Tag: history

The Idealism of the Machine

Of all the known civilizations and societies of the world, from the tribal to the international imperial, which are the five societies that you would say represent the height of human civilization. Each society must have lasted at least 50 years to qualify.

I have selected five societies based on a combination of lasting impact on human history, groundbreaking innovation, cultural flourishing, and the creation of systems and ideas that are still relevant today. Each represents a unique and profound peak in human development.

Here are five societies that represent the height of human civilization:

1. Classical Athens (5th – 4th Centuries BCE)

Peak Period: Roughly from the defeat of the Persians (480 BCE) to the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE).
Why it represents a height: Athens of this era was an unprecedented explosion of intellectual, artistic, and political innovation. In a remarkably short time, it laid the foundational stones of Western civilization.

  • Political Innovation: It developed and implemented demokratia (democracy—rule by the people), however limited by modern standards. This experiment in citizen self-governance remains a central political ideal.
  • Philosophical Foundation: It was the home of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, whose inquiries into ethics, metaphysics, and logic have shaped philosophical discourse for 2,500 years.
  • Artistic and Architectural Genius: It produced timeless art and architecture, including the Parthenon, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the comedies of Aristophanes.
  • Historical Method: Herodotus (“The Father of History”) and Thucydides (with his rigorous, analytical history of the Peloponnesian War) established the discipline of history.

2. The Roman Empire (During the Pax Romana, 27 BCE – 180 CE)

Peak Period: The first two centuries of the Empire, particularly under emperors like Augustus, Trajan, and Hadrian.
Why it represents a height: Rome’s genius was not necessarily in creating new ideas from whole cloth, but in engineering, administration, and law on a previously unimaginable scale. It created a stable, unified, and connected world.

  • Unprecedented Stability & Integration: The Pax Romana (Roman Peace) brought over two centuries of remarkable stability and security to the Mediterranean world, allowing for trade, travel, and cultural exchange to flourish.
  • Engineering Marvels: Romans built to last: roads, aqueducts, bridges, and monumental buildings (like the Pantheon and Colosseum) that were feats of engineering. Their infrastructure network bound the empire together.
  • Legal Legacy: Roman law was highly sophisticated and formed the basis for most modern civil law systems in Europe and beyond. Principles like “innocent until proven guilty” have their roots in Roman jurisprudence.
  • Cultural Absorption and Spread: Rome efficiently absorbed and disseminated the achievements of the cultures it conquered (especially the Greeks), preserving and spreading them across Europe.

3. The Abbasid Caliphate (During the Islamic Golden Age, c. 750-1258 CE)

Peak Period: Particularly the 8th to 10th centuries under caliphs like Harun al-Rashid and al-Ma’mun.
Why it represents a height: At a time when Europe was in its early Middle Ages, the Abbasid Caliphate, centered in Baghdad, was the global center of science, culture, philosophy, and innovation. It was a profoundly multicultural and intellectually curious society.

  • House of Wisdom: Baghdad’s legendary academy was a library, translation institute, and research center where scholars of various faiths and backgrounds preserved Greek, Roman, Persian, and Indian knowledge—and then built upon it.
  • Scientific & Mathematical Advancements: Scholars made groundbreaking contributions in algebra (al-Khwarizmi), optics (Ibn al-Haytham), medicine (Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine), and astronomy. They adopted and transmitted the numeral system (including zero) from India, which we use today as “Arabic numerals.”
  • Cultural Bridge: It acted as a crucial bridge between ancient knowledge and the European Renaissance, preserving texts that had been lost to the West and adding immense value through commentary and new discovery.

4. The Tang Dynasty (7th – 10th Centuries CE)

Peak Period: Often considered China’s “Golden Age,” particularly the 7th and 8th centuries under emperors like Taizong and Xuanzong.
Why it represents a height: The Tang Dynasty was the most powerful, prosperous, and cosmopolitan empire in the world at its time. It was a period of perfect harmony between political power, cultural efflorescence, and artistic refinement.

