Tag: history

The Jester’s Privilege

The Big Bear has become too self-aware to be permitted to spoil Satan’s punchlines by his little minions. This is a transcript from a recent UATV video; I’ve been experimenting with some of the auto-transcription software with the idea that preserving some of the more interesting information being presented in video form in a more permanent and accessible medium might be worthwhile.

I was thinking about this recently, there’s something called the Jester’s Privilege. Jester’s Privilege is the ability and right of a jester to talk and mock freely without being punished for it, for nothing he says seems to matter. I think I lost this Jester’s Privilege when what I said started mattering. It’s super interesting to think about: if the Jester can affect the economy and politics with his jokes to people stop giving him a pass. Or is it when the jester realises his power that he loses his invisibility?

Oh, the jokester has become self aware. Yeah, it might be my self-awareness that made it so I no longer got the Jester’s Privilege. You never lost that privilege. You claimed it more fully when you chose a new king, based on the truth that the king you chose is beyond this world. Good choice. That’s very profound. You went from Jester to King because the chair was vacated, and slaves despise all the speak-rule-of-law slaves like empty chairs because it because it allows for secret kings. That’s mind blowing.

Gammas love empty chairs because it allows them to envision that they’re in the chair. That’s why we don’t have actual rulers. The Jester’s Privilege is an interesting concept in the Age of Hilarious. Your downfall is people taking your job seriously. It has been a harbinger of great success today. People look up to you as a leader and a truthsayer. They banned you because you’re too many steps ahead.

Yeah, I think that when you’re really ahead of the curve, it’s almost like when advanced technology appears to be magic. It’s similar to when you’re early adapter or you’re a trendsetter. People think you’re insane until everyone starts doing it. There were tons of people in 2018 that already knew this shit. But it wasn’t as mainstream to get chickens and gardens and shit. The wise fool teaches this.

Learning about jesters is really interesting. The art of the jester is to skillfully play on the boundary so the king has no choice but to laugh along with his subjects. Many a jester had his head lopped off for not being skilled enough to recognise the line, that’s true. I think when I took a stand against the child hormone thing is when I lost my privilege, that’s why Norm McDonald’s so great. Norm McDonald’s never done that. We can’t find a clip of Norm McDonald actually getting mad, and I know he gets mad. I know a lot of people who know him personally and Norm battled a temper.

I’m not judging. I battled that myself. But he never showed it. As a jester, he would always make it a joke. And I think that’s why, up until his death, he always had the Jester’s Privilege. I think that what I did was that I wanted to be a real boy. And so it was my choice at the end of the day. A true jester edges the line further and further erodes the power of the king and empowers the people. A bad jester insults the king and brings tyranny for all who would bring tyranny to himself. When you insult the king, the king will lash out at you but in doing so, it weakens the king if the king kills the jester. The common folk don’t respect the king because he can’t take a joke.

So maybe it’s not the humor that changes things, but the insecurity of those being mocked. There are no true jesters allowed in court anymore. Their humorous scripts are prewritten, impotent, and grovelling. And if you are spoiling Satan’s punch line, there will be none of that.

Owen Benjamin, Unauthorized, 20 February 2020

The software actually works pretty well, as relatively little post-transcription cleanup and editing was required. And the application of the concept of the historical Jester’s Privilege to the relentless policing of comedy and entertainment today is both informative and thought-provoking. Keep in mind that this is the sort of thing that you’re missing on a daily basis if you’re not subscribed to UATV.

DISCUSS ON SG

JFK Assassination Coverup

I don’t know about you, but I never bought the “magic bullet” theory for a moment or believed that Lee Harvey Oswald was every anything but a patsy. It’s always been obvious that JFK was shot from a location in front of the car in which he was riding. Now there is documented evidence that this was the case, and that the physical evidence was tampered with by the U.S. Secret Service.

The Secret Service had the Presidential limousine shipped from Dallas to the White House garage the night of the assassination. Then they sent it to the Ford Factory at River Rouge in Detroit, where it was built, for refitting.

