I think he just has nothing better to do than post bullshit on the Internet.
Hey, wait a minute!
No mention of the big elephant in the closet? Flexible funding, so whether he makes the target or not, he’s keeping the money.
If his beta is so far along already, why not give beta access to most of the tiers?
What do you think comes first, Grimoire? Or the coming race war he predicted so many years ago?
1998? I think the original release date was in 1995. This was on his website in 1997:
When is the demo going to be available?
At the moment, we are planning to release our Alpha 1.16 on April 29th, 1997 at this site for public review and to get some feedback. The game should be fully functional in all respects. It will feature a small dungeon and forest area for testers to explore and get some feeling for the gameplay present in Grimoire.
The public beta should be released in the early part of June, 1997 and the uncrippled, fully playable shareware version will be available on the 1st of September in 1997 for anyone to download and play.
How much of the game is finished right now?
The game engines are 95% completed at this time. The artwork is 60%, sound & music 10%. We are making remarkably rapid progress and expect to achieve all the deadlines we have set for ourselves. We are not amateurs at the business of software development and would not be wasting your time by putting up this web page if we were less than confident about releasing the game on time. We despise developers who miss deadlines and promote games before they are even certain if they can finish them probably even more than you do.
Is the Clevemeister a coder and artist himself? I mean, is that his work from the ground up or did he hire programmers and artists to create Grimoire?
I think he has used artists through the years. But maybe done some himself, I’m not completely sure.
$4500+ in donations already.
“But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”
Can’t say yet, but apparently a demo is scheduled for some time in November.
If I were a woman of principles I’d not even give a thought about anything coming from Mr. Blakemore. Apparently I am not.
I don’t buy games from a certain board game designer any more, but in this case I know the guy in person and was personally affected by his former actions (in this case: publishing policy), but if I cared about how game designers present themselves on the internet, I’d be buying and playing very few games these days.
–cookroach
I’ll occasionally throw dollars at something I know is going to be a freakshow just so I can bask in it. Daikatana, so many years ago, was a pass; DNF got picked up. With that, I’m torn on Grimoire. On one hand, Cleve and Grimoire are a large part of my internet-coming-of-age on sissy-pig-RPG, and who WOULDN’T want to see how big of a trainwreck the game will be in person. But then again, Cleve is an absolutely reprehensible human being – or at least does a remarkable simulation of an absolutely reprehensible human being – that I would likely not piss on him if his superhuman body spontaneously caught fire.
This is all academic, of course … Grimoire has zero chance of coming out, and if it does, I will singlehandedly make Cleve THE PRINCE OF STENCH!
Didn’t he release a public beta like fifteen years ago?
Cleve is fat
(laughs at funny picture)
Yeah, I know.
But it’s something different this time. I don’t think he ever took anybody’s money before. It’s not plain craziness or racism (evil enough!) or throwing insults around, this time it would be theft, maybe fraud.
We shall see.
– cookroach
Guys, some of you seem to miss that we have in fact been playing Grimoire this whole time. The flamewars, the ridicule, the insane rantings, all part of the game. And think about how much entertainment we’ve derived from it. Doesn’t Cleve deserve our fifty bucks for all the good times over the years?
No. The answer is no.
Don’t believe it was public back then. They did put the demo up for download at one point in, oh I dunno, 2002-2003? I played it. Twas buggy.
I actually played some early release of Grimoire in that time frame (fifteen years ago), but I downloaded it on a work computer and only fiddled with it for maybe half an hour. At the time I assumed it was coming out soon and it didn’t really grab me so I deleted it from my work PC, thinking I’d rather play a fuller, less buggy version (it crashed on me once or twice in the brief time I played it).
Now I wish I’d saved it. I feel like I deleted an important Internet archaeological find. It felt old-school fifteen years ago.