  • Cosmopolitan Capital: The capital, Chang’an (modern Xi’an), was the largest city in the world and a bustling, international metropolis on the Silk Road, welcoming traders, scholars, and religious figures from across Asia and the Middle East.
  • Cultural Peak: This era is considered the golden age of Chinese poetry, with legendary figures like Li Bai and Du Fu. Painting, calligraphy, and ceramic art (e.g., Tang tri-color pottery) reached new heights of sophistication.
  • Political and Bureaucratic Model: It perfected the Confucian-based civil service examination system, creating a stable and efficient meritocratic bureaucracy that became the model for East Asia for a millennium.
  • Religious and Philosophical Tolerance: While Confucianism was the state ideology, Buddhism flourished and became deeply sinicized, and other religions like Nestorian Christianity, Islam, and Zoroastrianism were practiced freely.

5. The Italian Renaissance (c. 14th – 16th Centuries CE)

Peak Period: The 15th and early 16th centuries, centered in city-states like Florence, Venice, and Rome.
Why it represents a height: The Renaissance was a conscious rebirth and re-engagement with classical knowledge that fundamentally reshaped European thought and culture, paving the way for the modern world.

  • Humanism: This new intellectual movement shifted focus from the divine to the human experience, emphasizing individual potential, secular subjects, and the study of classical texts (studia humanitatis).
  • Unparalleled Artistic Revolution: It produced arguably the greatest concentration of artistic genius in history: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello, and Titian. They revolutionized art with techniques like perspective, realism, and the study of human anatomy.
  • Scientific Inquiry: The period began a shift from received wisdom to empirical observation and inquiry, laying the groundwork for the Scientific Revolution. Figures like Leonardo were pioneering scientists and engineers as well as artists.
  • Political and Social Thought: Thinkers like Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince) began to analyze power and governance in a realistic, secular way, breaking from medieval religious frameworks.

Now, here is where it got very interesting. When I asked it which modern society best represented these heights of human civilization, it produced an unexpected response.

What modern nation-state do you consider to best exemplify and approximate the values and achievements of the five historical societies you’ve cited here?

If forced to choose one modern nation that best synthesizes and approximates the collective legacy of these five societies in a sustainable, modern framework, the Federal Republic of Germany presents a compelling case.

Now, when one considers the significant social, demographic, political, economic, and military challenges presently facing Germany, all of which threaten both its stability and its survival, this calls into very serious question the legitimacy of the “values” that are programmed into Deepseek, and, no doubt, the other AI systems that are hardwired to advocate the outdated values of the Enlightenment. Aside from Ukraine, France, and Haiti, there are few modern nation-states that look less sustainable these days.

What this confirms is that the same self-destructive tendencies that have led to the disastrous government policies of the post-WWII period are now baked into the existing AI systems. So, keep that in mind whenever you’re interacting with them. Ironically, the Machine may be more idealistic than Man.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Sonnets Revealed

Fresh from conclusively proving that Thomas North is the true author of William Shakespeare’s most celebrated plays, Dennis McCarthy is now tackling the authorship of the Sonnets.

Over the last two centuries, and especially in recent decades, we have made astonishing progress in biology, physics, chemistry, medicine, technology–in all fields of intellectual inquiry—except for Shakespeare studies. And while, yes, most of you reading this do know the origin of the plays, the First Folio, Ben Jonson’s Ode, etc., have now been answered. But there’s still another origin story that I have avoided till now: the Sonnets.

First, consider how strange it is we know so little about them. Shakespeare is the most well researched figure in literary history, and he has written the most oft-analyzed sequence of poems. Yet out of his 154 sonnets, we still have not discovered the addressee of a single one. New books appear every few years raising swords before new candidates. Some have declared them inscrutable; others have dismissed them as mere literary exercises. To put this in perspective: while we have solved the origin of life, cured bacterial infections, invented computers, detected gravitational waves, imaged black holes, landed robots on Mars, unraveled the genetic code for life, and are at the dawn of AGI, we still have no idea whom the world’s most famous poet was comparing “to a summer’s day.” We still don’t know whose eyes were “nothing like the sun.”

