| The
Last Blissful Days
Smoking Guns and Rolling Heads The Monumental Ramrod Girderfucking The Brief Life and Quiet Death of Box Media Other Victims of the Internet Wars |
Installment Seven: 8/24/1997 Copyright © 1996 Will Moss. Note: I reviewed this article before posting it. Some inflammatory
material has been removed, and will stay removed until I no longer live
and work in Singapore.
Excerpt from my journal, October
7, 1996
The Report from Singapore 7: Rome Burns
The Last Blissful Days
.....Lotta good it did me later.
Excerpt from my journal, October 3, 1996 .....But all was not gloom yet. In October the second GOL romance began to bloom. Rob and Leshia had already been together for some time, and in October I began to suspect that Mike MacDonald and Karen Ng, one of our artists, were more than just friends. They had been spending an awful lot of time together, and Joe and I had our theories as to what was developing. Karen was quite conservative and traditional, and I found it odd that she would become that close to an American, but she and Mike were spending a great deal of time together, including many long evenings in our apartment. A couple of weeks after I first noticed their connection, I asked Mike, and he ‘fessed up. I was all in favor of it. Karen was quite nice and Rob’s relationship had turned out well, even though it was an intra-office romance. Hey, if Rob could do it, I figured that Mike could. .....October also brought the first glimmerings of the Christmas holiday season, which lasts an ungodly long time in Singapore. On October 3rd we were driving by the Tanglin Mall on Grange Road, near Orchard, when we saw out front what could only be described as a giant pair of Santa boots. "No," we thought to ourselves, "there’s no way they can build a Santa big enough for those boots…" .....How wrong we were. .....Within two days, a fifty-foot Santa Clause stood astride then entrance to Tanglin. As if that alone wasn’t bad enough, a scaffold went up behind Santa, supporting a cadre of equally huge elves. Finally, the fake-snow blowing machine was set up in front of the whole works, and everything was lit. The combined effect was blood curdling. I had visions of the giant Santa tearing loose from his foundation and striding down Orchard Road, eating tourists. Hooo, hooo, hooo…Merrrry Deathmassss… Later we learned that the Tanglin Santa was certified by the Guiness Book of World Records as the largest, free-standing Santa Clause in world history. I feel so privileged to have seen it. .....Santa was up for three (count them, three) months. And then he underwent a sinister transformation as Lunar New Year approached in February. Before our eyes, the giant Santa transformed itself into a giant Chinese prosperity god. It was enough to stretch your sanity to the breaking point. It was March before the prosperity god was disassembled. We had endured nearly five continuous months of intestine-twisting holiday cheer. And I thought it was bad in the US… .....I treated myself to an early Christmas present to dilute the chill of the giant Santa. I bought a full scuba diving rig, with a good regulator, BC jacket, computer, and a few ancillaries. I’d had just about enough of rental gear by this time. Of course, the season was drawing to a close, and there weren’t going to be too many more opportunities to use all that nice equipment. So I broke everything in at the swimming pool at my friend, Jim’s apartment. Needless to say that earned us a few odd looks from the security guards, but it held me until we made up to Pulau Sibu for some diving a couple of weeks later.
Excerpt from my journal, October 7, 1996 .....iPower was the game that Joe and I had originally envisioned making. We’d had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do and how we wanted to approach it. It was going to be a complex and difficult project. But it was going to be as nothing compared to what Cyberpunk was turning into. As the documentation began to come together it became clear that we were setting out to develop a server and simulation engine of vast complexity. We already had doubts as to our collective programming capabilities, and with its ground-up redesign Cyberpunk had evolved into a project that would have challenged even a seasoned team of game programmers. Our guys were bright and capable, but had zero games experience, and were being asked to learn a great deal on the fly. It began to dawn on us that we had become simply too ambitious, especially in light of the delays we had encountered with staffing and, especially, computers (Report from Singapore 6). At the same time as we were discovering the magnitude of the task we had created for ourselves we were falling under increasing schedule and financial pressure. .....Redesigning Cyberpunk snowballed into a litany of problems. For example, the Cyberpunk world was dependent on the integration of a huge amount of content: all the information, graphics and text that would define the world in which the players would operate. The writers at GOL were hired to produce that content under the guidance of Paul Deisinger and Mike. But creation of the content couldn’t begin in earnest until we had locked down a database structure for the server. And by our reckoning, creating a new data structure with the necessary sophistication was going to take us four months. So what could we do to use the writers productively in that time? We had some of them learning Visual Basic. Others were drafting up general content that could later be refined to fit the ultimate data structures. During this time Paul Naylor also finished the second World Builder tool, so we spent some time testing that. But no matter how looked at it we were far from optimum performance. And always the schedule was the light that made our problems glare. .....In this panicky situation we began to look at the reality of having to kill iPower to make Cyberpunk work. This was devastating. We had already pushed Year of the Rat back a year in the wake of the computer purchase fiasco. Now to delay iPower…the game we had originally wanted to make. It was a depressing option for all of us. But there was no way that the guts of Cyberpunk were going to come together until we consolidated all of our programmers onto it. We didn’t have enough experience to split up our teams and still produce what we needed to produce. Naturally, this prospect was particularly depressing for Rob, who was in charge of iPower. Rob was already sitting on the fence as far as staying in Singapore, and now we were going to jerk the rug out from underneath him altogether. By this time Rob was seriously considering going home. "I don’t want to ride this thing [GOL] into the ground," he told me. I totally understood. .....Joe and I scheduled a meeting with Chris and Seng Hon to discuss the situation. The prospect of that meeting terrified me. We had already pushed back Rat, and now we were going to tell them that iPower was in the hopper too, and that we were putting all of our resources into ‘Punk? A feeling of dread swelled within me, and grew all week. We were planning our second trip to Tioman the following weekend, only a week after I had gone to Sibu with Rob and Mike and Jim. I wanted to go back to Tioman very much, but we were planning to take a day off to make this trip. I couldn’t suppress a feeling that it was a dreadful time to be taking days off. The cloying sense of dread and depression made the trip seem like the sheerest folly, fiddling while Rome burned around us. On the other hand, there was no doubting that I desperately needed another weekend on the beach to let my mind settle. .....All of these circumstances conspired to drive me into one of the deepest funks that I had experienced since moving to Singapore. For the first time in a while I became acutely homesick and began to question whether or not I wanted to stay in Singapore. I thought about selling the stuff I had accumulated, boxing everything up, and moving home. A growing sense futility lingered around everything we were doing. But I never made that jump from thinking abstractly about going home to actually considering it as a serious option. I was too attached to what we were doing, and, homesick and depressed as I was, couldn’t bring myself to retreat in such a bald fashion. The idea of quitting while there was still some hope of making GOL work was unthinkable. But I often wonder, in retrospect, what it would have taken to push me to into making that decision. At the very least, I understood some of what Rob was going through. .....Later that week Joe and I went for our meeting with Chris and Seng Hon, and we dropped the bomb about iPower. Despite my overwhelming anxiety it turned out to be less painful than I though. We explained the situation and our reasoning, and told them that iPower had to be pushed back as we were feeling the cumulative effects of equipment delays and programming experience. We also explained our planned reorganization of the staff, in order to shift the entire GOL workforce over the Cyberpunk. .....The next day we got to experience the joy of actually breaking the reorganization news to the staff. Most of the staff took the announcement well. Cyberpunk had long ago metamorphosed into our flagship product, and it was critical that it move along. I was disappointed though, as iPower was the project that I had always been most interested in. ‘Punk had the potential to be a great game, though, and we all knew it. Unfortunately, Rob did not take the news as well as some of the other staff. iPower had been his project and his responsibility, and by postponing it and shifting him to working on one