Why bother with this post (it's probably more of an incoherent rant, really)?
Hopefully by the time I've finished it, I will know that myself. What I do know, is that I see a man spinning fables and obfuscating truths, hoping to deflect some of the accountability pressing down on him. This is unfair to the recipients of that deflection - most of the remaining Red 5 staff. I suppose it's for that reason, more than any other, that I bother.
When you boil people down to their various base personalities, you're left with a variety of adjectives that can be used to describe them. Good. Bad. Strong. Weak. Smart. Stupid. These are enormous descriptors, open to the full breadth of subjective interpretation. For getting specifics, they are woefully inadequate. For triangulating what makes a person do what the do, they can often be useful. One of the two best, and most divisive descriptions I use to help define the people I meet are these: "Thoughtful, or thoughtless."
Mark Kern is Thoughtless.
This is the circle of the Venn Diagram of Humanity where he squats at the center. In fact, he is so deeply thoughtless, he may well be completely unaware of it. It's for this reason above all others that he was driven from Red 5. He did not resign. He was not made an offer. He was told to leave. There were defenses in his contract that protected him to a great degree from such actions, but they were systematically disassembled and the price for them paid. They were paid because they amount to a fraction of the costs incurred when a thoughtless man is in a position of power over large budgets and the people who operate under them.
I suppose it's unfair to burden anyone with such a harsh criticism as thoughtlessness. As humans, we are perhaps defined as sentient by our ability to choose to be thoughtful. Calling someone thoughtless might be construed as moving them outside the classification of Human. But even dogs can be thoughtful. It takes a special kind of person to turn that off, and move in large ways. Mark is such an animal.
Though he is not without his virtues. In fables and stories you often hear of the bardic hero blessed with a silver tongue. This pauper-poet is able, through intense displays and a kind of predatory empathy, to convince the wealthiest merchants to empty their wallets. So it is with Mark.
At a time when the coffers were empty, and the future grim, he was able to arrive at the eleventh hour with millions in investment capital. It's hard to not view someone as a hero in light like that. This is why he was the CEO of Red 5. There is no other reason. Everyone who had been, or could have been CEO, left the sinking ship - and just before it dashed itself against the sharp rocks of bankruptcy, Mark appeared with bags of money. He grabbed the tiller and hauled.
So. We have a thoughtless man who knows how to raise money and saves the day for dozens of people. Fertile ground for an ego to bloom. If being Thoughtless is an Axe, then an Ego is the arm that swings it. Mark has a mighty swing.
To properly understand anything, you must observe it in action. Anything less than observation is supposition, and that can make the foundations of any argument creaky. It's my intention to lay iron-laced concrete for you. Thoughtlessness is an ailment, but most afflictions are only observable through their symptoms. So we will start with the symptoms of Mark Kern's thoughtlessness.
The largest, and perhaps most easily understood symptom is financial irresponsibility. I suffer from this as well. Many people do. You have a hundred dollars in your bank account. You get paid in a week. You see a thing, and you need it. You can afford it. You buy it. It's yours. Mission accomplished. Instinct-driven lizard brain. Still active after a million years, it perks up at the idea of acquiring things our higher brains stupidly slot into the Need category. Dopamine. Satisfaction. If you've never done this, you're a liar.
As a game development studio, it would be rational to assume that all of our attentions were focused on developing a video game. This was never the case. That's not to say that our attentions as a company were divided, but the CEO's certainly were. Where his mind wandered, others were forced to follow. Mark's wandered to video production. At first, this manifested as a large assortment of cinema-quality film equipment, purchased under the assertion that they'd be used for Firefall-centric content. We would do video updates to go with patch notes. We'd film some smaller events. Maybe bring them to tradeshows, or do canned interviews on them in the dev studio.
This assertion was a thin truth. We did some of those things, but the scope of what Mark really wanted to do was much larger. Ambition is a powerful thing, and when applied judiciously to actions, can lead to powerful outcomes. When applied recklessly and thoughtlessly it can be very destructive. Mark wanted to build a production company that operated online. He used "promoting Firefall" as a weak justification for many expenses which included (but most probably were not limited to):
- Production staff of around a dozen people. This oscillated wildly, which I will explain later.
- "Red" brand camera equipment. Things like this are made with it. None of it was cheap, and there was enough of it to fill a van. About $150k worth.
- The Sprinter, complete with a custom Firefall wrap.
- A film lot. When it was clear the dev studio was not ideal for film production, a portion of a warehouse was acquired (various sets and a greenscreen environment live here)
- On-location shoots for episodes of the stillborn series, "Gamechangers"
- Fully articulated 'Battleframe' costumes constructed by Steve Wang (These were also worn by actors at trade shows, but the impetus behind their commission was for their eventual use in..
- A Live-Action Firefall Miniseries
- Special effects for the Miniseries - most of which were done in-house by some talented people. Some of which was outsourced.
- The "Executive Production" of dozens of utterly unrelated videos, which may or may not have been tangentially related to video games. Mark is even listed as EP on some of them.
- Numerous self-published parody videos of pop culture topics. The most popular is probably this.
- Firefall Fest, where several high-profile, low-grade actors were hired to pretend interest in the game.
All of this was justified under the name of "Stage 5." This entity had the dubious mission statement of providing a development and publishing platform for indie developers to quickly build, monetize and promote their games. The video production element was established to bring brand awareness to Stage V and what it was supposed to be. Firefall was intended to be the first product that made use of the vast resources that Stage 5 would make available to any developer, for free.