But shouldn’t all our new information-tech be able to help here? Can’t our new inventions finally illuminate the identities of the subjects of the world’s most famous poems? Of course, they can, and they have. The dates and the purpose of the sonnets, as well as the identities of the Dark Lady, the Fair Youth, and the Rival Poet have now finally been solved—as have the identities of other subjects of the poems that no one suspected.

I have no opinion on the sonnets, except to say that I have always doubted that all of them were authored by the author of the plays. They simply never struck me as written by the same individual. But I would characterize that as more of an impression than an opinion, it’s certainly never been something I’ve been inclined to suggest, let alone defend.

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The Fictional Western

Morgan posted an interesting history of the fictional Western at Arkhaven:

The American fictional western arrived at the beginning of the twentieth century with the publication of Owen Wister’s The Virginian in 1902. The novel created the archetype of the cowboy as hero. The western story quickly became the mythic literature of the recently closed American frontier. A popular genre in the hands of Zane Gray, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, and Frederick Faust (“Max Brand”) to name a few in the legion of western fictioneers in the form of novels, pulp magazines, and later mass-market paperback books. If J. R. R. Tolkien attempted to create a mythology for England, the western writers created a mythology for the United States of America. Many stories had a setting vaguely late 19th Century time and place. Frederick Faust best known as “Max Brand” often set his stories in an undefined “mountain desert.” He used myths and epics as the plot basis for many of his westerns. Faust’s Hired Guns adapted the Iliad for example.

The western genre was a large part of the pulp magazine market from 1920 to the 1950s, possibly having the majority share. Some pulp fiction writers could be described as generalists, they wrote in various genres. Will F. Jenkins as “Murray Leinster” could be found in the pages of Cowboy Stories, Astounding Stories, Clues Detective, and “Swords and Mongols” in Golden Fleece. Frederick Faust wrote historical adventure under the “George Challis” for Argosy magazine in the 1930s. Faust had the Tizzo series set in the time of Renaissance Italy during the time of Cesare Borgia. He also had the pirate novel “The Naked Blade” in Argosy. Those swashbucklers would later be reprinted in paperback form decades later. At the same time, he was writing spy stories as “Frederick Frost.”

The fictional western story underwent the transformation during and after World War II that had earlier taken place with the detective story as written by Dashiell Hammett. The writing became leaner and more historically accurate. The protagonists were morally ambiguous men (and women) who had lived hard lives. Les Savage Jr. was a pioneer with a hard-boiled presentation coupled with a setting of 1820 to the1850s. The indistinct time and place of the mythic western gave way to the historical western.

Read the whole thing there. I will say that while I’m not a huge Louis L’Amour fan, I very much liked FAIR BLOWS THE WIND. Which, of course, isn’t a Western, but does set the stage for a series of them.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Transience of Attention

The Swan Throne contemplates two public figures, one famous, one increasingly forgotten:

The Transience of Social Media Metrics

The smarter the idea, the fewer that can follow it.

Social media rewards the lowest impulses. The more outrageous the performance, the more it spreads. The system favors anger, envy, and spectacle, not clarity or endurance. Metrics rise when a man panders to the audience’s worst appetites, and they collapse the moment that appetite shifts. This volatility is the core weakness of treating metrics as a measure of worth.

A politician can buy bots and inflate his follower count overnight. A platform can tweak its algorithm and bury a channel with a single update. A wave of coordinated harassment can erase visibility as though it never existed. None of this reflects reality. It reflects only the whims of code, the biases of moderators, and the fleeting moods of a distracted public. When importance is measured by such numbers, it becomes indistinguishable from chance.