segment of Cyberpunk we were diluting his role. Rob did some serious thinking that week about whether to stay in Singapore or return to the States, where his year leave-of-absence from his old job would soon be expiring. He had until late December to return to his old job at the Naval Research Lab, if he chose. Leshia and I lobbied Rob to stay, although I think we both did it for selfish reasons. Leshia and Rob were involved, and I considered Rob a very good friend, and didn’t relish the thought of him leaving. After a few days Rob’s spirits improved and he decided to stay. It would turn out to be only a temporary reprieve, however. Excerpt from my journal, October 26, 1996 .....The highlight of the trip came when, on my way to Ben’s Dive Shop to participate in a morning boat dive, I managed to hurl myself from the front porch of my cabin. The cabin was on stilts, six feet off of the ground with a narrow stone path that ended at a very steep series of plank steps that lead to the deck. I was standing on the deck hefting my dive bag, complete with forty pounds of equipment, as I took the first step. The bag caused my balance to shift, and where my foot expected the first step there turned out to be nothing but air. I did a completely graceless faceplant onto the stone path below, taking out the plastic faucet at the base of the steps on my way down. I had enough flight time to think to myself, "this is really gonna fucking hurt" before I landed face down with a resounding thwack. I lay there stunned for a moment as water from the broken faucet pooled around me. I could hear Alf and Gwat’s expressions of concern, as they had seen the whole thing from their deck. .....After a moment of rueful self-collection I sat up and began feeling for broken bones. I had a sprained wrist and badly bruised hip, but nothing was snapped or out of joint. Unfortunately I had hit my elbow against a ridge in the rock and I was bleeding copiously from a short but deep gash. I held my elbow under the free-flowing water pipe and realized immediately that I needed stitches. I could see clear down to the bone at the base of my forearm, right above the elbow. Unfortunately, although Tioman is a tropical paradise, it is not noted for top-notch medical facilities. After carrying my bag back up to my room I took my bleeding elbow to the office of the chalet operation we were staying at and asked for a first-aid kit. I was greeted with a wave of complete indifference, and briefly considered inflicting some damage on one of the locals so that they would have to use the first-aid kit and lead me to it. But, deciding that I would rather be merely bleeding, as opposed to jailed and bleeding, I opted for tact. I asked where the nearest medical facility was, and was informed that it was at Tekek, which is Tioman’s major village and home to the airport and customs office. I was told to wait for the sea-bus, due in fifteen minutes at the Salang jetty, and take it to Tekek. On the way we stopped at Ben’s Dive Shop to inform them that we had to cancel our bookings for the morning dive. Ben himself kindly offered to sew me up (sincerely), but I politely deferred, preferring to get my stitching in the meanest of medical facilities rather than a dive shop. .....Mike, trooper that he is, agreed to accompany me to Tekek. So we went out to the jetty, me holding a compress of toilet tissue on my elbow, and waited for the sea-bus. Unfortunately, what we discovered while waiting for forty-five minutes was that the sea-bus had already stopped running for the season. So we trudged back to the Indah Salang office where we were rented a speedboat and driver one-way to Tekek for the usurious sum of thirty Ringgit. At least it was quick. But when we got to Tekek, we still had to locate the medical facility. Eventually we found the customs office, and they told us that the "clinic" was a five-minute walk down the beach. Sure enough, we found the clinic. It consisted of a large, sheet-aluminum shack with two rooms. Both rooms were locked, although loud rock music was blaring from one. Mike and I pounded for a few minutes to no avail before asking the woman who lived next door where the doctor was. She pointed down the pathway, where a young and decidedly un-doctorly looking Malaysian man was walking towards us. .....Doctor turned out to be an exaggeration. The young man was a "medical technician." But, to my relief, he turned out to be pretty competent. He took me into the small treatment room, which was crammed floor-to-ceiling with medical supplies, slightly dusty equipment, and bottles of ethyl alcohol and iodine. After a brief inspection he informed me that he would have to "sew me up." He disinfected the gash, gave me a shot of local and three quick stitches, jotted out a pain-killer prescription which he filled himself, and gave me a tetanus injection. It was all handled competently and quickly. For this grand regimen of medical treatment I was billed the princely sum of ten Ringgit, or about four bucks US. .....I love socialized medicine. ....On the other hand, I don’t think I’d want to convalesce in Malaysia. The boats to-and-from the clinic cost 35 Ringgit each for Mike and me! .....The medic informed me that I could
still go diving. Since this incident had eaten up half of my one full day
in Tioman I was eager to get back into the water. When we got back to Salang
I slipped into my skinsuit and gear and Mike, Joe and I did our shore dive.
My elbow as fine as long as I didn’t bend it too much. A greasy antibiotic
cream kept the seawater out of the cut. Unfortunately in the few hours
since the fall my bruised right hip had stiffened up so much that I could
barely walk, let alone with a tank strapped on my back. But in the water,
weightless, it was perfect. I made the night dive later that evening. The
next day we headed back to Singapore without Honi, who stayed an extra
day. A week later I pulled the three stitches out myself. It took another
three months for the knot of scar tissue in my elbow to subside and for
my wrist to regain full motion without pain, but now there is just the
faintest little scar where the gash was. My souvenir of our second visit
to Tioman. I have resolved to not need medical treatment when we make our
third trip.
Excerpt from my journal, November 4, 1996 .....Bob Harris wasn’t our only high profile visitor during that period. We also entertained two gentlemen from the Bandai Corporation of Japan. Bandai maintains a Singapore office, but it is mostly concerned with distribution and marketing, and not with development. We gave the Bandai guys the tour that would later be a near-daily task, showing them the core of Cyberpunk, and the concepts that we were developing. Bandai were obviously being felt out as potential investors or distributors. As you would expect from good businessmen the Bandai reps were extremely noncommittal during the meeting. Later some comments filtered back to us, though. Apparently Bandai was "interested" in what we were doing, but they were concerned with the violence that was part and parcel of the Cyberpunk milieu. It was a matter of some concern that people died in the course of our game, rare though that is. My heavens, I hope they never expose their delicate sensibilities to Quake, Command and Conquer, Warcraft, Diablo, Mechwarrior, or many of the other most popular computer games of the last few years! .....But it was also understandable. Bandai’s major success in the US had been built around the harmless-to-children but lethal-to-anyone-over-ten Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, which was actually a Saban Inc. adaptation of the Japanese Go Rangers series. Why screw with the formula for massive success? We would hear more from Bandai later, as it would turn out. .....Chris and Seng Hon were both present for the Bandai meeting. It was after that meeting that Chris told us that he felt that we had a "20 percent" chance of being killed off in the budget review. He explained that he was beginning to look for alternate financing to keep GOL alive if Sembawang got cold feet. This was the first mention of the unmentionable, and a foreshadowing of developments over the next couple of months. Jim invited me back to Pulau Sibu the following weekend, but I had a bout of financial paranoia, and decided I could serve myself best by saving some money. .....Chris started spending a great deal more time in the GOL office. Apparently he had been told during the budget meetings to start paying some first-hand attention to what was going on at GOL. It did not bother me too much to have Chris around, although we had gotten used to a certain laissez-faire attitude from SembMedia as to what went on at GOL. But with the second of our three games biting the schedule dust apparently certain forces felt that it was time for a more hands on approach. We were Chris’ baby first and foremost, so he got the duty and started spending some time in the previously unoccupied visiting-manager’s office at GOL. I resolved to strangle any visible lollygaging going on in the office during business hours. There was no doubt that the massive periods of enforced inactivity before we’d had computers had engendered a certain free-and-easy approach at GOL. It didn’t bother Joe and me so long as people finished the work that they were assigned to do, but I didn’t want reports of office hours game playing or uncontrolled netsurfing coming back to haunt me. .....During this time I got a little touch of home sent out from the States: election junk mail. I had registered to vote at the US embassy in early October, and being halfway around the world did nothing to dissuade the