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Comment by syntheticnature | Hacker News Reader

(2020)

I'd hope anyone who saw "Plane Crazy" would know better than to back a Robert X. Cringely Kickstarter, and I'd expect anyone who followed his tech takes for a bit would have acquired some salt to take with any claims he made.

There seem(ed) to be a number of folks absolutely obsessed with hounding Cringely (apparently dead, I know) over the Kickstarter in his irregular posts. Given the highest tier was $200 and the whole of the Kickstarter was $35.5k USD, seems like a lot of throwing good time/energy after a bad Kickstarter call. I'd be overjoyed if that was the worst case of someone walking off with my money I'd ever faced.

They are, or were I guess, free to do so, but it seems wasteful to spend the amount of time in his comments they did.

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I feel like a lot of the hounding was more due to the fact that Cringely wouldn't admit the failure and instead chose to lie again and again, and less because of the money.

Seems like an even worse time investment; warn people about the fabulist, yes, but never expect there will be some change of behavior like you might get in a children's show.

It's about anger, not money, and anger is usually about ego, not facts.

Was that the TV series where he wanted to design and build a plane? He seemed weirdly resistant to the idea that mounting the engine at the back and the prop at the front and a bloody great propshaft running the length of it was a bad idea. The Scooby engine was a good choice, the rest, eeeeh, naw, not so much.

The thing that was / is a drag about Kickstarter was in the early days when some complete randos raised quite a bit more than the mine server project raised to make a “spiritual successor “ to a game I designed. Anyone who knew better knew they couldn’t, whatever they believed. Would have been nice to see that money go to a real game or a real developer.

What was the game?

It worked out sometimes! Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night shipped, and was fun! Then, they somehow managed to spend years of dev time after shipping to make good on the various higher-tier rewards that they had promised like a Boss Rush mode and an 8-bit prequel story. (This was well after the game was fully wrapped up and nobody was still playing it, so it felt a little weird, but they followed through on their promise!)

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