Some preface is necessary. But skip it if you want.
This journal made me infamous in Singapore. To this day I still bump into people who have either heard about it, or read it. For many years it generated me a constant stream of e-mail, mostly from Singaporeans, split evenly between bouqets ("Right on, brother! Tell it like it is!") and brickbats ("Go home, imperialist Yanqui swine!").
Fair enough. It is, in parts, provocative. But let me clear about what this is. In the most basic sense, this is my as-it-happened journal of the creation, rise and fall of Games Online, a company created by me, five American friends, and twenty-five locally hired staff in the Autumn of 1995. This was the project that brought me to Singapore.
It was a total disaster.
In a deeper sense, this journal is the culture-shocked ramblings of a young man way out of his professional depth. Like it or not, you will get my unvarnished first-contact perceptions of life and work in Singapore, and my bitchy, increasingly bitter narrative of the implosion of Sembawang Media, Singapore's first big Internet company. I wrote neither as an international sophisticate nor as someone dedicated to uncovering "the real Singapore". I just wrote it as I experienced it.
Consequently, you'll get equal parts insight, salacious gossip, and banal narrative for my family back home ("gawrsh, aren't laserdiscs cool!").
I have pointedly not edited this for posterity, other than one bout of self-censorship several years ago to cull some of my more incendiary, potentially litigable rants. Those spots are marked in the text. You can speculate. All the typos, the hyperbole, and plain bad writing is still in there. There are also several mistakes about Singapore, especially in the first couple of installments. Trust me, they've long since been pointed out. Also, many of the links within are long dead.
Early episodes deal with the creation of GOL and our arrival and early experiences in Singapore. The latter episodes (6 and 7 especially) are dedicated primarily to the death of GOL, and have less Singaporeana in them.
I re-post this with apologies to everyone named within. Some of you probably wish this was dead and buried. If it makes you feel any better, my conciliatory words can be found at the end of chapter 7.
For the record, eight years later Singapore is still my adopted home. I am married to a Singaporean, and will raise half-Singaporean kids. I think that's great, and it means that, ultimately, this was all worth it.
Note: The reports are long, single HTML documents. Sorry about that. Also, they are in the original "Moo Moo Mutants" formatting.
Will
Report 1:
How Joe and Will journeyed to Singapore and, unfathomably, struck a huge deal. This installment was written on the airplane back from Singapore, after Joe Pantuso and I spent a week there hammering out the details of the deal that would create Games Online. This installment has a lot of our first impressions of Singapore. It also displays our early enthusiasm, and our early naïvité. 9/95.
Report 2:
How we moved to Singapore and adjusted to life in Southeast Asia. This picks up about a month after the conclusion of our initial visit. Our month in the Mandarin Hotel is covered, as is the panicky race to get the apartments set up before the rest of the American crew arrived. You can read about our first interview and hiring experiences as we started building our staff, and see the very first signs of the trouble we would later face with our infamous computer purchase. 12/95.
Report 3:
How the rest of the gang showed up, and the first inklings of trouble began. In this installment the rest of the Silkworm gang gets settled in, and we continue with hiring. Report 3 is mostly a series of vignettes from our early acclimitization. There are some interesting portents concerning Singaporean business practices, however. 1/96.
Report 4:
How, against all odds, a computer game company began to coalesce. This is where things really began to get interesting, as we welcomed new staff on board and moved into temporary office space. Work begins on our projects while I suddenly become a TV performer. More pithy observations on life in Singapore. Bonus culture shock. 4/96.
Report 5:
And here my troubles began. Rough sailing for the intrepids of GOL. We move into our permanent office space at long last. It really begins to feel like a company after months of slogging. Unfortunately, in the face of this joyous progress, the demon of the computer purchase rears its ugly head to challenge our fledgling studio. 6/96.
Report 6:
Folly in the tropics. Our problems mount but we persevere. The intrigue surrounding the computer purchase blossoms to colossal new heights, prompting a wave of cynicism and despair. The schedule begins to suffer, and projects are pushed around mercilessly. In the midst of chaos we find bliss diving in the tropical seas off of Malaysia. But a cloud of doubt hangs over all we do. 9/96.
Report 7:
Posted nearly a year after the previous chapter. This is the climactic episode in the story of Games Online. Find out how it all went down. What became of our year and a half of blood and sweat? Who were the players? What was the intrigue? It's all finally revealed. Warning: this is a 200kb HTML file.8/97.