local and statewide Democratic Party offices and several candidate organizations from sending me their literature and voting states. Now I have to make something perfectly clear: From the far side of the planet I genuinely don’t give a fuck who sits on the SF board of supervisors. So stop sending me yer goddamn literature. At any rate, since I am no longer a California resident, and the next national election is four years off, I suppose it won’t likely be a problem again. Four days shy of a year. Excerpt from my journal, November 13, 1996 .....Joe had gone to Japan for a week for E3 Tokyo, and I was left in charge of the office. Wishing to keep the tiller straight and the crew focussed I arranged for weekly team meetings so I could keep a finger on progress and attitudes. The scheduled meeting approach was a break from Joe’s philosophy, but I felt it was the best way for me to have a handle on how the different project segments were progressing and where fires were most likely to erupt. .....Clutching my printed goals and schedule sheet, I convened the first set of meetings on Friday, November 1. There were 6 teams: Client programming, server programming, content, systems, 3D art, and mannequin art. The client programmers were lead by Paul, and were concerned with developing the front-end and interface. The server programmers were lead by Jimmy, and were developing the server, scripting language, and interpreter that would be the heart of the world. The content team was lead by Mike and was made up of writers, developing the plots, characters and locations that would flesh out our digital realm. Systems was lead by Rob, and was concerned with blocking out every process that would have to be implemented and programmed to make Night City functional. The 3D artists were developing cut scenes and object art, and the mannequin artists were producing character and fashion artwork for the avatar system. All of the teams had specific goals and schedules to meet. As with any game or large software project there was a huge amount of interdependency. .....Most of the teams seemed to be doing well. Object and mannequin art were advancing, and content and systems had clear objectives and were progressing, and the front-end programmers were working on necessary tools and interface development. Unfortunately all of that was meaningless without progress on the server, the most complex and most critical part of the development. Jimmy, Nico, and Vince were the programmers responsible for the server, and they were all good. But Vince and Nico were inexperienced, and learning on the fly, and Jimmy had a huge burden as the only experienced man on the server. It was then that we really began to feel the ill effects from being denied Eric Nelson and Tom Spencer Smith, the two most experienced programmers we had tried to hire. They had both been too expensive for Sembawang’s tastes. But you can’t replace experience with manpower, which was what we had tried unsuccessfully to do, especially when no one on the island had any hard-core games programming experience. It was time to pay the piper for the hiring decisions of months before. We had the best people we could get, but the job was simply beyond their reach. And that is no slam against their abilities. It would have been difficult for experienced game programmers to do in the time we had. For our one experienced and two eager but inexperienced guys it was impossible. Maybe with a year they could have done it. But we were asking them to develop the kernel of the server, the Game Method Interpreter, or GMI, in six weeks. They knew how important it was. The GMI would define the data structure that would allow us to begin coding content. And I pleaded with them to put everything they could into delivering it by January. They did their best, but ultimately there was no way that it was going to be possible. And with no functioning GMI, everything else would slowly wind down to a point where little more useful work could be done. We did pick up a little extra programming help in the form of Mark, an instructor at the Polytechnic who was assigned to us as a staff attachment. Mark was pleasant and eager, but also not experienced. He ended up working on our avatar system, the basic groundwork for which had been laid by Arthur Lim, one of our other programmers. .....In the wake of the team meetings I published a progress report on our Intranet so that all the staff could easily see how all the segments of work were going. In the progress reports I mentioned that one of our artists’ work was proceeding a little slowly, so I got called on the carpet by the artist in question. The fact of the matter was that it was going slowly, much more slowly than the rest of the art. But it didn’t affect any other work, and I wanted to avoid generating any ill-feeling at such a delicate time. So I reworded the progress report to be more neutral and things blew over. The fact was that if the GMI wasn’t going to be finished, it didn’t matter what happened with anything else. .....There were other staff ripples during this time. One thing Joe and I had fostered at GOL was informal hours. We allowed people to come late as long as they worked late and put in their eight hours a day. Some degree of moderation was enforced. We wanted the entire staff to be present for the core of the work-day. But if some staff wanted to come in at ten or eleven and work until seven or eight that was okay with us…as long as necessary work got done. On the whole this policy worked out well, but with Chris spending more time at the office and us entertaining more guests and potential investors I became concerned about appearances. I was particularly concerned that some people were coming in late, intending to work late, but then getting sucked into the Command and Conquer or Quake games that invariably sprang up after 6:00 PM. I made an announcement expressing my concerns and asking people to keep their hours relatively sane and keep the game playing to a minimum. This, unfortunately, caused some indignation among people who felt that they were being singled out, even though I had made a point of stressing that it was something that we were all guilty of at times. After some patch-up diplomacy here and there all the ruffled feathers were smoothed out, and there was a decent improvement in office-hours discipline. .....At the same time as I was driving the teams and dealing with personnel fallout I was also absorbing a big chunk of the content development for ‘Punk. Koji and Paul D. had been assigned to the systems team, under Rob, and I had to work on the content sections that they had been responsible for. It would lead to my busiest time in the office, with one six week stretch over Christmas where I was in the office every single day. Smoking Guns and Rolling Heads
SembMedia is way behind where they want to be now. Instead of millions in profits they are taking millions in charges. No wonder the guns are smoking and the heads are rolling. Excerpt from my journal, November 20, 1996 .....The first I learned the details of what was going on with Sembawang Media was on the thirteenth of November when I was at Boat Quay for one of the Live@BoatQuay cybercasts I was occasionally co-hosting. These periodic trips to Boat Quay ad been useful to me as they were an opportunity to talk with many of my original friends from Sembawang Media. It was also a good time to pick up on company gossip and gauge the company mood and morale. While I was there that evening one of my friends brought me up to date on what became the first great Sembawang Media crisis. .....SembMedia had a corporate Internet solutions department called Contact. Contact had been set up amid high hopes, and with a high profile. They had expensive offices at the new Suntec City Towers and a large staff. Contact was the company you would call if you had a business that you wanted to wire to the Internet with a leased line. They’d arrange the leased line and sell you servers, routers, hubs, and so on, and integrate your Net access with your LAN. A growth industry, especially in high-tech Singapore. Or so you’d think. Contact was supposed to be a cash cow for SembMedia, and I heard reports that possible first-year revenues of up to ten million dollars had been expected. Contact’s overhead was high, but against ten million in gross, certainly not prohibitive. Contact’s success was supposed to provide the financial cushion to support the rest of SembMedia’s more speculative Internet ventures…such as Games Online. There was a problem with the plan though. It’s all well and good to plan on getting ten million in gross. It’s quite another to actually achieve it. What I heard — and I stress that this is simply what I heard— was that Contact had, in fact, lost several million dollars. Sembwang Media was a year-and-a-half old company started with less than two million dollars, and now one of their subsidiaries had swallowed up two to four times that amount! ..........The numbers might be inaccurate, but what did happen without a doubt was that the CEO of Contact offered up his resignation. Although the resignation was not immediately accepted, the man in question was on an extended vacation shortly thereafter, and the resignation was accepted and he was out within a short time after that. SembMedia staff at Boat Quay could already smell trouble, and the Contact debacle was not reassuring. I talked to several people that evening, and my take on the mood at Boat Quay was not encouraging. Everyone I talked to seemed cynical, and slightly paranoid about his or her job. There was a stark kernel of suspicion that Sembawang Media