THEREALQHERETIC'S PROFILE

Im down to do a podcast

author=Darken
I think you might mean Exile? (list of GGZ games here)

Yeah thats it. I got the names mixed up in my memory. Still blown away from all the nostalgia now. I do remember KanjiHack, Don Miguel and all them. I don't think we really had any involvement in the translation of RM2K though, just that we got close to Don Miguel and helped distribute the original RTP files or whatever to the community when they were partially translated.

I vaguely recall RM95 because its what I got started with originally. I remember it was really limited - like custom battle engines were not viable and you were sorta forced into using a lot of the default content.

I did have a brush with an opportunity to get into a game dev career at one point thanks to a custom Starcraft 2 map called Smashcraft I built: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGyQQwYHL_k (RIP TotalBiscuit)

Riot Games emailed me and offered to fly me out for an interview because they liked the map so much. It ultimately fell through but I think I also decided around then that making games for work would ruin the joy of playing games for me.

WOW. It's been a long time since I heard the name "GamingGroundZero" but I just randomly stumbled on this thread looking up old RPGMaker content and noticed recent activity. You guys realize this whole debacle is over 20 years old now? Let me get you caught up on the history probably no one knew about.

Yes, I am the real QHeretic from those days (I stopped using that screen name a looooong time ago). I was 16 at the time. I'm now 36.

Wishmoo was my mom, and embarassed my early motivations of running a website as a kid. It used to just be a hobby I relatively enjoyed, until she sort of forced her way into my internet life and RPG Maker community. I stopped being really invested or even remotely involved with anything GGZ around the time she took everything over and started demonizing the community, so I really would like the history books to strike my involvement or any kind of responsibility from the record. This period of about 3-4 years was a dark stretch in my life I look back at and wonder how things got so out of control and crazy.

So rewinding just a little bit. I believe the year was 1999 when this all started. We had just gotten the internet and moved to Delaware, and for the most part I only used it to play online games (like Quake, at the time). At some point I got into the old RPG Maker, pre-RM2k, and enjoyed making games on it as a hobby. At some point I took this hobby and expanded into making a website revolving around RPG Makers, mostly failed projects - but "The Heresy" was the original name of my first successful page and small community. I had befriended a dude in the community who was also into RPG Maker and we sort of forged a small alliance and ran The Heresy as a team. You may or may not remember this person of great significance in this whole drama. His screen name was "Illustrious".

I don't remember the details of how it got to the next part, but my mom started talking to this guy, probably just out of simple concern as a single parent - since he was significantly older than me and talking to a 14-15 year old on the internet regularly. At some point my mom warmed up to him a little too much, and then suddenly I got the news that he's coming to visit us for a short period of time (forget how long but it was like a month or two IIRC. Just to hang out for the summer). At the time it didn't cross my mind that they were romantically involved in any way or that there was any alterior motive to this guy visiting. I was, of course, just a kid.

So things started out pretty chill and fun. Illustrious (aka Jeremy) seemed cool and we all were getting along pretty well for the summer. We eventually moved into a larger house and this is where things really started to change. My mom had been completely sucked into my RPG Maker community, and she was the one who pitched the name for the new re-design of The Heresy which was of course "Gaming Ground Zero". She also now was developing a strong desire to make her own game. She was super busy writing this really thorough story whenever she wasn't at work, and had all these ideas and plans for this enormous production she had in mind. The game was to be named "Tabernacle", and to give her some credit, it was pretty well written out. The only problem was that she had no clue how RPG Maker worked, and was not very technically savvy at all. She started latching me into doing all of the work for her and soon turned this into a bit of an enslavement, using threats and coercion to get me to do the programming for her several hours a day.

