Category: Uncategorized

How Coleco scored Donkey Kong

I ran across this interview with the driving force behind the Colecovision and found it to be fascinating. It seems incredible to think you could once get the rights to great arcade games like Zaxxon and Turbo for $5,000.

Bromley knew this title – which was hitherto unknown in the West – could be the game to propel his console into the public consciousness. He also knew he had to act fast. “A meeting was arranged for the next day,” he reveals. “I said I wanted the rights to Donkey Kong. I didn’t want Atari to find out about this game. After a lengthy conversation Makihara-san told me Yamauchi-san wanted $200,000 advance and $2.00 per unit royalty. It was around 10:00AM and Yamauchi-san knew that I needed to catch my train, so then he added the kicker: the US$ 200,000 must be wired to his account by 12:00 midnight, or there was no deal.”

The odds were most certainly against Bromley. “The most Coleco had ever paid for an advance for any license up to then was $5,000,” he says. ”Also, they never, ever paid more than 5% of their selling price; the worst case would be about 90 cents. Now because of the need to wire the money before 12:00AM Tokyo time, I needed to take the next available train. I would have to call as soon as I got back to my hotel in Tokyo which would be in the afternoon and therefore wake up Arnold Greenberg in the US, the only one who could authorise an immediate wire transfer. I was to call him at home, wake him up, and then ask him to wire $200,000 for a game he has never seen or heard of. If that wasn’t bad enough, he then has to agree to more than twice the usual royalty amount!”

Bromley stayed firm, spurred on by the fact that he knew that Donkey Kong would be a smash-hit once western gamers laid eyes on it. “Upon my return to Tokyo, I called Arnold Greenberg from my room – I was shaking a little,” he admits. “It was about 4:00 AM in the morning and I got: ‘Whaaaaa? Do you know what time it is?’ I referred him to a conversation we had days before with marketing and sales; we all agreed we needed a really spectacular game to bundle with the ColecoVision console to create an impact. I then told him of the conditions: $200,000 advance and the $2.00 per unit royalty. I said: ‘I have found that game.’ To my surprise all he said: ‘is it really that good?’ I told him that it was as good as Pac-Man. He asked what it was called and I uttered ‘Donkey Kong.’ Silence. For the first time I realized how silly the name sounded. What seemed like an hour later he said: ‘OK. Let’s do it,’ and said he would wire over the money as soon as the banks opened that day.”

It’s also an important lesson in what passes for Japanese business ethics. I had to laugh upon reading it, having run into similar issues with both Konami and Sega in the past. Fortunately, having studied in Tokyo, I was more prepared for them than Mr. Bromley was, although it’s hard to argue with how well it worked out for him. What a pity Coleco didn’t tough it out the way Nintendo did; the industry would have been the better for it.

THE ALTAR OF HATE

Today Castalia House published my collection of short stories entitled THE ALTAR OF HATE. It consists of one novella, one poem, and eight short stories. Some of the stories will be familiar to longtime Dread Ilk, having been originally available on my old Eternal Warriors web site back in the day or published in Stupefying Stories. As the collection is dedicated to Bane, who would have enjoyed its dark and occasionally sinister bent, it contains the poem that is here on this site, “Bane Walks On”. And there is a new story, one with which I am particularly pleased, that involves the application of a particular Maupassant mechanism to the futuristic world of Quantum Mortis.

The cover illustration was created by our newest artist, Jeremiah, who did an excellent job working under the direction of JartStar. The title story was inspired by a visit to Venice some years ago; I very much doubt any writer can visit that eerie, decaying city without feeling the proddings of a brooding, water-logged muse. I very much like the cover art, as in addition to the Venetian theme it reminds me a little of the paperback edition of Mona Lisa Overdrive, an image that Psykosonik once used as the cover of our demo tape.

From the initial reviews:

“Each story has its appeal across multiple genres, although to me the
story from which the title is derived was particularly moving.”