was going to swan dive, and that the failure of Contact was just the first symptom. The question lingering over everyone’s head was when the next blow would fall. .....For the staff at Contact the next blow would fall almost instantly. In the wake of the revelations of disastrous financial performance Contact was reorganized. Although initially only nine of about sixty were cut, in the end nearly half of Contact’s staff, including several of my friends, would lose their jobs. Contact would be forced to give up its posh offices at Suntec City and move into much lower rent digs. What those digs eventually turned out to be I will tell you later. .....A week later I got together for drinks with a friend of mine who worked in the front-office at Pacific Internet. This friend passed on to me some more gossip about how the Contact debacle had come about and why it had been revealed all at once, rather than having been addressed early on before it snowballed into disaster. Essentially the Contact books had been presented in the rosiest manner possible while trouble was brewing. My impression was that everything was legal, it was simply that the numbers were self-deluding. For instance, no matter what kind of figures you rack up for your department in inter-departmental sales, it is still money out of the parent corporation’s pockets. Apparently there was also some dispute between Contact and other SembMedia subsidiaries over who should get credit for some sales. What I heard was that the smoking crater of Contact’s finances was revealed when Nicholas Lee, the fiscally conservative CEO of SembMedia’s successful Pacific Internet subsidiary, was called in to review the numbers. .....No matter how it originally brewed, the fallout was that Sembawang Media was suddenly millions behind where it was supposed to be financially. Instead of generating a pile of revenue and profits with Contact it had bet the farm on the corporate Internet business and lost. Contact was to be the rocket that would propel Sembawang Media. Instead it would be the anvil that would drag it down. .....Contact wasn’t the only Sembawang Media department that was coming under sudden, close scrutiny. Multimedia Studios at Boat Quay had also come under the financial microscope. Chris Teo himself was one of the early casualties. Like Yu Min before him, Chris was exiled to Games Online, his portfolio of management reduced to the increasingly vulnerable GOL. Chris became a five-day-a-week presence at the GOL offices, and concentrated his efforts on trying to find an alternate source of financing for us. Our sense of desperation ratcheted up a notch as we realized that our major patron had fallen from grace. We had always been perceived as Chris’ baby, his expensive pet project. Chris had been responsible for our formation, the recruitment of Joe and me, and the general continuance of Games Online within Sembawang Media. We had watched him burn up his political capital to keep us and his other projects alive, and now that capital was exhausted and Chris was relegated to the provinces to save his most expensive ship, or to go down with it. .....Back at Boat Quay the reigns of control of Multimedia Studios were handed over to longtime American expatriate Peter Schoppert, one of my early friends from SembMedia. My impression was that Peter wanted the job about as much as he wanted to be appendectomized with a spatula. Although liked and respected throughout Sembawang Media, and with a lot of authority, he wasn’t a full-time employee. But, for the time being, he was in charge. .....This may have a ring of "I told you so" pettiness about it, but, in truth, neither Joe nor I was surprised by Sembawang Media’s turn of bad fortune. Joe and I had been scholars of the Internet business back in the States long before we moved to Singapore, and we’d seen the cycle of flush growth and shakeout that had claimed so many companies in the US. Now we got to see that same cycle repeat itself in Singapore, and we got to watch Sembawang Corp make many of the mistakes that destroyed companies in the States. Sembawang Corporation bet large on the emergence of the Internet as a source of revenue before the true value of the Net as a commercial commodity was established. Sembawang Media was to be the tool of SembCorp’s emergence as a regional information technology power. But the company spent money like success was assured before they’d even started, renting extremely expensive office space at Boat Quay for the headquarters, and equally pricey digs for Contact at Suntec City. A great deal was riding on the creation of Web content, and Multimedia Studios was a very slick operation with talented people and good equipment. But it started large, and it was high overhead operation in low margin business. Personally I have always felt that talented kids working out of their parents’ basement do best web design. Give me one good HTML/Shockwave page design person, one good Java/Database programmer, and a Photoshop wiz, and I’ll cough up whatever content and functionality you want. We also worried about Contact, well before problems began. The Singapore market was small, and, to our way of thinking, Singapore Telecom was holding all of the infrastructure cards in a regulated market. Contact should have worked its way up, rather than starting large and banking on success. Even the creation of Games Online was a questionable business decision. Game development is a long-term, expensive proposition, and there is a good deal of risk involved. I don’t want to argue against our own creation, but SembMedia should have started as a stripped down company and run that way for two years while the realities of the market were established. But in image-conscious Singapore it was built from the beginning to be a showpiece. Now, as it comes apart, it is a highly visible catastrophe. .....Two things happened to me around this time. First, I started to have acute paranoia about my own job stability. I’d had my mood swings and feelings of insecurity before, but now I could see the writing slowly being etched onto the wall. I started doing a lot of mental math concerning my savings and what it would cost me to ship my accumulated junk home. The second thing that happened to me was that I started having a lot of dreams featuring retired army drill sergeant turned screen actor R. Lee Ermey (Full Metal Jacket). I have no idea what that means, but I am pretty sure that it is indicative of some deep, underlying psychosis. .....My moodiness and insecurity wasn’t hard to trace. As SembMedia’s fortunes went, so went ours. I was becoming acutely concerned about our viability. The word that filtered down after the first wave of post-Contact budget meetings was that any project that hadn’t been cut yet was essentially safe for the upcoming budget. I filed that piece of news under "I’ll believe it when I see it." But I continued hoping for the best, even through my funk. But I wasn’t the only person on the GOL staff who’s morale was being affected, or who heard the gossip from Boat Quay. Other SembMedia staff had friends at the headquarters, and rumors of the troubles upstairs spread through GOL. The staff started getting edgy, and worrying about their security. I already suspected that Arthur Lim, one of our programmers, was considering leaving. He had been taking a lot of half-days off that smacked of job interviews. I didn’t blame him. Arthur had always been an outsider at GOL, and with the postponement of iPower he had ended up doing programming work that was different than what he had signed up for. But Arthur wasn’t the only one we worried about. We noticed that one or two of our other key staff were working on cover letters. .....One thing that agitated the GOL staff was that no one had been confirmed yet, despite the fact that many of our staff had been on board for much longer than the six-month confirmation period. Joe and I had submitted the evaluation paperwork recommending that everyone on our staff who had passed the time requirement be confirmed. They all deserved it. But confirmations throughout SembMedia had been frozen, an extremely bad sign. I asked Chris to look into the confirmations, and he agreed. Two weeks later, on November 27th, the first batch of confirmations came through. It was a major morale booster at GOL. In the end, everyone on the GOL staff would be confirmed. But some of them would only be confirmed for a day. .....November 28th was our second Thanksgiving in Singapore. The previous Thanksgiving Joe and I were still living at the Mandarin Hotel on Orchard road. We had been in Singapore for a little over a week, and the arrival of the other expats was still over two weeks off. Joe and I had celebrated that Thanksgiving at the buffet at the Triple 3 restaurant at the Mandarin. There was nothing there to acknowledge that uniquely American holiday. This year was big step forward. We invited several of our friends over and roasted two turkeys, which we served with mashed potatoes, gravy, salad, and pumpkin pie. The American Club itself couldn’t have provided better. Uh oh, Spaghettio! Excerpt from my journal, November 29, 1996 ..........My stomach dropped like a shot duck. ..........Seng Hon went on to explain that
Sembawang Media couldn’t afford to pay for Games Online any more. They
were going to have to find a third party investor to buy a stake in the
GOL, and provide an infusion of capital that would allow us to complete
Cyberpunk. The most damning thing was that we only had until the
end of the calendar year — five weeks— to find this investor. We asked
what might happen if no third party investor was found. Seng Hon told us.
