce lacks even that rudimentary level of self-awareness, which is and will forever be his tragedy. The first URL in Oddbob’s blog entry will hang around Bruce for the rest of time like the carving on a headstone.
http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/bruceworld
Oh, and PS Bruce: you still haven’t found all the comments on your blog whose user ID is actually a link to that page…
Me:”Bruce, you’re only successful if your blog is popular and making money for you.”
You:”Soks, personally I wouldn’t even class that as successful. I’d be more inclined to not measure success by statistics or earnings but by my actions as a human being.”
Now you’re forcing me to think…dammit…so I’d have to say that a highlight of my “remaking career” was having Omega Race singled out by you, as being something you loved to play, in an interview in Retro Gamer. So why was that a highlight? Because I know about your love for games - old and new, and the integrity about it that you bring to the table. So “so what” if you’re full of cock-talk and rubbing yourself in flour whilst looking at my webcam - you know what you’re talking about.
Something that clearly can’t be said about Bruce.
So, Bob, stop that. By clearly thinking more about your answer than I did, you clearly show the holes in my original argument.
You’re right, of course, but then my comment wasn’t really supposed to about blogs in general, but just about Bruces.
Nice to come back and have more to read
I’m thinking of hosting a party like this next week. I’ll start things off by detailing how piracy killed the shmup genre. Don’t you say otherwise, I was there. You weren’t.
Bill
“Bruce, I’ve had a good many laughs over the couple of weeks or so, but I wouldn’t even care to go to your webite again to read any of those 300 articles because I couldn’t imagine anything worthwhile in them.”
I’ve actually perused a little, and Bruce has some well worded and some hyperbolic-yet-true things to say on the subject of the effects of video game violence on children. Were my first exposure to the man an Everiss vs. Thompson debate I’d have been cheering Brucey on.
However, as I apparently managed to take enough of his piss away from his Piracy/Imagine Software article with my own brand of humble, folksy common sense, I’ve been deleted, banned, and maligned repeatedly by him. Couple that with his obscene forum antics and he gives the distinct impression of being a twat.
Some things to consider:
Piracy is theft. This is common sense.
Piracy has to have some sort of impact on the sales of the pirated item. This is also common sense.
Piracy destroys game companies. This is a giant leap of assumption requiring data which is unavailable and has never been pursued.
And, no, “I was there to see it” doesn’t count.
“Piracy is theft. This is common sense.”
But wrong…
Yeah it definitely isn’t theft.
No reason why it shouldn’t be regarded as just as cunty as theft though.
“Piracy is theft. This is common sense.
Piracy has to have some sort of impact on the sales of the pirated item. This is also common sense.”
Actually neither of things are common sense.
1- Is simply not legally true.
2- An interesting debate. Piracy only has an impact on the sales of the pirated item if people who pirated would otherwise have paid for it.
And furthermore only has a negative effect if those people aren’t outnumbered by people who play a pirated copy and really like it enough to pick up the game, which in the age of shitty or non-existent demos is not a small number.
So it’s not “common sense” at all, at the very least it’s an issue with enough of a grey area to demand proper research. Especially given that the single most pirated format of this generation, the Nintendo DS is also massively the most successful.
I do like the new Worldofstuart blog.
Oh Bruce, oh Bruce, oh Bruce, oh Bruce.
Do stop it, there’s a love. You might be amusing yourself for a few moments but I’m not entirely sure if its a pay off that’s worth it considering each time you do something so colossally idiotic like this it reflects worse on you than anyone else.
The entire internet and it’s aunt has shook its head at your antics, journalists, folks from the industry you’ve worked in who unlike you continue to work in the industry (despite piracy LULZ), even Seth Godin - marketer extraordinaire has told you to check yourself- not to mention us on the fringes, the punters, the folks you so love to deride as lesser beings only worthy of being lied to.
So, just about everyone aside from yourself, then.
And still you persist. Bless you, Bruce. It’s a train wreck and you’re only piling more onto the track with each idiotic act.
Carry on, we’ll have a TV Movie out of this in no time.