When a senior manager there, George S. Whitaker, came to work two days after the assassination, he was ordered to immediately report to the glass plant lab. He was let in through locked doors and found two of his men had already removed the limousine windshield.

As Whitaker said in a recorded interview: “And the windshield had a bullet hole in it, coming from the outside through…it was a good, clean bullet hole, right straight through, from the front. And you can tell, when the bullet hits the windshield, like when you hit a rock or something, what happens? The back chips out and the front may just have a pinhole in it…this had a clean round hole in the front and fragmentation coming out the back.”

In an interview a few months later he added: “The hole was about 4 or 6 inches to the right of the rear view mirror [as viewed from the front]. The impact had come from the front of the windshield. If you have spent 40 years in the glass [illegible] you know which way the impact was from.”

Following their orders, Whitaker had his men use the old windshield as a template, create and install a new one, and then once again following orders, they ground up and destroyed the original windshield with the bullet hole in it. The refurbished limousine was then sent back to the Secret Service in Washington.

Whitaker is far from the only witness who saw a bullet hole in the windshield. Several members of the Dallas Police, a nurse, and several doctors (and others) at Parkland Hospital noticed it when it was still parked outside while doctors were trying to save Kennedy. One motorcycle patrolman was quite specific: “There was a hole in the left front windshield…It was a hole, you could put a pencil through it…you could take a regular standard writing pencil…and stick [it] through there.”

Remember, the mainstream media’s official story is always false. The official stories have become so reliably unreliable that it would not be totally unreasonable to not only harbor doubts the details reported about the atomic bombings of Japan, the so-called Holocaust, and Operation Barbarossa, but the existence of World War II itself.

Just to be clear, I think there is sufficient evidence to indicate that World War II more or less happened in the general order of events claimed – although the reasons and motivations given for all the parties involved are almost certainly false – I’m simply saying that the incredibly unreliability of the mainstream’s narratives, both current and historical, cast the possibility of reasonable doubt on literally everything we think we know about the world in which we live.

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The Techno-Pedocracy

The layers of the wicked onion are being gradually peeled back, one by one. And the extent of the pedocracy goes higher and deeper and wider than anyone wants to admit:

Jaren Miles, head of global community development for Facebook caught trying to meet a 13-year-old boy in his hotel room.

There is a reason that truth is considered to be a fundamentally different category than the beautiful or even the good. Sometimes, the truth can be ugly indeed, but even the ugliest truth is of intrinsic value. And one increasingly undeniable ugly truth is that the global community that the pedocrats of the West want to develop is the same hideous society that inspired Africanus to destroy Carthage, Cortez to destroy Tenochtitlan, and European Christendom to repeatedly expel the Jews.

It’s not an accident that these monsters keep just happening to be hired by companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and YouTube. AC asks the pertinent question: Why do you think he could get that job, but there is no way you would ever have gotten hired for it?

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The Recurring Evils

The Empire That Never Ended has several recurring evils that help identify its influence in the dead societies of the past, including child sacrifice:

Six mummified children thought to have been sacrificed hundreds of years ago, apparently to accompany a dead nobleman to the afterlife, have been unearthed in a tomb near Lima, archaeologists reported.

The tiny skeletons, wrapped tightly in cloth, were found in the grave of an important man, possibly a political figure, discovered last November at the dig site of Cajamarquilla about 24 kilometers (15 miles) east of Lima.

“The children could be close relatives and were placed… in different parts of the entrance of the tomb of the (nobleman’s) mummy, one on top of the other,” archaeologist Pieter Van Dalen, in charge of the dig, told AFP.

“The children, according to our working hypothesis, would have been sacrificed to accompany the mummy to the underworld,” says Van Dalen.

AC makes an important observation of the archeological discovery. What are the odds that so many distinct societies, separated by time, place, genetics, culture, and language, would reach precisely the same conclusion again and again?