"The worst case scenario is that we close down GOL."
.....Yeah, right. .....Seng Hon explained that there were
other options. Two that he mentioned were operating in a stripped down
form, or helping to steward a management buyout of the assets of GOL so
that it could continue operating independently from SembMedia. But stripping
down GOL would mean altering its focus entirely. And conducting a management
buyout from Sembwang, as attractive as it was, meant still having to find
some kind of financial backing. Even the best-case scenario was not exactly
stupendous from our point of view. The Silkworm Interactive share of GOL
equity, according to our still theoretical contract was 12%. Selling
off enough equity to fund another twelve to eighteen months of development
would dilute the Silkworm percentage to a microscopic 6-7%, to be shared
at that point among four people. No one was going to become a zillionaire
off of 1.5% of GOL, that was for damn sure. Our decision to accept moderate
salaries in lieu of equity was suddenly looking dubious.
Change is in the wind. Cancelled my Christmas ticket. Excerpt from my journal, December 10, 1996 .....I talked to Rob at length after he made his announcement, and I had to support his decision. Faced with his dilemma I might have made the same choice. I had no job to return to in the states, though, and so I didn’t lose anything by riding out GOL. Besides which, despite my bouts of professional depression, I essentially enjoyed the experience of living in Singapore. But Rob also had another issue: his girlfriend. The relationship between Rob and Leshia was not a casual thing. They had become extremely close over the months, and it looked like there were long term possibilities. Leshia was not taking the news of Rob’s departure very well. Rob also admitted that his social life during his year at GOL had been far better than anything he’d had going in Washington DC. But the professional realities were enough to counter all of that, and the decision was made. Rob would leave Singapore before Christmas, the first of our original band of expats to quit, and the first person to quit GOL, period. On the fourteenth of December, just short of a year after his arrival, I drove Rob to the airport and put him on a plane back home. Leshia would go on to visit Rob in the States in April. (At the time of this writing, they are officially engaged. Congrats!) .....Rob wasn’t the only person facing a tough decision at that time, although his decision might have been the most difficult. Mike, Paul and I had all planned to go home for Christmas and spend some time with our families. The Christmas trip was particularly important to me. The others had been home in August, when Koji and I had been the only expats to remain behind. I hadn’t been home since the previous May, and was missing my friends and family a great deal. And even the Christmas trip was really a postponement of my planned August trip, with the others. I’d stayed behind because the budget couldn’t support sending us all to GenCon, in Milwaukee. And someone needed to stay behind and run the show. Now it looked like I was going to have to postpone again. .....We began to have serious doubt about the Christmas trip early in December. The instability of GOL alone was enough to make us wary of spending the money, and being gone for two weeks. But the staff was also being asked to bust their asses to get the playable ‘Punk demo done by mid-January. Word reached me through Mike that there had been some grumbling among the staff about three of the expats running off for two weeks in the middle of that flurry of activity. Looking for some guidance I sent an e-mail to my family informing them of the likelihood of having to cancel. Naturally my brothers wrote back absolving me completely of the decision to stay, and my mother followed suit shortly thereafter. If anything, their collective support made me feel more guilty. Frankly it would have been easier if they had said, "Come out here or we will kick your ass." But they realized, as did I deep down, that the best decision was to stay in Singapore. Reluctantly, on December 10th, I cancelled my ticket. It was two weeks before my planned departure. It would be four more months before I would make it back to the States, for CGDC in late April. By then I had been out of the country for nearly a year. .....Paul and Mike made the same decision, and, in the end, we would all be in Singapore for Christmas. All except Rob, who would be back in Washington, as depressed as the rest of us, but for different reasons. .....A few other interesting issues popped up in early December. In the wake of Rob’s departure, we learned a little bit about his relationship with the staff who had been on his original iPower team. We had known that Rob’s communication with Isaac, our 3D Studio whiz, had been strained. For a while we had assumed that it had been due to Isaac’s artistic intransigence. But, in the wake of Rob’s decision to leave we learned that it was more complex, and that it had been a cultural failing on our part. Isaac was among the most traditional of the GOL staff, and a person to whom face, respect, and authority were all very important. No one had ever doubted Isaac’s talent, he was superb. But Rob had dealt with him like he might deal with one of us, or like he dealt with the more westernized members of the GOL staff. That didn’t play very well with Isaac, a man to whom diplomacy and tact were essential. Friction had developed from there, and the two of them had never been comfortable with each other. When Joe and I took a new tack with Isaac our communication with him improved a great deal. Although Isaac did remain prone to lavish a little too much attention to detail in some of his deadline critical efforts, he also went on to produce some of his most spectacular work. I don’t fault Rob for this. We were all guilty, we all made assumptions about the attitudes of our staff at various times, and we all learned cultural lessons the hard way. Singapore is deceptive in that way. It is just westernized enough to lull you into a false sense of security, and then you forget that it is very much an Asian city at heart. And that’s when you screw up and embarrass yourself, or someone else. .....Something else came out of our investigations into the staff culture issue. There were definite opinion leaders within the Asian members of the GOL staff. We had been surprised at the loyalty and dedication of our staff, and we learned that it wasn’t always because of Joe’s or my exhortations or entreaties. There were two or three of our local staff who commanded a lot of respect from the other Singaporeans. Often it was their decisions and opinions that influenced the others. .....During the first weekend in December Rob had breakfast with Chris. The two of them had a long conversation, which Rob thought was quite interesting. Among other things, Rob gained some insight into Chris’ personality, and the competitiveness that drove him. Chris also offered to help Rob find another local job if GOL folded and he still wanted to stay in Singapore. Predictably, Rob was not swayed from his decision to leave Singapore. The most interesting thing was that Chris warned Rob that the possibility of a management buyout, raised by Seng Hon and greeted as a fairly attractive option by Joe and myself, was remote. If it came down to it we could expect very little help from SembMedia or SembCorp in arranging a buyout. We would be on our own. That warning would come back to haunt us later when the prospect of attempting a buyout became more concrete, at the very end. .....The investment dance continued full speed throughout the month of December. Seng Hon, Chris, and Nick Lee paraded an endless chain of potential investors through GOL as we worked to complete the demo. In the end, our lease on life would be extended through January and into mid-Feburary, and we would entertain visitors from TDF (again), the Economic Development Board of Singapore, the Pico Corporation, United Overseas Bank Venture Capital Group, Electronic Arts, the National Computer Board, EDB (again), Electronic Arts (again), Net Results Holdings, Wearnes Technology (Pte.) Ltd., Imagine Interactive (Pte.) Ltd., Music Pen Inc. (I don’t know why), Lawton/Yeo Design Associates, and more whom I have forgotten over time. I gave the fucking tour of GOL so many times that I was locked into complete autopilot by the end, paralyzed into a routine of enforced enthusiasm that lay like a thin carpet over my bulletproof fatalism. It was miserable. We got the same response from pretty much everyone we entertained. Polite feigned interest, and a promise to look into the possibilities. Net result: zero. Sort of. But I get ahead of myself. There were some wrinkles. .....One odd thing about the final month of tours, between mid-January and late February, was that the GOL studio became frozen into a kind of time loop. We finished our playable demo in mid-January, as promised. But there was nothing else that we could do until we knew that we had financing in the bank. At that point even the product we were pitching had changed, a development that I will explain shortly. So the office was locked into a kind of stasis for a month where nothing ever changed. Every time there was a tour we would take people around the office and show them the exact same things. Everyone would have the same display on their computer that they’d had the previous day. All the same animations and tools would be demonstrated. I