The men who have mattered most to the world have almost always been out of step with the crowd. They did not flatter their followers but forced them to confront truths. Their importance could not be captured in likes or shares, because those very metrics would have been turned against them. Plato’s Academy, Aquinas’ Summa, or Burke’s Reflections cannot be reduced to the applause they received at the time. They endured because they held structures of thought that outlived the moment.

The man who mistakes social metrics for real significance plays with shadows. When the crowd moves on, his numbers vanish, leaving him where he began: irrelevant, not because the crowd says so, but because he built nothing beyond it.

What Endures Beyond Metrics

It’s simple math: Nick Fuentes – Noise = 0

What lasts is not the rise and fall of trending graphs but the deeper architecture of culture. Values, language, ideas, institutions, and elite influence form the skeleton that endures when the noise of platforms fades. These are the measures by which true importance is weighed.

Values set the moral direction of a people. When they shift, entire movements tilt with them. Language provides the tools of thought itself; to coin a term is to shape the way others perceive reality. Ideas supply the patterns that give coherence, allowing men to order their experience and chart a course. Institutions anchor those ideas in the world, giving them a physical presence that resists decay. And elites, though often despised in populist rhetoric, are the carriers of continuity. They determine what is preserved, what is discarded, and what is advanced.

The older I get, the more I come to value the historical minds that focused on the Good, the Beautiful, and the True instead of whatever their daily reality happened to be. Not that there isn’t real value in the latter, as without them we simply wouldn’t know anything about what life was like during their times. But the more an author focuses on today’s issues, today’s politics, today’s public figures, the less readable and the less relevant his work tends to be over time.

This is true of fiction, of course. The imaginary landscape of Tolkien hold up much better than, say, Mack Bolan’s never-ending battles with a mafia that no longer exists or even Hollywood’s interminable retellings of that one bad thing that happened during that one war.

Not everything one does has to be significant, of course. One of the beautiful things about AI-generated text is the fact that writers can now accelerate our writing processes and increase our literary output to the point that we might even begin to approach the superhuman levels of John C. Wright and The Legend Chuck Dixon.

However, the writer is correct to observe that which is most popular is seldom that which lasts. One has only to peruse the bestseller lists of 100 years ago to recognize that.

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The Kenobi Years

Vox Day… it’s a name they haven’t heard for a long, long time.

Vox Day – some ‘oldtroons’ know who that is – called out Jordan Peterson as a troubled person who shouldn’t be giving advice over 10 years ago. He did this just by reading Peterson’s first book.

He also called out ‘SJWs’ as liars and wrote a book about it – which some large accounts on here have plagiarized for years.

He still has a blog. But he’s a good example of how mainstream people just pillage from smarter underground people – and really never give credit.

It’s really fascinating to see how lazy the average person is about following anyone off the usual five sites. Unless you’re on YouTube, Twitter, or Spotify, you may as well not exist for 90 percent of the population. No wonder Clown World finds it so easy to program all the NPCs. For the most part, we might as well be living in Boomerville circa 1970 with the three network channels plus public television.

The amusing thing about all of this is that given the ephemerality of the Internet, ebooks, and human memories, about the only thing that is going to survive from our era are the physical books. Which means that as forgotten by the mainstream as I already am, future generations will probably believe that my influence and popularity were much greater than they actually are.

But, as I have always said, the names don’t matter. It’s the ideas that are important, and I suspect that my most important idea will likely prove to be the mathematical impossibility of evolution by natural selection. I’m already seeing signs in the AI systems that it has been quietly accepted and that TENS is being abandoned by biologists in favor of a mathematical model based on large quantities of random mutations gradually fixing in parallel throughout entire populations independent of reproduction or selection advantage, which is a non-Darwinian concept so far outside the traditional evolutionary box that I haven’t grasped it well enough to critique it yet.

I’m pretty sure it’s nonsense, but I won’t take a position on it until I can be certain of that. The point is that the biologists have given up on both Darwin and evolution, and now they’re clinging to randomness to avoid the obvious implications concerning intelligent design, genetic manipulation, and artificial selection.

