Bruce Everiss: The Oxygen Of Publicity

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.]

[Belated update] What happened after this tale? Over to Rammy.