Namone, A. (1999). Ray Bladderschelt Tells It Like It Is. August Is Tired Weblog.

Namone: Ray Bladderschelt! Of the legendary gamemaking duo Steve & Ray Bladderschelt (no relation), co-founders of manisoft (formerly known as "Bladderschelt & Bladderschelt")!! Hello!!!

Ray: Wow, that's quite an intro you have for me! I don't think I'm very 'legendary' but I guess that other stuff is true. Hello August. Excited to participate in your new weblogging project!

Namone: Thanks Ray. So okay: There's this one story Kevin Kevinson tells about you.

Ray: Haha, yeah? He's uh... he's pretty good at telling stories, I guess.

Namone: He is indeed, Ray! He is, indeed. This is the one where Kevin arrives for his first day at work at what he was told is a 'game studio' but actually he arrives to find you two guys making spreadsheet software in a basement.

Ray: We did have some clients from the finance industry back then. We did work in a basement.

Namone: But did he actually unplug your computer and shout "NO SPREADSHEETS" at you?

Ray: Ah, well... nothing ever really happens the way Kevin says it did. But sure: He really hated doing the contract work, so he got us out of that stuff pretty much right away.

Namone: He would always do this dopey impression of you where you say: "But videogames are made out of spreadsheets, KK!" and people laugh at it, but I always think 'yeah actually they are'.

Ray: People laugh when they think they're supposed to, right? But yeah, I never really liked that 'punchline' of his either.

Namone: Why'd you start working with Kevinson in the first place?

Ray: We thought... well, we'd had it with the publishers and we thought that if we found the right investor we could switch to a self-publishing sort of business model.

Namone: And that investor was Kevinson?

Ray: That was the idea, yeah. He brought in a large amount of capital, and he said he wanted to be partner but a 'hands-off' sorta partner. That's what he said during negotiations, I mean.

Namone: That's funny. I thought y'all hired him as a designer! Actually, he told me once that y'all had hired him to 'help Ray decide how not to squander the Bladderschelt family trust'...

Ray: For real? That's... hah! Kevin's a real character. Well, we certainly never had a family trust. When I was a young man in Iowa my father sold car insurance, and my mother stayed at home with us kids. We had food on the table, but I still wore all my older brothers' clothes. 

Namone: It seems like he really misrepresented you and I'm sorry I didn't call him out on it at the time! Especially galling since it seems Kevinson was the guy flashing the wealth himself...

Ray: Well I appreciate the sentiment August, but no apologies are needed! Kevin said that the money had come from angel investors in Texas, and our due diligence confirmed this to be true. But... in hindsight we aren't really sure why those investors chose Kevin to represent them, nor why they decided to go along with his wishes. There was something kinda odd about that aspect.

Namone: Was "Dragon Lands" the thing you hoped to self-publish? The game that Kevinson says became "BLOOD OATH"?

Ray: Yes. Now mind you, We also had a prototype for a game about this blue dot character named Scotty Dotty who saves the Painted Kingdom through... well, basically it was gonna be a Commander Keen ripoff. "Dragon Lands" was my favorite option for sure.

Namone: How do you feel about the direction that project took?

Ray: "BLOOD OATH" is a great game! Of course it isn't quite the thing Steve and I started out with... but then, it was also our most commercially-successful project. We certainly couldn't have done that without Kevin. It was our idealism and his... well, his darkness I suppose. Certainly it made us very rich, but, I don't really think it was worth it in the end. It wasn't good for the team. Wasn't good for Kevin, either.

Namone: I saw him at an industry event last month and he kept insisting I call him by all three of his names? I didn't even know he had a middle name!

Ray: For some reason I always find this story very hard to remember, but I think... he took that name from somebody else and sorta changed it a bit. He'd come to us and declared that his new middle name would also start with a 'K'... can you imagine? "Triple K", he was saying to us, "like the wrestler!" And we were just flabbergasted, because-

Namone: Jesus. Yeah. You know, I always found it was hard to tell whether Kevin really knew anything about anything? In terms of what he was saying or doing.

Ray: Well, it's very unpleasant trying to talk Kevin out of something, as you can probably imagine, but we did it: We said 'please just pick any other letter for your middle initial Kevin', and we were persistent. In the end he kinda took the 'K' off and added this double-letter "A.E." thing. He was very excited about that; said he was gonna be the first U.S. president with 3.5 initials. We weren't quite sure what it was that made him act this way, August, but... ah, I feel tired now. I'm sorry, can we talk about something else?