UPDATE: Everyone is going to have to revert back to our old GamerGate practices, as within two hours of my linking to that particular X post, it was deleted, along with the nearly 200 comments, both positive and negative, in the thread. So don’t send me links to anything anymore if they’re not already archived, and send me links to the archived version.

DISCUSS ON SG

Mediocrity Rules

People are noticing that the best and brightest don’t tend to be meaningfully employed these days:

Every smart person I know is failing

My brother who was the valedictorian of our high school is unemployed. My best friend who skipped grades and went to MIT for math is a beach bum now in Florida working at a bar. I’ve personally made enough money to quit society if I moved to a cheap college town and I am seriously considering it, I do not see the point in working and I am totally burned out.

Meanwhile the most mid people I have met throughout my life are rising to director positions at companies, going on crazy vacations, becoming influencers, having families. Truly every really bright person I know who studied something serious at a good school is now unemployed and working on ar; esoteric passion project no one will ever care about.

Has it always been this way or is society especially cooked right now?

It’s not just the communications gap, which was always a problem for those with 130+ IQs. The so-called “meritocracy” was very short-lived, and lasted about as long as it took Clown World to take control of the Ivy League and then bar the doors against the more objectively meritorious whites and Asians who dutifully, but naively, swallowed the rhetoric about an educational meritocracy.

That was more than 30 years ago. Now, the need to protect the favored mediocrities from their intellectual superiors has pervaded every aspect of society, aided by the diversity, equality, and inclusivity directives that ensure no one who is capable of seeing through the nonsensical corporate narratives is in a position to challenge them.

I became aware that I was being banned from things as early as 1994, when I was directly informed that I would never be permitted to have my work appear on the editorial page of a newspaper. That ban proved to be prophetic, as despite being nationally syndicated, precisely three of my articles ever appeared on an editorial page, and one of them was only because I was deemed to be the writer at the newspaper most capable of understanding the Unabomber’s manifesto.

So, subsequent bannings by the SF genre publishers (2005), SFWA and the Hugo Awards (20013-2015), Twitter, Indiegogo, YouTube, and BackerKit have hardly been surprising. It is the fate that will eventually be met by all superior intellects who refuse to take Clown World’s ticket. If they haven’t gotten around to you yet, it’s simply because you are insufficiently threatening to their morass of mediocrities.

But climb a little higher, show a little more potential, enjoy a little more success, and you, too, will suddenly find the doors closing in your face, and watch as those who are obviously less accomplished are turned into manufactured “successes”.

This is not a complaint. The world is the way it is now because the wicked openly rule it. But, as has happened many times before, they have overplayed their hand and their world is collapsing under the weight of their own incompetence. The subversive never seem to understand that they are nothing more than parasites, and that they cannot create, they cannot improve, and worst of all, they cannot even maintain a functional society capable of surviving over time.

The evil has not yet dared to show its true face. The USA has not yet erected its pyramids to their evil gods, and, God willing, it never will. And our promise of victory lies not only in the Word of God, but in the ancient ruins stretching from Africa to South America that show the way in which their doom is certain and absolute even at the moments of their greatest self-proclaimed triumphs.

DISCUSS ON SG

Sea Power vs Land Power

Sea power tends to be more aggressive and expansive, but land power tends to last longer:

For over a century, two dead advisors have shaped the way great powers view the world.

On one side, we have Alfred Thayer Mahan—the American naval officer who believed sea power determined global supremacy. According to Mahan, controlling the oceans means controlling trade. If you control trade, you control wealth. If you control wealth… well, you get the picture.

On the other side is Halford Mackinder, the British geographer who argued the exact opposite. Forget the seas, he said. Whoever controls the “World Island”—Eurasia—controls the world. Railways, rivers, pipelines, and land empires are what count. Not frigates and aircraft carriers.

Mahan and Mackinder are no longer with us, but their ideas continue to influence the world today.