felt like I was in the movie Groundhog Day, destined to relive the same miserable experiences into infinity, never progressing, never succeeding, never failing. Make no mistake, we weren’t idle. We just had the staff working on anything but Cyberpunk. By the time the inevitable happened, Cyberpunk as such had ceased to exist. .....By mid-December Joe and I were determined to cover our bases as much as possible. We didn’t have much faith left in Sembawang by that point, so we worked on forming some contingency plans of our own. One thing that we did was to begin talking to people at the Institute of Systems Science, a computer think-tank attached to the National University of Singapore. ISS had spun-off several commercial ventures, including one called StarGlobe Technologies. StarGlobe was lead by a woman named Virginia Chia, whom Joe and I had met when we spoke at the Information Superhighway Summit/Asia show the previous Spring. Virginia had asked me to come and speak in January at another conference she was participating in. When everything started to cave in at GOL and I had to withdraw from speaking she took an interest in what was happening to us. Virginia suggested that investment money could definitely be found in Singapore. Over the next few months ISS would go on to play a central role in the unfolding of events. .....Joe and I also spoke to the American computer game company 3DO in December. The 3DO saga began on the 14th of December when I discovered a voice-mail message time-stamped 5:00 AM at work one morning. The message was from Steve Sellers, one of the team responsible for the creation of the Internet multiplayer game Meridian 59 and one of the leaders of 3DO’s Internet product development group. My friend Scott Ruggels, a 3D artist at 3DO, had apparently spread word of our plight, and Steve Sellers had been interested enough to give us a call. Naturally, Joe and I were intrigued. 3DO was in my neck of the woods, and it seemed like an option worth pursuing. I phoned Steve back, and we arranged for a conference call between Joe, Myself, Steve, and members of his team. .....We faxed copies of our game concept and major design points, along with some art samples, to 3DO. It was all based on copyrighted material, so we didn’t worry too much about it being stolen or abused. Three weeks later, after two postponements that completely unnerved Mike, we had the conference call. We talked about ‘Punk and what we were trying to do for a while, and what our possible options were for working together. Steve pledged to distribute our information (and investment prospectus) to his team, and they would get back to us after they had reviewed it. .....We never heard from them again. .....That the 3DO thing didn’t go anywhere
didn’t bother me too much. It had been a long shot, and worth talking to
them. We had looked at Meridian 59 and been less than impressed,
so we could see why they were looking for new ideas. But a little research
also revealed that their department was in trouble, and that they were
looking for new engines rather than content to put on top of their existing
engine. We were a long ways from a working engine and, indeed, if we had
worked with them the first task probably would have been to put ‘Punk
content on the Meridian engine. That they didn’t have the balls
to contact us again in person and let us know how things had shaken down
was somewhat annoying, though. Since they went through the trouble to contact
us, it seemed like a pretty fucking elementary courtesy.
.....They hated each other. .....As you would expect in polite, open
society, it was all pretty much unspoken. But we had ample opportunity
to talk to both of them at length, and it wasn’t hard to read their feelings
on each other. It didn’t make us particularly confident to know that there
was this lethal tension between our fallen General Manager and the man
who would ultimately decide if we lived or died. In retrospect, I think
that our choice of who to confide in, between the two of them, was unfortunate.
But it probably wouldn’t have changed much either way. Suffice to say that,
today, I’d happily split a pitcher of beer with Chris. I can not say that
I would do the same with all of the other parties present in those dark
days. Whatever complaints that we might have had over the lifespan of GOL,
I think that Chris was sincere in his desire for GOL to succeed, and that
he spent a lot of his political capital on us. Some of the problems that
Joe and I blamed him for at the time originated, I suspect, further up
the chain of command.
We have a colony of ants living in the trunk of our car. Excerpt from my journal, December 12, 1996 .....The next day we had a visit from the home office. They were there to account all the equipment and update the tracking tags. We had a bout of collective paranoia that this was fraught with some kind of dire message until Joe reminded us that they did equipment inventory every six months, and that it was, in fact, time for the check. That appeased us somewhat, but we all got little hikes in our blood-pressure when, after inventorying the equipment at GOL, they went to our apartments and inventoried all the company equipment there, including our washing machines, air conditioners, etc. That’s the price you pay for having the company provide everything, I guess. .....That weekend Joe and Akiko had a visit from some family friends from Malaysia. The visitors were a Malaysian Sikh investor, and his wife, who, due to her family, had the status of "Princess of the Realm," the realm being Malaysia. Joe spun our tale of woe to the Sikh, who sat and patiently listened. When all was over he said to Joe "It is Divine Providence that I am here this weekend." Apparently he thought he might be able to rustle up some investment for Games Online. Well, we weren’t about to say no to anyone, particularly if they had access to 10 million Ringgit (about 6 million Sing) in investment money. Nothing ended up coming of the Divine Providence, at least in time for GOL. The mysterious Sikh emerged as a factor again when we tried to set up our new company in the wake of GOL. Ultimately, though, I guess divine providence wasn’t enough. .....In mid-December some new dish about Contact emerged. By that time twenty of Contact’s sixty employees had been let go. Everyone who was left was ordered to go to a morale building class. Attendance was mandatory. Now, is it me, or is this the business equivalent of sending forty starving people to look at rubber food? It reaches levels of Dilbertism that I had never expected to see in real life. You want to build morale, stop sacking people. Personally, I always feel much higher morale and company loyalty when the first thing I look for in my mailbox every day isn’t a pink slip. As Joe said, "Der floggings vill continue üntil morale improofs!" We also learned at this point that Contact was not only paying huge rent at Suntec, but that they were locked into a three year lease. All before anyone knew if they would succeed. Well, kids, that’s confidence. Too bad it was misplaced confidence. Contact would end up having to break that lease. .....And so, by the end of the month, the intrigue surrounding GOL and SembMedia had reached fever pitch. Joe had been dropping some files on Chris’ desk and noticed Chris’ datebook lying open. Written on the top page, which was January 6th, was "D-day. Resign." We had suspected as much, but it was interesting to see that there was actually a timetable. (I feel obliged to stress that Joe was not actively snooping, and merely stumbled across this…although he did tell me.) Shortly thereafter Chris was off in Hong Kong, prowling for investors we assumed. TDF made a repeat visit, and brought along some consultant who asked a flurry of utterly vacuous and pointless questions about what we were doing. Nick lee had been lying low for a couple of weeks, since our most recent visit from EDB. Seng Hon had become the invisible man, surfacing once when we had a visit from the local contingent of Electronic Arts. We were still nursing 3DO along at this point. All in all, nobody had a clue how anything was going. .....But it was Christmas, the holiday season, and we were going to have a good time or die trying. Karen, it turned out, had an artificial Christmas tree. Now, personally, I find artificial Christmas trees objectionable under most circumstances. Sure, they don’t leave pine needles all over the carpet, or turn brown before Christmas day, or entice the dog to urinate on your pile of neatly wrapped presents, or spontaneously burst into flames, or any of the other things that real Christmas trees do. But you don’t get the ritual of going out and picking one that you like, and you don’t get that infusion of pine scent throughout the house (unless you spray everything with Pine-Sol, or do something similarly desperate). In Singapore, however, a real pine tree has to be air-flown in from New Zealand, or Kamchatka, or some such, and they tend to cost about $200 Sing. So we welcomed Karen’s artificial Christmas tree, and by god, we trimmed that baby. And then we went out and bought presents, and wrapped them, and put them under the tree. And it was just like an honest-to-god, real-life, temperate zone Christmas, except that it was still 85 degrees and humid out. Like Thanksgiving, Christmas was a big step up from the previous year. We had friends, we had presents, and we had a tree. All in all, it was a nice time. I went to work on Christmas day, but only after we opened our presents. New Year’s