“From an eldritch tale blended with computer insider humor, an ode to a
fallen friend, to science fiction with a twist, this is a good
collection of Vox’s shorter writings to date.”

“The stories move along, but one feels the uneasy eyes of the abyss
staring back as you progress, as it were, through a darkened ancient
forest. Only an author of the first rank could achieve this.”

In other Castalia news, fans of Tom’s Rathaverse will be pleased to note this comment to a reviewer hoping for a sequel: “Look for The Court-Martial of Ratha Flower Wood, maybe before Christmas.”

The new evil empire

The European public has finally begun to figure out that the Eurofascists of the EU are cut from the same cloth as Napoleon and Hitler:

Britons see Russia in a more positive light than the European Union,
despite recent tensions with Moscow over Ukraine, according to a poll
published on Saturday. The league table of 27 “liked”
countries and institutions put the European Parliament — for which
elections are being held in May — sixth from bottom, and the EU fourth
from bottom. Only Saudi Arabia,
Iran and North Korea ranked below the European parliament when those
polled were asked how positive or negative they felt towards them.
Israel was fifth from bottom and Russia was seventh from bottom. Canada was top.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the British fear the EU more than the Russians. The EU is an invading and occupying force. The Russians are doing little more than securing their national interests in responds to EU and US provocations, and in doing so, proving that national interests supersede artificially-drawn political boundaries.

What shall we feel?

Fred Reed asks an honest question:

What am I, and people my age, supposed to feel other than raw contempt for pig-ignorant, self-righteous, utterly useless illiterates whom society will have to feed and house like barnyard animals for the next fifty years?

I suspect that in another two decades, this will be the moderate position. There is nothing to salvage them. “Education”, the progressive answer to all social evils? Education is what turned them into utterly useless illiterates in the first place.

The iceberg’s tip

I find it both amusing and absurd to observe how certain trolls simply cannot manage to control themselves. Despite my supposedly controversial style, in my entire history of Internet use, I have only been asked twice to refrain from commenting on an Internet site. In both cases, I not only refrained from commenting there, but ceased regular reading there as well. I even declined an invitation to return to one of the sites when contacted and encouraged to do so.

Contrast with that the behavior of Ann Morgan, who is not only one of the trolls who continues to read this blog and attempts to post easily identifiable comments here, but apparently can’t even manage to keep her troll-dentities straight:

Rose colored glasses March 22, 2014 7:13 PM

**It celebrates the Egyptians, Chinese, Mayans, Indus to downplay Christian Civilization without ever once considering the barbarity of those civs.**

So… on the planet you came from, Christians never burned women alive for nonsensical reasons, held slaves, or spent 400 years trying to wipe out the Cherokee and Souix…

Ann Morgan March 22, 2014 7:16 PM 

This comment has been removed by the author.

Don March 22, 2014 8:08 PM

Ann did you forget which sock puppet you were using? What is that, three on this thread alone. I would be honestly interested in hearing why you think you cannot stay away even when you have been told. Worse you simply cannot follow the rules so we always know it’s you. You fool no one but yourself. Go do something quit hating Christians and blaming others for how you respond to your problems. It’s spring go for a walk. Throw rocks at the beach, go to Church tomorrow, I promise though it might hurt giving up sin and pride is painful at first, you’ll be happier in the end.

While I normally delete the trolls’ comments, I leave those I consider to be educationally illustrative. This example of a troll attempting to resurrect itself should help explain to some of the relative newcomers why I occasionally nuke what superficially appear to be innocuous comments, but are actually the tip of an incipient and entirely familiar iceberg.

For some reason, the trolls never seem to grasp that virtually no one, in the entire history of the Internet, shows up for the first time on an established blog and promptly vomits forth a massive series of comments indicating familiarity with both the blog and its regular commenters. It should be obvious that changing one’s identity will never fool anyone so long as one insists on saying the exact same things that resulted in one’s identification as a troll in the first place. But then, logic does not appear to be a strong point with these creatures.