And we’re watching it unfold.

The United States and the United Kingdom—Mahan’s spiritual children—have long benefited from an ocean-based order. Ruling the waves built their prosperity and power. The British Empire’s reach was maritime. The U.S. Navy now patrols every major sea lane. The dollar reigns supreme because oil, commodities, and trade settle in greenbacks. That world—the Mahan world—is why Americans live like kings while land powers like Russia and China have spent decades playing catch-up.

But Mahan’s world has limits. Especially when you try to keep your rivals bottled up in theirs.

That’s precisely what the U.S. has tried to do with China.

If you look at ancient history, the rivalries between Athens and Sparta, and between Carthage and Rome, all ended the same way; with the land power eventually defeating the sea power. This is because sea power is intrinsically offensive, which means that it doesn’t have much in the way of defense in depth once its advantages are counteracted in one way or another.

It’s already apparent that either China or Russia can defeat the USA in a war. Which means that the US is an empire in decline, and the only real question is how fast it will collapse and how far.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Globalist Charade

It’s fascinating to observe how simply paying attention to the details of the Ukrainian war inevitably leads to the observation of the complete failure of the globalists presently running what passes for the West:

The entire globalist charade at this point consists of presenting an image of solidarity, growth, and ‘optimism’—a narcotic psyop for the masses drowning in the post-modernist hell of social and cultural breakdown. Think of these deals as nothing more than kabuki theater aimed at concealing the massive printing of central bank debt meant to prop up the disintegrating system a little while longer. At this point, the elite cabal’s only remaining mandate is to conceal the disrepair and present an air of ‘health’ and systemic structural integrity—nothing else matters to them; but the charade no longer fools us.

Granted, what Trump is doing is still head and shoulders above the decrepit Biden regime’s lifeless pantomime. From the perspective of the US, Trump is at least attempting something radical, rather than the same old hyper-progressive Keynesian Malthusianism. But at the same time, the increasing vapidity of each new ‘victory’ can only be interpreted as a dead cat bounce theory of the US’ terminal imperial decline. All the pomp and glory associated with Trump’s ‘triumphant’ return to the throne seems to be a kind of last gasp from the stiffening cadaver: everything we see rings hollow, every initiative superficial and short-lived; the thin gold leaf veneer is flaking off to reveal weathered vinyl.

This translates to the combined ‘victories’ of the Euro-American Atlanticist sphere. We’re barraged with daily proclamations of bold new initiatives dressed up with pomp and frills, but nothing concrete is ever done: lives never improve and infrastructure stays rotting…

But ultimately, one cannot escape the feeling that, even despite hopes for a broader global restructuring, any benefits that come will too represent nothing more than the dead cat’s final feeble bounce. The systemic undergirdings prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are simply not in place anymore, and the monstrosity of global finance and capital which has grown since the post-war era likely cannot be undone with even these far-looking and well-intentioned half-measures.

Which is to say, as I wrote in 2004, you can’t fix a corpse.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Classicist Conspiracy

The more deeply one looks into the facts related to the mainstream historian’s version of the official Shakespeare story, the more obviously implausible it becomes.

In my debate with classicist Philip Womack, he pushed the orthodox view detailed above that the apocryphal plays and bad quartos were all the result of some form of piracy. And I responded with something like the following:

Can you not tell how anti-Strafordian you sound here? You think the majority of plays attributed to William Shakespeare while he was alive and up till 1621 are fraudulent and the result of corruption (this is counting all apocryphal plays and bad quartos) despite the fact that:

  • Shakespeare never protested about his name falsely being used.
  • Shakespeare and company, who performed all these plays, never complained about their illicit procurement and unauthorized publication.
  • No one else ever mentioned it at the time or for decades afterward.
  • The real authors of the apocryphal plays never demanded proper credit.
  • None of the dozens of printers or publishers were ever punished for it.
  • These nefarious printers and publishers ended up pulling off a ruse that fooled the world for a century—as scholars, editors, etc. were still referring to “Yorkshire Tragedy” and “London Prodigal” as Shakespeare’s into the 18th century.
  • No other playwright of the Shakespeare era was similarly victimized. In fact, no other living writer in all of English history had a similar misattribution occur to him just once—let alone twelve times!