All over the world, across great time frames, different cultures, with different people, who spoke different languages, on different continents, isolated from each other, all came to the conclusion that murdering an innocent child, sometimes with a knife, or sometimes by throwing them into fire, or sometimes another brutal means, and always something which would have to be horrifically traumatic to do, would give them some advantage. It doesn’t feel like chance.

This is what the current anti-Christian rulers of the West are working towards. This is what they have already been doing for years in secret places in the shadows. This is what they hope to institutionalize and practice openly in public. The evil is real and the darkness is rising.

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We’ve Seen This Before

A doctor conversant with the history of vaccination observes that the Covid pandemic and vaccination regime has almost perfectly followed the previous example of the smallpox epidemic and vaccination regime, including its eventual demise.

Vaccination was made compulsory in England in 1853, with stricter laws passed in 1867. In the United States, Massachusetts created a set of comprehensive vaccination laws in 1855 (which created the Supreme Court case Jacobson v. Massachusetts a case that is frequently cited about state enforced vaccination). Lemuel Shattuck emphasized the need for vaccination and pushed for house-to-house vaccination to be enforced by the authority of the City of Boston in an 1856 report, also noting ““The City has already provided that no unvaccinated child shall be admitted into the public schools.”

A situation emerged I term the vaccine positive feedback cycle. Keep in mind that most systems in nature are instead negative feedback systems. In these, when something occurs, it self-corrects the system and turns it off rather than accelerating it, as occurs in a positive feedback system.

The cycle is as follows:

A concerning disease exists

Immunization is cited as a potential solution to the problem

A preliminary immunization campaign is conducted and makes the problem worse

As the problem is now worse, the need for immunizations to address it increases and another campaign is conducted

This makes the problem worse

This increases the need for more aggressive measures to increase immunization

This makes the problem worse and further perpetuates the cycle, before long leading to very questionable governmental policies designed to force unwilling parties to vaccinate.

The underlying drivers of this process seem to be an unquestionable faith in vaccination, a conviction dating back to the days of smallpox, that vaccinating an ever increasing proportion of the population through vaccination can end epidemics (now termed herd immunity), and the government having limited options to address the issue besides immunizations and governmental force.

As widespread skepticism of the vaccination increased, enforcement increased, with no legal recourse available to opt out of the immunization regardless of the situation or physician recommendation. Reports are abound across the world of vaccination resistors being fined and jailed or forcefully vaccinated, with parents often opting to receive these punishment in order to spare their children from vaccination.

Assaults on officers enforcing vaccination occurred, and riots periodically broke out. This quote 1874 quote from Emeritus Professor F. W. Newman encapsulates the mood of the time: “Decorous and admissible language fails me, in alluding to that which might have seemed incredible thirty years ago—the commanding of vaccination on a second child of a family, when vaccination has killed the first; and then sending the father to prison for refusal.” Many reports of the horrific enforcement of these mandates and the resistance against them within the United States can be found in Chapters 8 and 9 of Dissolving Illusions. However, the most notable story occurred within England.

The manufacturing town of Leicester was subject to the England’s 1840 law requiring immunization, and the 1859 law requiring every child to be vaccinated within 3 months of birth. As refusal to vaccinate was punishable by fines or imprisonment or both, many vaccine refusers agreed to vaccinate. In spite of their high vaccination rates, a 1871-1872 smallpox epidemic occurred, with 3000 cases happening, of which 358 died, leading to growing skepticism of vaccination, and increasing enforcement of the vaccination mandates. In 1869, 2 criminal prosecutions occurred against vaccine refusers, while 1100 occurred in 1881 (a total of 6000 occurred during this period of prosecutions, with 64 imprisonments and 193 seizures of property being enacted against those too poor to pay the fines).

In 1884, 5000 court summons had been issued against the unvaccinated, a case load that completely overloaded the court system. Letters in local newspaper at this time revealed widespread disdain for the irrationality of the procedure and the medical profession’s steadfast defense of a dangerous practice that had clearly failed over the last 80 years.

