Originally published at: Doom music legend Mick Gordon denounces the executive at iD Software who publicly scapegoated him for the soundtrack they butchered—and he has receipts | Boing Boing
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Basically
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Since I’m not a qualified psychologist I’m going to refrain from saying that Marty sounds ‘clinically executive’ and just go with ‘dangerously’ instead.
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Moral of the story: Keep all of your receipts.
One tech at work (a month away from retirement) was being screwed over by our payroll department, they claiming that their records did not back-up his request for considerable backpay. Hence, no backpay. Unbeknownst to him, his wife had been saving all documents related to his employment… including receipts proving backpay due.
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I think it’s already been repeatedly confirmed that working as a wage drone (even a well paid one) for a major gaming software company is excruciating.
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Holy fucking shit. This guy - I feel for him. These egotistical manics in power fuck everything up.
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By going to Reddit, that gentleman threw Gordon to the toxic gamers, but I wonder if he was also bypassing corporate legal, who might have otherwise vetted his statement?
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Doubtful; in fact, his behaviour was probably prescribed by Legal knowing Bethesda / Zenimax. They have prior.
I started paying attention to their legal shenanigans when they killed off the original Prey sequel, and I can guarantee that every time they’ve acquired a gaming company, it’s been through tactics that outside of the corporate arena would qualify as blackmail.
Remember, this is the same company that withheld money from Obsidian because Fallout New Vegas failed to hit a fucking Metacritic score.
When Stratton originally released his hitpiece on Reddit, I immediately knew that Mick was probably not to blame here and that it was just Bethesda at their usual shady legal shenanigans.
Remember, the guy who ran the company and who recently passed away, Robert Altman (not this one; that one), was successfully prosecuted in a trial relating to banking fraud before founding Zenimax with the founder of Bethesda, Christopher Weaver.
Whereupon he used his legal experience and power as CEO to oust Weaver and take full control.
He always used the law as a weapon in the gaming industry, and was so sleazy that the only time I’ve ever backed Facebook is when he took them and Carmack to court over perceived VR IP ownership rights.
So yeah, Stratton’s the mouthpiece, where Bethesda are just playing the same evil legal game they’ve always played.
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In what world is Bethesda to be blamed for this? Softworks published Eternal, they didnt develop it meaning id Software had the purse. Zenimax is the parent company. If there was an issue, it should have been settled there. Its funny how some are so quick to blame Bethesda for things that they are barely involved in. Then there are people blaming Todd and even Phil for these things. Its stupid.
Perhaps Zenimax should have stepped in, but it looks like they had no idea what was going on until it blew up. Bethesda should have been paying better attention to what id were up to, eg when Bethesda announced the OST album, they should have checked that id had actually asked Graham to make it. There’s also the previous OST he made for a different game which Bethesda never paid him for until several years afterwards.
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Reading this makes me grateful that our son and elder daughter both abandoned their plans to earn degrees in gaming development. Seems like they dodged bullets there.
Like making music, movies and shows, game makers have more options on how to get their games made, sold and where to do so. It’s been generally a great time to be an indie game maker for the past decade, though i’m sure it still takes a lot of work but it’s a viable strategy and if someone wanted to avoid working for a large publisher they could do so.
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Yeah; Bethesda knew (more or less) what was going on. I read through the entire article, and it was just disgusting what was done to him.
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it really sucks when employers use a person’s desire to a good job against them. that’s the only way someone winds up crunching when they’re not even getting paid
the concept of “we have to approve the work before you get paid” seems ripe for abuse. yes, you want the person doing the work to be responsible for some amount of quality control, but that can also be done by firing a bad contractor and hiring another. they obviously weaponized it against him, and it really sounds like they were doing that to the whole team with unrealistic schedules and ever changing goals
i absolutely believe him that the final call he had was solely to gather information about his mindset and use that in the reddit post against him. i’ve seen that done at a company i once worked at, with an employee review, and it takes a really awful person to do that
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