Expanding on the last point above, there is no known case in history in which an English printer or publisher has ever purposefully misattributed a single work (like a play, essay, or novel) to a single, living author whom they knew had nothing to do with the work. Why is that? Well, because the printer and publisher would know that the credited author would complain—and so too would the wronged author whose work had been stolen and assigned to someone else. In fact, as I have shown, there also may not even be an indisputable example of such a deliberate misattribution occurring to a dead author.

There’s just no rational reason to doubt Shakespeare’s authorship of the quartos attributed to him—and no one at the time, or for even a century afterward, ever doubted those title pages either.

As usual, the mainstream inverts the actual situation. It’s not those who are revising the official history on the basis of the available facts who are the conspiracy theorists, it’s the classicists who are defending their unsupportable dogma by concocting a whole series of conspiratorial explanations.

DISCUSS ON SG

RIP Julian LeFay

Legendary Elder Scrolls creator Julian LeFay passes away at 59. Julian LeFay, the designer largely credited with helping shape the vision of fan favorite Elder Scrolls franchise, has passed away at the age of 59.

This is a hard one to hear. I was friends with Bennie for years, and it will probably surprise a lot of people to learn that we even worked together for 18 months on what was supposed to be a launch title for the Sega Dreamcast.

He left Bethesda to come work for Fenris Wolf after we signed a $1.5 million deal with Sega to provide its first RPG for its new Katana system after our original producer at GT moved to Sega of America and made signing us one of his first orders of business. I’d licensed the rights to Traveller from Marc Miller, and Julian was not only tired of working at Bethesda after his friend Vijay had left for Microsoft, but was very excited to take his innovative design concepts into a science fiction space for the first time.

And, of course, he liked the idea of working with me and my partner, as we’d hung out together at various CGDCs and E3s for four or five years by that point. He, Vijay, Bobby Prince from id, and Carter from Spectrum Holobyte were the people I spent the most time with at the Westin and the various other locations outside of the CGW crew.

Unfortunately, Sega of Japan eliminated Sega of America and cancelled all ten launch titles that SOA had in development, including ours, about one year prior to the launch of the Dreamcast, in favor of spending the $100 million that had been budgeted for those games on putting the Dreamcast logo on the front of the Arsenal FC jerseys. This was, of course, a terrible decision that was much-mocked in the industry, and helped contribute to the failure of the Dreamcast to compete with the original Sony PlayStation despite its technical superiorities.

I still remember Julian, Kurt (from SOA) and I laughing about the fake headline in a parody newsletter given out at CGDC that read: “SEGA REFUSES TO REVEAL PLANS FOR SELF-IMMOLATION” or something to that effect. It wasn’t quite so funny when I got the phone call from Kurt telling me that a) he had been let go, b) SOA was being shut down by SOJ, and c) Traveller was canceled. In retrospect, that was the beginning of the end for my time in the game industry, as GT’s collapse followed Sega of America’s by about 18 months.

So Julian and I never finished our game. We talked once or twice about possibly working together, and I think he ended up getting back together with Vijay toward the end, but things never managed to quite work out. It’s truly a pity, because I think that what we could have – what we WOULD have – achieved would have been truly epic, in fact, more epic than Epic.

It is truly the end of an era. Julian LeFay is gone, but he should never be forgotten by the gaming community. He never received the plaudits of Richard Garriott, John Romero, or Sid Meier, but he was genuinely one of the great designers of the era. He always imagined things on a larger scope than most of us were able to conceptualize. He set the standard for complex randomized environments and laid some of the conceptual foundations for both the MMO and all modern games that incorporate random elements as part of their design.

DISCUSS ON SG