Tensions reached a boiling point and on March 23, 1885, a large protest estimated at 80,000 to 100,000 people erupted. It was composed of citizens of all professions from across England and receive support from citizens across Europe who could not attend it. The procession was two miles long, with displays showing the popular sentiments against vaccination present throughout the crowd. The demonstration was successful, and the local government acceded to and acknowledged their demands for liberty.

The Smallpox Pandemic Response Was Eerily Similar To COVID

It is literally impossible for anyone who has even a basic grasp of history to believe that any government genuinely has the best interests of its people in mind at any time. The current governments had zero interest in protecting anyone from Covid, just as the governments of the late 1800s had no interest in actually protecting their people from smallpox.

Vaccinations are, for the most part, worthless. They simply haven’t done what they are supposed to have done. In every single historical case, from smallpox to measles, a review of the historical statistics will clearly demonstrate that the vast majority of the reduction in cases and deaths occurred years BEFORE any vaccinations were being administered.

It’s worth noting that the author recommends a book titled VACCINE SCIENCE REVISITED: Are Childhood Immunizations As Safe As Claimed? as being particularly informative about vaccines.

DISCUSS ON SG

Calling Out the Evil Empire

Russia points out that Germany is an occupied state under the military occupation of the imperial USA:

The US continues to “occupy” Germany by any measure, while America’s NATO allies have surrendered all their sovereignty to Washington and aren’t allowed to have a say on issues like Nord Stream 2, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told RT in an exclusive interview on Tuesday.

Commenting on US President Joe Biden’s talk of “shutting down” the Nord Stream 2 pipeline during the visit of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Washington on Monday, Zakharova pointed out that Berlin remains under Washington’s thumb long after the Cold War’s end.

“Germany, according to a number of relevant characteristics – this is neither mine, nor Russia’s opinion, this is according to politological terms and metrics – remains, one way or another, an occupied state: 30,000 of American [troops] are stationed there,” she told RT.

Zakharova added that “American ambassadors to Germany, who are supposed to work there to improve bilateral relations, are giving orders to German officials.” Richard Grenell, who was the US ambassador to Berlin during the Trump presidency, was “giving them orders literally every day on what to do on issues such as Nord Stream 2.”

Germany is being treated like “simply a protectorate” by the US, Zakharova said, adding that this doesn’t just take the form of financial leverage of threats, but is “backed up by 30,000 American boots on the ground.”

So, why is the US military still occupying Germany, 77 years after conquering it? The excuse of “defending West Germany from the Soviet Union” hasn’t even existed for the last three decades. It’s getting harder and harder for the New Neo-Liberal Rules-Based World Order to pretend that it isn’t the evil Empire That Never Ended, especially now that two of the largest national powers are not only resisting it, but openly calling it out.

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Darwin was an Anti-Christian Psyop

Not only is the Darwinian – and the Neo-Darwinian – theory of evolution by natural selection completely impossible due to the number of genetic transformations required in limited amounts of time, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that Charles Darwin was nothing more than a fraud, a plagiarist, and the front man for a previously published theory that was popularized in order to cast doubt on Christianity and the Christian worldview:

Dr Mike Sutton, whose book Science Fraud: Darwin’s Plagiarism Of Patrick Matthew’s Theory is published by Curtis next Saturday, said: ‘This is the biggest science fraud in history.’

He highlights similarities between key phrases and explanations and cites letters apparently showing Darwin knew Matthew’s work and covered up his debt to his rival.

In one, Darwin’s wife admitted to Matthew that evolution was his ‘original child’, but her husband had nurtured it ‘like his own’.

Dr Sutton said: ‘In 1859 Darwin replicated the theory of evolution by natural selection in Patrick Matthew’s 1831 prior publication. ‘Matthew was the first to coin that phrase to explain the theory, which he called the Natural Process of Selection. Darwin realised he had no choice but to use the same words so he called it the Process of Natural Selection. He shuffled the words and hoped nobody would notice.’