This was also around the time she drew the attention of a lot of people in the community because, i'm sure we all remember, she had some "issues". Let's expand on this a bit. My mom was always bit of a basket case. My childhood growing up under her care was rifled with abuse and some horrific incidents that i'm sure psychologically scarred me pretty deep along the way. But not to get too into that stuff. She was a textbook narcissistic personality so naturally the internet and her ego clashed. And clashed HARD. Anyone who wasn't kissing her feet was out to get her, and she very quickly devolved into this depraved addiction for "ruining people", and she used my technical knowledge to do it. I remember her using me to spy on friends, or strangers I never met or cared about. She had me numerous times trick people into installing trojan horses on their computers, and teach her how to use the monitoring side of it so she could monitor them whenever she felt like it. It was all forced, she held threats over my head constantly to do her bidding and many of those threats were that she was going to throw me out on the street, or that i'd have to sleep locked in the unfinished basement we had in the house, or she'd destroy my computer. Under that duress, I even went so far as tricking some of her most "trusted" friends into being spied on because she constantly was developing suspicions about them too, even though they were devoted allies to her all the way. They probably still to this day don't know that she was spying on them, printing out encyclopedias worth of paper evidence about them, so that if they crossed her she could "ruin them".

She "ruined" god knows how many people, I lost count. Whenever someone really got under her skin she went on the warpath, and she'd start e-stalking them, finding their places of business, their parents, and using all this (very likely illegal) evidence she collected to get them fired from their jobs, or to ruin their family lives, and in a couple instances I recall she got people arrested. I don't know how the fuck she did it. She had this way of manipulating people into doing anything she wanted, and she often managed to get her way.

Things were falling apart at home though. Illustrious, who was only supposed to stay with us for the summer, had now been living with us almost 2 years straight and was having a hard time keeping a job. The relationship between him and my mom was becoming strained, and they fought constantly. He would recede into his room for days at a time, drinking himself into a stupor and we'd never see him emerge from that room during these stretches. As a side note, Jeremy was in the marines when he was younger (or so he claimed). This becomes relevant now.

I remember waking up really late one evening to them having a really intense fight, and Jeremy was getting unstable. He was drunk, and threatening to become violent. I forget how it ended up happening, but I said something harsh to my mom and out of nowhere he clotheslined me to the ground and then kneeled down and started choking me REALLY hard. This 30 something old guy with marine-level training essentially was using lethal CQC force on a 16 year old kid. My mom freaked out and tried to talk him down from whatever psychosis he was in. After she threw him out we had to call the cops on him because he was running around our front yard naked and laughing like a maniac. That was the last we saw of Jeremy. Or at least, the last I saw.

The rest is a blur, but the abuse got worse. My mom got sucked deeper and deeper into this spiral of depression, anger, and constant paranoia about people in the community. I had long stopped being involved in the whole community, even though people frequently brought me up as Wishmoo's accomplice. Realistically speaking, I was under duress for most of my appearances and often had her standing over my shoulder telling me what to write in forum posts. One time I didn't comply she chased me into the basement with a baseball bat. But for the most part I just lost interest in RPG Maker altogether, partly because of her, partly because of creative walls I kept hitting with the software. I had sort of sunk into online games full time and tried to avoid anything GGZ for most of the time it existed.

Eventually, the same month I turned 18 we got into this argument and she finally threw me out on the street as she promised she was going to do for years. I ended up having a friend pick me up and went on to a loooooooong and arduous (and abrupt) liberation into the adult world. I pretty much never saw her in person again after that, save maybe once or twice much later down the road, but I essentially left and never turned back. It was for the better. Without her in my life, the toxicity was gone and I realized she had been this ball and chain holding me back in life.

Anyway, Wishmoo died a few years ago. I don't even remember of what, probably heart disease, or lung cancer (she went back to being a smoker when I left). She had numerous health issues and was just miserable 99% of her waking life. The worst part is, my first thought was "good riddance". She was abusive, narcissistic, and a cancer in this world, and a horrible person. All the "friends" she made in the community, the very few - she put on a nice face to them but was always suspicious of them behind their backs and couldn't just trust anyone. Probably kind of awful for me to speak about her in this way, but that's the whole story of me and GGZ.