Speaking of one’s critics, I thought it was amusing to see that someone is attempting to imitate my cruel tactic of directly quoting Mr. Scalzi’s words. While I have no doubt he’ll be able to dig up a few careless infelicities, people tend to forget that I started as a nationally syndicated columnist. This means that I have always been aware that my words will be mined and carefully sifted for the purpose of attacking me. That is why quotes cited for use against me are usually modified or grammatically incomplete.

Otherwise, they tend to say more about the critic’s particular ideological bent than anything else. I mean, does anyone who has read this blog for more than five minutes seriously think I am even slightly embarrassed with people seeing observations like these being publicly attributed to me? I mean, what is the implied argument here, women DO have a Magic Vagina Power with a range of 30+ yards?

On Doctor-Assisted Suicide
I suspect euthanasia advocates would feel differently if it was legalized, but the doctor was required to use an axe.

On Male Intuition
Men can, as it happens, tell when a woman doesn’t have any idea what
she’s doing. As hard as it may be to believe this, a woman’s Magic
Vagina Power does not actually ensorcel every male within a 30-yard
radius and cause them to believe that a woman is automatically
superlative at every form of human endeavor.

On Public Education
“Is sending your kids to American public schools parental malpractice?” Yes.

Combative and confrontational

Since we are all about the evidence here at VP, be it scientific, documentary, or testimonial, here is a documented example of the sort of thing that a certain Baen author pointed out a certain Tor author is prone to overlooking on the part of the Tor editors when he is busy on pinkshirt patrol policing the behavior of other SF/F publishers.

The Baen author wrote: “Scalzi’s editor Patrick Nielsen-Hayden has been a rather routine and
divisive voice on his Making Light blog for many years now.  Often
combative, often confrontational.  Both he and his wife.  How much
division have the Nielsen-Hayden duo sown?  How much has their invective
and their involvement in various controversies helped to put up walls
in fandom?  Has Scalzi ever once called either of them out for it?”

Then someone sent me this little rant, courtesy of Teresa Neobatrachia Hayden, as she threatened those who dared to criticize her husband, the self-declared racist, Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

There’s been a big LJ thrash recently, one of those maelstroms of online
stupidity that take on a life of their own. All kinds of good people
got trashed, starting with Elizabeth Bear. Patrick got involved when he
posted some consoling remarks to Lisa Spangenberg. In the course of
those remarks, he observed that (1) some people are stupid; and (2)
some people don’t argue as well as others. The mob took this personally,
and lit into him.

What would you expect from a group that’s
self-selected for agreement with the statement, “I’m stupid, and I don’t
argue well”? Things got extremely ugly.

I wonder whether any of
those draggletailed loudmouths have noticed that Patrick has now deleted
his entire Live Journal, all the way back to the beginning. I doubt
they have. They don’t strike me as the sort to go back and see the
damage they’ve done. Patrick has as usual taken them seriously; whereas
they, knowing themselves better than he does, will have known they
weren’t worth listening to, and assumed they’d had no effect.

I
tender them my congratulations. Whatever good there was in Patrick’s LJ
is gone now. Those members of the mob who actually wanted someone to
listen to them now have one less person to do it. The junior literary
critics and wanna-be writers have lost one of the central editors in
science fiction from their conversation. And if any of that lot
professes to care about Patrick personally — please understand I’m not
rating that probability very high at the moment — it should be obvious
to them what kind of effect they’ve had.

I know Patrick better
than anyone else. This is serious damage. The nithings who’ve hurt him
will have moved on to some other inane topic by now. There’s nothing
worthwhile I can do to them. It wouldn’t take away his hurt — and
besides, they wouldn’t understand most of what I had to say to them.