A grain merchant and landowner from Perthshire, Matthew had travelled widely in Europe studying agriculture and forestry.

While claims that Darwin borrowed from Matthew have been aired before, the book contains new evidence, including that when Matthew confronted him, Darwin claimed no one had heard of Matthew or his theory. In fact, according to Dr Sutton, Matthew’s book had been cited and reviewed by Darwin’s friends, colleagues and even his mentors in 30 leading publications. In his own journals, Darwin admits to having read at least five publications in which Matthew’s work featured.

Perhaps most damning is a letter from Darwin’s wife, Emma, written on behalf of her husband.

Dr Sutton said: ‘She wrote claiming Darwin was too ill to write, with a telling line to Matthew. She says, “Darwin is more loyal to your own original child than you were yourself.” If you want an admission, there it is – “Your own original child”.’

Dr Sutton, a winner of the British Journal of Criminality prize as well as chief editor of the Internet Journal Of Criminology, added: ‘All the top Darwinists admit Matthew got there first, but claim nobody read it. Actually, they did.

‘We’ve got Darwin’s lies, replications of text and ideas, independent verifiable facts which, I think, come down in favour of deliberate, knowing fraud.’

Although I knew about the other scientist whose work arguably preceded Darwin’s, Alfred Russell Wallace, the idea that the concept of natural selection had been articulated more than 30 years prior to Darwin’s first publication on the subject struck me as incredible. However, after reviewing a copy of Matthew’s book, On Naval Timber and Arboriculture, it’s clear that Charles Darwin was the harbinger of the subsequent scientific fraud that was Albert Einstein.

The consequences are now being developed of our deplorable ignorance of, or inattention to, one of the most evident traits of natural history, that vegetables as well as animals are generally liable to an almost unlimited diversification, regulated by climate, soil, nourishment, and new commixture of already formed varieties. In those with which man is most intimate, and where his agency in throwing them from their natural locality and dispositions has brought out this power of diversification in stronger shades, it has been forced upon his notice, as in man himself, in the dog, horse, cow, sheep, poultry,—in the apple, pear, plum, gooseberry, potato, pea, which sport in infinite varieties, differing considerably in size, colour, taste, firmness of texture, period of growth, almost in every recognisable quality. In all these kinds man is influencial in preventing deterioration, by careful selection of the largest or most valuable as breeders; but in timber trees the opposite course has been pursued….

The use of the infinite seedling varieties in the families of plants, even in those in a state of nature, differing in luxuriance of growth and local adaptation, seems to be to give one individual (the strongest best circumstance-suited) superiority over others of its kind around, that it may, by overtopping and smothering them, procure room for full extension, and thus affording, at the same time, a continual selection of the strongest, best circumstance-suited, for reproduction. Man’s interference, by preventing this natural process of selection among plants, independent of the wider range of circumstances to which he introduces them, has increased the difference in varieties, particularly in the more domesticated kinds; and even in man himself, the greater uniformity, and more general vigour among savage tribes, is referrible to nearly similar selecting law—the weaker individual sinking under the ill treatment of the stronger, or under the common hardship.

Patrick Matthew, On Naval Timber and Arboriculture, 1831

At this point, it’s observably far more reasonable to say “science is fraud” than to seriously propose it as a potential arbiter of truth.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Soviet Union Didn’t Collapse

Everything you know about the end of the Cold War is wrong, as a U.S. ambassador who was witness to the events explains:

Octavian Report: To what extent were Reagan and Gorbachev as people essential to ending the Cold War?

Ambassador Jack Matlock: I think only Reagan and Gorbachev would have been able to do what they did. You had to have the two of them in office at the same time. Now, the first George Bush finished it off. But essentially, the Cold War was over ideologically when Reagan left office. It was just up to Bush to continue the policies Reagan had set with Gorbachev in order to finish it peacefully. It was finished by negotiation so that both sides came out as winners. That’s why today, when we talk about winning the Cold War as if Russia was the loser, we’re not only distorting history, we’re making it much more difficult to build a peaceful world.