was also good. We spent the evening swimming in our friend Jim Myran’s pool and quaffing Kirin’s. It was a pleasant step forward from the previous New Year’s Eve, spent sitting in our unfurnished living room morosely drinking noxious Tiger Beer and watching the groovy video light-show thoughtfully included as a setting with every 3DO video game machine. .....There was a slight damper on our Christmas spirit, however. After a year of safe driving on the often hair-raising Singapore roads we had two accidents within a week. I am pleased to report that neither of them was serious, and that most of the damage done to the (insured) car was cosmetic. Joe was person who initiated this mini-trend by rear-ending a guy in a Toyota Hi-Ace van. He then called the car rental company, City-Limo, and dutifully informed them of what had happened. Mike then finished the job by getting himself rear-ended by someone else, which caused some consternation at City-Limo, when we they got their second call from us before they had even sent round their representative to check the damage from the first accident. The car was gone for a few days for repairs, and then returned to us. It never quite recovered, though. .....And so the holiday season played itself out here in Singapore, where Santa doesn’t visit because his reindeer are unlicensed. Nick Lee subtly turned up the heat on us, reminding us of how dire the situation was. Singapore held an election, which generated, if anything, even less excitement and suspense than an American election does (although at least they get high turnout, since voting is mandatory). Jim, Joe, Mike and I spent a merry day at the Sungei Buloh mangrove swamp nature preserve on Singapore’s northern coast photographing monkeys, monitor lizards, and the colossal, Southeast Asian dog-eating spiders that infest the wooded areas. My friend Rob Mills and I spent another day wandering around our own neighborhood, sticking our heads into the temples, local shops, and other places we had never thought to explore before. It was the lull before the merciless storm of mid-January and February. A Brief Entomological Aside
.....And they fly. .....This is particularly disturbing. It’s
bad enough that they move so fast that they can set your wallpaper on fire,
but when even that isn’t enough they will actually take wing and fly around
your bedroom, invariably landing on the grilled closet doors, on which
they are completely invisible. This causes many sleepless nights because,
as we all know, you can’t sleep with a roach in your room. It might start
running windsprints in your nostrils while you sleep. A friend of mine
actually had one of these things charge her and land on her thigh while
she was naked. Just thinking of that makes me squeal like a catholic
schoolgirl in bondage. Casing my room for a turbo roach often engenders
the same desperate, sweaty sense of danger and futility that I imagine
was often felt by American dogfaces prowling the Mekong Delta for Victor
Charlie (which, for the geographically impaired, happened about a two hour
plane flight northeast of here).
Joe Pantuso to Ooi (GOL Programmer Ooi Szu Khiam), 1/10/97. Excerpt from my journal, January 10, 1997 .....We had just shown one of our myriad potential investors around, and Nick Lee, Mike, Joe and I were sitting back near my cubicle talking. It had always been Mr. Lee’s assertion that we were over-ambitious. (A correct analysis considering some of GOL’s limitations.) He though that we should have set our sights technologically lower and done a simpler product. As we were sitting around talking it occurred to him that the work we had done so far could make the backbone of a good Internet chat system. The client/server mechanics would be similar to Cyberpunk, but much simpler, and we could use the same content and theme to give it character. We could, he theorized, develop a chat system as a quick-and-dirty first product, and then build towards the fully realized Cyberpunk Online from there. The chat system we could sell to Internet service providers to serve their clients, eventually networking all of our chat servers into a web of theme areas through which customers could explore and interact. By this time we were all grasping at straws, and it seemed like a fine idea to us. Our enthusiasm was stoked by news that if we didn’t have an investor and a viable plan by January 17th, eleven days hence, we were dead. We went to work writing the idea up and putting it into a form that we could present to investors. The chat bubble would begin to burst less than two days later, as Joe and I examined the market. .....The next day we had a visit from Virginia Chia, our friend from StarGlobe Technologies who had assured us that there was investment money to be had in Singapore. She brought with her a man named Gurminder Singh, a pleasant Sikh fellow from Canada who was the Creative Services Director for the Institute of Systems Science computer think-tank at the National University of Singapore. We had met Gurminder a few days earlier at a meeting with Virginia at ISS and had arranged to give them the tour of GOL. At GOL they bumped into Chris, whom both of them knew. Chris looked a little surprised to see them there, but he had been incommunicado in Hong Kong when we had arranged the visit. Gurminder and Virginia looked at the work we had done and at our staff, and said that they though that we could very well work together somehow. The next step would be for Joe and me to go over to ISS and take a look at some of the stuff that they were working on, and to see if it looked like it could all dovetail together. .....The positive feelings from the meeting with Virginia and Gurminder were tempered by the results of our investigation into the realities of the Internet chat market. It was saturated. There were a dozen companies, including Microsoft, operating or selling Internet chat systems to ISPs, private companies, individuals, or anyone else who could pony up anywhere from a few hundred dollars to $150,000 depending on the system. This looked like a major monkey wrench in our plan to sell a "PunkChat" server to ISPs for $30,000, which was the number that Nick Lee had come up with. Other companies had gone before, some with original ideas, and they were foundering commercially on exactly the same plan that had looked so good to us two days before. Our only solace lay in the fact that most of the systems suffered from obvious shortcomings of design or content. But were we the people to come up with the first Internet chat product that avoided all those pitfalls? We had our doubts. But we were so desperate for something to cling to at this point that we went into a murderous little cycle of preliminary design, trying to find the twist that hadn’t been done before. Every time we came up with the idea we’d have a flash of enthusiasm until we uncovered some previous incarnation or attempt that had failed. It was an exhausting and self-destructive way to try to conceive a product. There was no way that anything productive would ever come to it. .....But if you’re going to go down, go down flailing. And flail we did to try to come up with some last minute solution. In retrospect we should have given the entire chat idea the finger and stuck to our guns. We had two ambitious but good game designs that, with the right crew and approach, could have been realized. Cyberpunk and iPower were what we believed in, and the only things that we could sell with any sincerity. Everything else was lip service offered under duress. .....On the eighth of January Nick Lee and Seng Hon came back to GOL with an old friend. Goh Yu Min, who had resigned Sembawang Media after being assigned to Games Online full time months before, had been temporarily lured back into the fold. Nick Lee had hired him as a freelance consultant to draft a business plan around the Internet chat idea. It was interesting to see Yu Min again after all that time. He was, as ever, pragmatic and slightly aloof. He explained to us that he was not even sure that he would take the job, although in the end he did. During the meeting that we talked about what our approach to the Internet chat business would be, and what numbers would be offered to prospective investors. .....The numbers in question struck Joe and me as goony. Nick Lee was offering 20% stakes in Games Online for $1 million each, which, with a brief Sesame Street level calculation, reveals an implied $5 million valuation for Games Online. As Gates is my witness, GOL was not worth $5 million. GOL wasn’t worth $2 million, which was the actual amount of total investment dollars that we were looking for. GOL, ruthlessly boiled down to its component parts of equipment, intellectual property, and the component chemicals of the staff was worth a grand total of about $750,000. A best-case stretch for investment purposes might have justified a $2 million valuation, if you factored in intangibles. But, unlike NFL scouts and Jehovah’s Witnesses, it turns out that most venture capitalists aren’t interested in intangibles. Go figure. .....By this point Joe, Mike and I were on about draft fifteen of the Internet chat server approach, looking for a viable angle. Our latest fever-crazed scheme involved real-time 3D (incorporating work done by ISS), a cross-networked server system, rich content, and a tool set that would allow commercial clients to customize their worlds or promotional purposes (e.g "Paramount presents Star Trek Chat, with Star Trek avatars held in the starship Enterprise, etc.). Even