One
other issue: when Patrick and I first registered our Live Journal
accounts, it never occurred to us to use anything other than our real
names — or rather, our real initials, which are easily traced to us,
and which we’ve used as userIDs in other forums where our identities are
or were known. Has it not occurred to the people attacking him that
they can say anything, whereas what they say about him will show up
whenever someone Googles his name? In terms of public reputation,
they’re playing with Monopoly money, and he’s playing with the real
thing.

Some of the people who are using false names are known to
him. Some of them are known to or evident to me. In those cases, I’ve
told Patrick who they really are. It’s only fair. Just on the other side
of the boundary for people whose identities he can figure out are
people whom he can almost figure out: this one is a VP student. This one
is someone he knows at conventions. This one is a reviewer he’s had
dealings with. And so forth.

Do any of those safely pseudonymous assholes ever stop to reflect that if he can tell they’re a former VP student, but not which one,
all former VP students become “people who may be traducing me on LJ at
this very moment”? The same thing goes for people he knows from
conventions, or wanna-be writers who might submit something to him.
Entire classes of people become potential attackers. That’s why I
identify everyone I can: it exculpates everyone else in that class.

Those
of you I can’t identify are not off the hook. I suggest that you never
seek to take credit under your real name for anything you’ve done or
written under your LJ pseudonym, because it’s unlikely that I will ever
forget you or what you’ve done.

Did Toni Weisskopf ever threaten anyone in the industry or publicly question the extent of their sexual experience? Alternatively, did Mr. Scalzi ever wax outraged and hold his very own editor to public account? Meanwhile, the overweight amphibian croaks about hurt… what about the terrible pain her husband inflicted on us People of Color? What about the FeelBad he has caused us? What about the way our tender feelings are bruised, even years later, by Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s cold declaration of racism?

It certainly explains a lot about the rot in SF/F over the last three decades to know that this pair of half-witted lunatics were editors at the largest publisher in the genre. Between them and the Peter Jacksons, it is a tossup as to which marriage was more disastrous for modern science fiction and fantasy.

Speaking of Mr. Nielsen Hayden’s reputation, I find it more than a little amusing that one has only to type “patrick nielsen h” into Google and the fourth autocomplete suggestion is “patrick nielsen hayden racist”. Despite all the pointing and shrieking that has been directed at me over the years, the accusation doesn’t even come up that quickly for me. What a grand editorial legacy to leave behind: racism and McRapey.

Science and raciss Africans

It’s telling how SWPLs decry whites who are openly less than enthusiastic about mudsharks, but tend to remain entirely silent concerning blacks who discriminate against other blacks who associate with whites in any way:

A new study of 212 black college students made available to Secrets found little open-mindedness: Blacks don’t like it when other blacks associate with whites, to the point of refusing help to an African-American experiencing “a run of bad luck” — just because they have white friends.

The study in the April edition of the authoritative journal Social Psychological and Personality Science found the so-called “black code” alive and kicking, prompting blacks far more than whites to frown on one of their own if they associate with the other race.

And it is particularly ironic that it is most often those who insist that the natural world is all there is and subscribe to the theory of evolution by natural selection who are most upset by the logically inevitable preference of one distinct population sub-species for its own kind in preference to the members of other sub-species that have evolved differently.

Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the “black code”, as it is not only scientifically logical, but is precisely the sort of thing that the Constitutional right of free association is designed to protect.

Britain’s big mistake

 It’s hard to argue that the Maastricht Treaty wasn’t a blunder of historic proportions. The only question is whether England will have to fight its way out of  the Eurofascist empire:

What is Sir Peter, married to his second wife, Gabrielle Mahieu, for 40 years,
most proud of? ”My opposition to the Maastricht Treaty. Because everything
that has gone wrong in Britain dates from us joining the European Union. One
of the reasons the House of Commons has lost its prestige is because people
feel we are no longer in charge of a country. So much of the legislation
that affects them is imposed by Brussels.’’ He is in favour of leaving the
European Union. ”If we had a referendum and the country votes to stay in
then we’re finished as a country because we will just be gobbled up into the
German Empire.’’