OR: In what way do you think Russia won?

Matlock: First of all, Russia was part of the Soviet Union. We ended the Cold War with the Soviet Union, not with Russia. We’ve got to stop talking about Russia as if it was the same entity, whether a Communist empire or whether the current Russian Federation. There are a few characteristics that they share, but these are entirely different political entities.

That’s one thing you have to understand. The Soviet Union won the Cold War — as did everybody else. Ending it saved them from the collapse that was going on internally. The arms race was killing them. Their ideology was killing them. Their foreign policy was not in their interest. Gorbachev saw that and Reagan saw that. We set terms to end the Cold War which were in the interest of the Soviet Union if they wanted to follow a peaceful policy towards the West, which they did.

Losing the Cold War would have been if it went hot. Everybody would have lost. We ended it without anyone losing anything. The Soviet Union lost nothing in ending the Cold War other than its control of Eastern Europe, which was not an advantage for it but a disadvantage. The idea that somehow controlling other countries that don’t want you to control them is an asset is absolutely wrong. Look at the problems we have in the Middle East today. It is a liability. It is not an asset. In giving up those liabilities, Gorbachev made it possible to try to reform the system.

He was unable to do so but the system broke up from the inside after the Cold War was over. Ending the Cold War, ending the arms race which literally was killing their economy, ending their attempt to project their power abroad which was creating liabilities, ending all of that was to the advantage of the Soviet Union. It gave the country the possibility of reforming and coming into the late 20th century. They couldn’t do so under the conditions of the Cold War.

The seeds of future wars are often planted in the ends of the previous one. The neocons who used to control the Soviet Union now control only Ukraine and, to a lesser extent, the United States. That’s why they are now so eager for war with Russia, since the Russians managed to free themselves from neocon rule and the so-called neo-liberal world order with the collapse of the Yeltsin regime.

The events of the present make a lot more sense once one has a more accurate account of those of the past.

DISCUSS ON SG

Evil Always Eats Its Own

Those who have taken the ticket or are celebrated for their utility in building the false case against God had better enjoy their public adulation while it lasts. Even the most famous and well-respected scientists, who were lauded for their brilliance and whose work was absolutely integral in constructing the false scientific edifice of evolution by natural selection, are discovering that they and their work will be discredited and dishonored once the satanic narrative moves beyond them, as demonstrated by this article in Scientific American denigrating the legacy of evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson:

With the death of biologist E. O. Wilson on Sunday, I find myself again reflecting on the complicated legacies of scientists whose works are built on racist ideas and how these ideas came to define our understanding of the world.

After a long clinical career as a registered nurse, I became a laboratory-trained scientist as researchers mapped the first draft of the human genome. It was during this time that I intimately familiarized myself with Wilson’s work and his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.

His influential text Sociobiology: The New Synthesis contributed to the false dichotomy of nature versus nurture and spawned an entire field of behavioral psychology grounded in the notion that differences among humans could be explained by genetics, inheritance and other biological mechanisms. Finding out that Wilson thought this way was a huge disappointment, because I had enjoyed his novel Anthill, which was published much later and written for the public.

Wilson was hardly alone in his problematic beliefs. His predecessors—mathematician Karl Pearson, anthropologist Francis Galton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel and others—also published works and spoke of theories fraught with racist ideas about distributions of health and illness in populations without any attention to the context in which these distributions occur.

Even modern geneticists and genome scientists struggle with inherent racism in the way they gather and analyze data. In his memoir A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life, geneticist J. Craig Venter writes, “The complex provenance of ideas means their origin is often open to interpretation.”

To put the legacy of their work in the proper perspective, a more nuanced understanding of problematic scientists is necessary. It is true that work can be both important and problematic—they can coexist. Therefore it is necessary to evaluate and critique these scientists, considering, specifically the value of their work and, at the same time, their contributions to scientific racism.