Ultimately though it was a bunch of sound and fury signifying a boatload of bullshit. A waste of time and money. Mark had seemingly gotten bored of Firefall, or perhaps disillusioned by it. It's evident from his
Twitter feed and various
other sources that his attention was simply not focused on the game his studio was developing. More Machiavellian aspects of my mind wonder if he didn't architect his own exile for a well-cushioned severance, notoriety, sympathy and the chance to begin something else. Something that interested him more than the thing he started. Though my premise of thoughtlessness precludes that sort of guile. Instead, let us assume he suffered the same affliction suffered by many people held rapt by gaming - a low attention span. So, he funded a hobby, gave it a name and spent a good deal of company time, personnel and money pursuing it.
This wasn't the only instance of bad spending habits. There was also The Bus. The Bus was a mistake from the moment it was suggested. Very few thought it was an idea that held merit, and fewer still worked happily to make it happen. The Bus was an idea birthed from the creative morass of Mark's imagination. Red 5 would purchase a tour bus. Then we would ship it over to
West Coast Customs. They would then turn something like
this into something like
this.
But why keep things simple? There would also be twenty gaming stations inside and a very large, very powerful server to run it all. The bus would expand on hydraulic rams to double its size, and the entire thing would become the Mobile Gaming Unit. It would travel from city to city, all over the country, demonstrating our latest build to eager gamers, and pitting them against each other in ongoing PvP matches. Definitely something that should be built while still in pre-profit Alpha testing, right? Would Red 5 get back the 3 million dollars (more or less) they spent on it in advertising or brand awareness? Who know. Return on investment is something Mark cares very little about. Loss leaders can have a lot of value, but you need to explicitly know what that value is before you embrace one.
The bus was a disaster. It was completed many, many months after WCC said it would be done. It was never premiered at any of the major conferences. We settled on AnimeCon, and most of the reception for it was mild bewilderment. It also didn't (doesn't work). The hydraulics don't move anything, the servers and interior electrical setup are spotty. It sits in a warehouse somewhere, collecting dust. A large part of this can be attributed to WCC, and I believe legally has been. However, the failure for this boondoggle ultimately rests with Mark. Why should this have been a priority? He focused on this instead of the game for many many months.
After these financial symptoms, come the personal ones, but there is something you must understand before I continue.
It would be easy to look at this post as the ravings of a dispirited employee who doesn't know one tenth of what he thinks he does. The Internet is rife with such things, and I - as I type this - know that this post will likely be destined for the same digital midden heap where most things go. "He's bitter, and angry and never knew the whole story - ignore him."
That's fine.
But please understand that I am not failing to grasp some master plan. Do not ignore this thing I write because of the obvious truth that I don't know everything about what goes on at Red 5. Using that as a reason to dismiss me, suggests that Mark was privy to some grand scheme that Everyone Else - including myself - failed to grasp. The reality is that Mark was out of his depth with too much money, too much control and too little interest in thing he'd convinced people to give him money to do - make Firefall.
The personal symptoms of his thoughtlessness are perhaps less immediately tangible than the financial ones, but I would argue they had a bigger impact on the company as a healthy entity. I say this, because we can all be held accountable for the vast quantities of money tossed into the fire. We should have stood up sooner, yelled sooner, let the investors know sooner. We did, eventually, make it clear to the right people and these expenditures stopped. Very much too late though.
His thoughtlessness and utter lack of sympathetic empathy make it impossible for him to identify with anyone. It also makes it impossible for him to objectively understand, in any meaningful way, how his actions or inactions affect people. Especially as a CEO. What I observed was a man so out of touch with the people who worked for him as to be categorically incapable of leading them.
While he was trying to bootstrap Stage 5, he was simply absent from the company. He would make his presence known to the forums (his fans), but there would be no sign of him for weeks, sometimes months in the office. He would not respond to requests for feedback, there would be few emails - if I'm honest, these times were among the best times.
Because when he did get involved in the production of the game itself he was simply destructive. He would swoop in one afternoon and berate a series of features several teams had spent months on, declaring they begin again and LISTEN to what he told them to do. He'd be back in a few days to see if it was done. This crushed morale, and forced people into spontaneous, isolated crunch mode. He would shout and scream his perspectives. He would ignore anything that didn't fit his immediate viewpoint - which was subject to sudden, violent changes. He would rage-email people in the small hours of the night, or on weekends.
He would spout bile and vitriol to the point where he gave some employees (mostly his production crew) access to a "safeword." This was in case he was being particularly verbally abusive, someone could yell it out or email it to him and he would clam up. He had the misguided notion that he could write quality fiction, and would force feed it to members of the writing team. He's fired people on the spot, berating and screaming at them publicly. He's thrown temper tantrums AND objects around the office.
This is the kindest expression of what I observed that I can offer. Now that I've written it, I think I understand the purpose of this post. Clearly catharsis. Hopefully though, something more. There is a vast array of skill, talent and intellect at Red 5 Studios. They are hard at work on a game that has immense potential. And now, just short days after being shown out, Mark is
publicly berating them. He is publicly stating his preference for features I personally watched him scream and shout and BAN from even being discussed in-house.
In his own way, he's trying to save face and diminish those who left him behind. I urge you, if you take NOTHING else from this post, to ignore him. These people deserve their fair shot for all the hard work and trying times they've been through, working under this man. Now that he's gone, there's the slimmest chance any game studio can hope for - that something mindbogglingly fun might come from all this.
Give them that, if nothing else.
09/07/2017, 10h53
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