with this candy-coated plan Joe had flat out told Nick Lee that we thought the revenue numbers were bogus and unsupportable. We believed that there was no hope for constructing a decent business plan around any chat system that we were likely to develop in 7 to 9 months (which was our target schedule). We were told that it didn’t matter, and to proceed anyway. Needless to say, this did not do sparkly wonders for our nascent enthusiasm. While Nick Lee continued to work on the plan crafted by Yu Min, Joe set about drafting an alternate and vaguely more realistic business plan based around dirt cheap servers and free clients, which was the only option that we considered remotely viable in light of the burgeoning competition. .....On January 10th, at about the same time as the dueling business plans were being born, Joe and I went down to ISS to take a look at the product that they were developing. History City was a real-time 3D, multiplayer, online environment for children. The content was a recreation of Singapore in the 1870s, with, villages representing different ethnicities, a trading/economics game, and music and sound effects. There was voice and text chat, and the plan was to add stories, jokes, and other content to amuse children between the ages of about 6 and 10. Joe and I had a mixed reaction to History City. On one hand they were clearly on to something with regional content and a focus towards kids. On the other, the content needed a vast amount of enriching and polishing, and the display engine, built on the Renderware system, was slow. History City had been fully funded by the Singapore National Computer Board, and was heading towards a live beta test in May and national roll-out in June. At the meeting Gurminder explained to us that the plan was to spin-off from ISS a new commercial venture that would develop the beta version of KidSpace into a viable commercial product. It was conceivable that, instead of creating a brand new company as a spin-off, that an existing one, such as GOL, could form a partnership with ISS to take on the commercial development of History City. Joe and I were excited. At long last this seemed like a really solid break. Although we both knew that History City was a long way from being a successful commercial product, it’s transformation into one was just the kind of thing that the GOL staff could do. The bulk of the engineering had been done, but the content was raw. GOL had always been short on engineering and long on superb content people. The potential was real. Or so we thought. .....While we were at ISS Joe and I looked at some of their other projects, including some fascinating audio tools that were being developed by two affable, audio-inclined propellerheads named Peter and Lonce. I spent some time doing the audio geek shuffle with the Scots Peter and American Lonce, who were friendly and enthusiastic. They were hardcore theorists and inclined to rhapsodize about subjects beyond the grasp of knob-twisting sound-effects editors such as myself. Joe and I both got excited about the potential of the tools that they were developing, however, and decided to see if we could get their work folded into any potential deal. We arranged follow up meetings with Gurminder. .....Around this time the already strained relationship between Joe and Nick Lee began to get downright frosty. Joe was abrasive, had some strong opinions, and spoke his mind openly. It was clear that he though that we were only being paid lip service by Sembawang Media as far as saving GOL. My impression was that Nick Lee considered Joe uppity and arrogant. The situation deteriorated to the point where Nick Lee began pointedly excluding Joe from investment meetings. At first he had me do the talking during presentations, and later he decided that he and Seng Hon should do most of the talking and I was used only to explain certain things and answer questions. Joe fumed about being excluded, and eventually wormed his way back into the loop, but there was no love lost between him and Nick Lee. I was more political, and maintained a semi-cordial relationship throughout. .....One week after our first substantive discussions with ISS our early optimism had faded. We had arranged for ISS and Sembawang Media to talk, and the result had been a resounding thud. There was clearly going to be no deal between the two companies. Joe and I kept talking to ISS, but we changed focus. Now we discussed the possibility of going to work for ISS in the wake of the likely collapse of GOL. GOL would have to die first for anything to develop between ISS and us. Meanwhile, the Singapore National Computer Board had expressed some interest in GOL, and offered a grant package, but like TDF’s investment it was dependent on a private investor coming in. At that point the best case scenario seemed to be that we would muddle along for a further six months or so before biting the bullet, not a very fulfilling prospect either from our point of view or from Sembawang’s. All our moods went into the toilet as a new wave of fatalistic depression swept over us. We thought about simply conceding defeat. Joe slipped into the depressive side of his mood-swing cycle and allowed his confidence to evaporate. I started taking my personal stuff home from the office. At that point my greatest hope was that we wouldn’t alienate Nick Lee or Sembawang so badly that they wouldn’t pay our repatriation and last-month’s salaries in lieu of notice. The emotional roller coaster had stretched all our nerves like taffy. .....I could tell that the entire process was damaging my mind when I wrote the following (excerpted from e-mail) to Christie, in the states: .....Another symptom of impending mental
collapse was rampant paranoia. One theory that we advanced among ourselves
at that time was derived from Sembawang’s insistence on selling two 20%
stakes to other investors at $1 million each. Because then Sembawang could
maintain a controlling share. $2 million would recoup the money that they
had spent on us. They could sell the stake and balance their books, and
then, with a controlling interest, close us down in two months anyway.
Later rational examination pointed out the vast flaw in this little fantasy.
Singapore is a tiny island, and if Sembawang Media had pulled a stunt like
that they would have alienated the two other companies completely. No one
likes to be scammed for a million bucks. In the end, the numbers were based
on one thing only: the amount of money necessary to fund our projects to
completion and begin generating revenue.
Excerpt from my journal, January 15, 1997 .....The meeting went well, as always. We had refined the tour and pitch to a well-rehearsed art by this point. At the end of the meeting Nick Lee asked the representatives to fill in their forms and check the box that represented their level of interest. The completed forms were quickly examined, and some pleasantries spoken, and the meeting was adjourned. At the end of the meeting I found myself in possession of the six pieces of paper. I flipped through them and found, to my complete lack of surprise, that option two had been checked on all six of them. What else could it be? No one was going to commit on the spot. At the very least any group that was seriously interested would have to go through a due diligence check. On the other hand, it would have been an abrogation of Asian manners to check option number three. In Asia a "no" is often delivered in the most couched and delicate terms possible. Checking the "not interested" option would probably be considered unthinkable. Nonetheless, I chose to interpret the results as six rejections in order to prevent heartbreak. .....After that meeting it was time for some psychological balm. On Thursday, January 23rd, Mike, Joe, Jim and I left for three days of world class diving at Manado, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. That glorious trip is covered in self-indulgent detail in my journal article 20,000 Geeks Under the Sea: The Report from Manado. If you want to know how great this trip was for me, consider this, I missed the Superbowl and didn’t care! We returned to Singapore much refreshed, and ready for the worst that fate could dish out. .....Fate obliged. .....On the day after we got back from
Manado we had a meeting with Wong Seng Hon and a new set of representatives
from the Singapore Economic Development Board. Seng Hon had worked for
EDB before joining Sembawang Media, and he still had ties there. We already
had an grant from EDB for $800,000 over two years (none of which was ever
used, we learned in retrospect), but now they were being courted as potential
part owners. It was necessary to make sure that everything was above board
with EDB, however, as Sembawang Corporation chairman Philip Yeo was also
EDB chairman, and any s conflict of interest had to be avoided. In the
meantime a letter of intent emerged from TDF, which was good news. TDF
managing director Thomas Ng had returned from the states apparently enthused
about the possibilities of Internet entertainment. There was a catch, though.
We still needed a "strategic industry partner," which is to say a private
investor with no government links. TDF (and the other government-related
investors) wanted reassurance that other private corporations thought that
we were viable. It seemed that with every bit of good news there was some
attendant catch that invalidated it. I began to seriously think about other
jobs in Singapore.
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