We knew the day would come when a former Give Me Head employee would get in touch. However, we never thought it’d be Nelson. He hardly appears in any of the meetings or other documents but was there until mid-July. His background was in engineering and special FX. Yet he was asked to “keep an eye out on the stationary thieves for the first month”, of which there was none, completely wasting his talents. “At least the weed was good.”

He described to us the cognitive dissonance of being involved in what you initially believe to be the next big thing: “On day one I truly believed this baby was going to be Star Wars but for the outsiders; the kids and the freaks with skateboards who smoked dope and hung around the arcades” and then eventually realising ‘you fucked up’. It hits you, man. It’s like a distorted version of grieving if you can imagine it.

“But on top of that you have a lot of anger to deal with. I have no doubt in my mind that Cassidy had some good intentions, but he was, pardon me, a narcissistic asshole. Over the years I’ve tried to get into his mind–like really get into it–and I always arrive at the same scholarly conclusion: Cassidy was just a narcissistic asshole.

“And he’d blown so much snow the boy had gone cuckoo. I still think if Cassidy was straight thinking or just got out of the way, Cyberia might’ve got over the finish line. I always thought if we made a series of several videos helping kids to visualise the universe we were creating and then put out the game as a tabletop RPG which was independent of the story but heavily leaning into it then we’d hit jackpot.

We directed Nelson to this page and he smiled as he read it. “You boys are way, way off,” he said. “You’ve fallen for Cassidy’s vision which was, as you say, completely unworkable. But we had an alliance in the office including Peck, Brooks and some others. We were pulling the strings towards a completely workable concept which I’ll tell you about some other time.”

We could sense Nelson wanted to say much more but was a little overwhelmed, time travelling back to such a uniquely crazy time and place. However, I couldn’t resist asking about Cassidy.

“Man, it’s crazy to be actually talking about that guy Cassidy again. Almost like therapy. You know, memory is a funny oid thing. The further away things gets, all the bad shit seems to dissolve. Okay, those many times I was in his company, it just became a blur. He would storm into the main office, talking at a million miles an hour. You’d try to catch some words and you’d see people rolling around on the floor, laughing at whatever he’d be saying. I mean he was one funny guy. The funniest I met. He’d be insulting everyone in ways I didn’t think was possible, and yet nobody would be offended. Except for the Dmitry Parsons situation which I actually witnessed. That was some scary shit. Man just turned into this grizzly bear. Oh, and way after I left, when Sando tried to hunt Cassidy down to kil him after the project collapsed. He played the Gunther character.”

“As for me: I remember this one time, I showed Cassidy some detailed illustrations of the Skanna I’d made out of pure boredom. As he started to eat the pages I’d been working  on, he asked me if my last job was conducting market research for fat women’s swimwear because everything I had drawn reminded him of a gunt. I later found out what a gunt is and couldn’t stop laughing. I’ll save you some Google time. Pardon my language, but you know those obese mammas who wear big shorts and you can’t make a distinction between her gut and her, ahem, cunt? That’s what you call a gunt.”

* * * * *

I should make it clear that we actually visited Nelson who still lived closeby. We travelled mostly for irrefutable evidence that he was the Nelson in the office photo. I can honestly say he is one of the nicest people I’ve met. He is also extremely smart. He didn’t want to be filmed, but he was more than willing to be recorded for interviews.

Now this is the best part about hooking up with Nelson which is why I’m putting it in quotations. He said this to us:

I really appreciate your dedication to this project without any guidance. I’m happy to give you a nudge here and a nudge there based on my experiences. It’s certainly a piece of history that shouldn’t be forgotten. However, the deal is that I get to write your Substack. What will I write about? I’m an AI expert and by that I mean I fucking love and detest AI equally.

I ain’t going to be some old crank, what you British boys might call a Luddite, I just want to have my say and a lot of fun. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. If you boys are willing to put my Substack up on your website then I’ll tell you some stories along the way. What do you say?

We all shouted Yes! Yes! Yes!

We made only one stipulation which was not to target and ridicule individuals or their projects because we’re all, broadly speaking, pro-AI with 567,994 caveats and counting. But at the same time we also detest it with double the caveats. Nelson said his intentions are aligned.

So there you have it, folks! Nelson is waiting on our call and then it’ll be launched.

Keep those eyes peeled!

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