Using banks instead of tanks is arguably more civilized, but the end result is the same: conquest.

I RAGAZZI NON PIANGONO

Speaking of matters Italian, this seems a good time to mention that thanks to the collaboration between Castalia House’s bestselling author and Signore Bonello, the Rathaverse has been unleashed upon an unsuspecting Italian market. I RAGAZZI NON PIANGONO by Tom Kratman is now available on Amazon. I can personally attest that the translation does justice to the original text even if the translation of the title is not quite literal. A more accurate translation would have been I GRANDI RAGAZZI NON PIANGONO or perhaps QUESTI RAGAZZONI NON PIANGERANNO, but in the interest of actually fitting the title on the cover, we modified that to the Italian equivalent of “The Boys Don’t Cry”.

Descrizione: I RAGAZZI NON PIANGONO è un romanzo breve dell’autore di fantascienza
militare Tom Kratman, famoso per Un deserto chiamato pace e per la sua
serie Carrera. La trama segue il ciclo di vita di un Ratha, un super
carro armato senziente del futuro, che combatte con senso del dovere le
battaglie dell’Uomo in decine di mondi alieni. La creatura saprà però
ancora grata ai suoi creatori una volta che scoprirà di avere una
coscienza? E per quanto tempo una macchina da guerra intelligente con
potenza di fuoco sufficiente per radere al suolo una città sarà
soddisfatta di rimanere uno schiavo obbediente?

One mildly amusing translation note: because Italians don’t have the letters “J” or “H” in their names, I took the liberty of changing the names of the Ratha developers to Italian names like “Giovanni” and “Loredana”. The translator objected to this on the basis of Italians being familiar with English names in their science fiction, and more importantly, because he felt the behavior of the characters was much more English than properly Italian.

I resisted the urge to ask if this was because the characters concerned were actually doing their jobs rather than sitting around drinking espresso, smoking cigarettes and reading La Gazzetta dello Sport and Chi; it turned out that he felt the problem was that no Italian superior would ever refer to a female employee by her first name unless he was romantically involved with her. And while there was a mild suggestion of this in the English text, he felt that it was the wrong way to go. So, we stuck with the English names.

Anche, stiamo cercando per ancora cinque lettori italiani per rivedere questo libro nuovo, quindi, se parle italiano e vuole leggerlo, spedirmi un email, per favore.

The German translation, GROßE JUNGS WEINEN NICHT will follow within a week or so. And on Monday, Castalia will announce a new release.

UPDATE: Apparently Italians are massive Tom Kratman fans. He’s already number one in fantascienza: #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Foreign Languages > Italian > Fantasy, Horror & Science Fiction

The return of La Serenissima

I, for one, welcome the return of our old Venetian overlords and the Most Serene Republic:

TREVISO – Il referendum on
line per l’indipendenza del Veneto dall’Italia ha conteggiato 2 milioni
360mila 235 voti, pari al 73% del corpo elettorale regionale. I sì sono
stati 2 milioni 102mila 969, pari all’89%, i no 257.276 (10,9%). Sono i
numeri della consultazione comunicati  in piazza dei Signori a Treviso
dai promotori del referendum, il movimento venetista ‘Plebiscito.eu’.

E’
stata una consultazione virtuale in tutti in sensi: perchè fatta
soprattutto attraverso la rete, oltre che con schede raccolte nei
gazebo, e ‘voti’ telefonici, e perchè, Costituzione alla mano, non ha
alcun valore formale, men che meno istituzionale.

The vote has no legal force, but the fact that 2.4 million votes were cast in an electorate of 3.7 million indicates that there is genuinely strong support for Venetian independence. And so the Risorgimento, the bastard child of Garibaldi’s globalism and the ambitions of the Piedmontese royal house, begins to unravel at last.