Those who reject Truth will eventually find their work deemed worthless, especially by those who reject the truth even more vehemently. Don’t ever curry the world’s favor. It simply isn’t worth it.

Jesus Christ stands by his followers even when they fail. Satan abandons his servants even when they succeed.

DISCUSS ON SG

Bad News for Gamers

A former Microsoft employee explains why the recent purchase of Activision, which previously purchased Blizzard, is very bad news for gamers:

So. Question: You’re in a company filled to the brim with nerds. You have some big, impressive looking skybridges that are empty and not being used for anything in particular?

What do you do?

You fill them with classic arcade video games. Obviously. Or at least you line the sides with arcades (so there’s still plenty of room to use them as hallways).

Microsoft Main Campus. The arcade skybridges were in the buildings circled in blue.
That’s exactly what folks did.

We’re talking… maybe two dozen arcade games were in these hallways at any given time. All set to free-play, naturally.

Each game was brought in by employees who had their own personal collections. Often times because they spent more time at work (Microsoft was famous for 80 hour work weeks back then)… so bringing in some arcade games helped boost morale. Made the place feel that much more like a nerdy home.

It was this way… for years and years. The arcades graced the hallways of these buildings (and others on Microsoft Main Campus) long before my time.

File:Retrovolt Arcade 2017 – Arcade Machines 1.jpg
This is not a picture of the arcades at Microsoft HQ. I don’t have any of those, unfortunately. Source: Wikipedia
To be sure, these skybridges weren’t the only places that arcades could be found around Microsoft Main Campus. Many other buildings were known to have little clusters of arcades here and there. In this corner or that. But the skybridges filled with arcades were visually interesting. Simply… super cool.

Most of the arcades were in good working order. Some were project machines that needed a little TLC (and often got tinkered on, after hours, by some of the fellow nerds).

It was, honestly, pretty awesome. Very nerdy. A great morale booster.

Then, one day, Microsoft decided it was fed up with arcade games. An email was sent out to every building that was known to have them… that if they were not removed from Microsoft Main Campus promptly… they would be tossed out. Into the garbage….

Why do I bring this up?

Well. Microsoft just bought Activision. And, with it, Microsoft now owns some of the most important classic games in human history. Zork. Kings Quest. Space Quest. Pitfall! And so many others.

Games that are important not just to the history of gaming in general… but to those of us who were there as the video game industry grew up.

And… based on personal experience, when it comes to the preservation of classic video games… I don’t trust Microsoft as far as I can throw ‘em.

Maybe Microsoft has changed since those days. I sure hope so. But, honestly, there’s no reason to believe they have.

It’s probably a nightmare for gamers. Aside from the original Flight Simulator, Microsoft has never done games very well. Even my friend, the great game designer Chris Taylor, wasn’t able to work with them very successfully. That was one reason why I steered clear of them even after Alex St. John took Big Chilly and I out to dinner one night at the GDC in an attempt to get us to move from the Sega Katana (aka Dreamcast) to the Xbox.

The fact that Sega’s subsequent murder of Sega of America meant that accepting Microsoft’s offer would have been the right thing to do doesn’t change the fact that we were, even back in the day, extremely dubious of Microsoft’s ability to nurture game development. And the fact that Microsoft insiders share that skepticism does not bode well for the future of corporate gaming.

One of these days we are really going to have to bring together the collective game development talents of this community, from art to testing, and start producing on a truly revolutionary game. It should be possible, but the stars simply have not aligned yet.

As for Alex, well, the fate of the original Games Evangelist at Microsoft doesn’t tend to bode well either:

I’m sorry now that I stayed long enough to see what would become of it. I was trapped in the quandary of representing technology that was now being built by people I had no respect for, and feeling responsible for the enormous community of developers I had persuaded to adopt it. I stuck around after the re-org hoping to help the new guard become as customer focused as the old had been. It appeases my sense of guilt about all of this immensely to know that I died trying.

DISCUSS ON SG