Today I got an email from Beatnik Games informing me there were keys for the Gamma test of Plain Sight up for grabs and that I could have one if I just clicked on a link. “Brilliant!” I thought.
Except when I clicked on the link I got a message saying that all the Gamma keys were gone! I felt a rage I have not felt since the year 2000.
Whilst completing our final year of A-Levels, my friend Andy and I won two free tickets to see the premier of the original X-Men film in Leicester Square. We had an entire day to spend in London, so we decided to go on a pilgrimage to Karl Marx’s tomb in Highgate Cemetery. They were charging to get in, which obviously struck us as something Karl wouldn’t be too happy about. He probably thought that by the year 2000 people wouldn’t be using money any more, and that even if they were it wouldn’t have to be spent to see his gravestone. He also probably thought his gravestone wouldn’t look so bloody expensive.
Anyway, we were both studying Computing and Maths, but one of Andy’s A-Levels was Politics, and one of mine was Philosophy. After visiting the tomb and a second-hand bookshop (I picked up a copy of Che Guevara’s ‘Guerilla Warfare’ for 50p) we stopped by a lovely pub called The Flask. In that pub we came up with two ideas. First, we should form PFERB, or the People’s Front for the Establishment of the Republic of Basingstoke, where we both lived at the time. Second, that we could probably clean up by starting a web design company in Basingstoke over the summer. We decided that we should call the web design company ‘Beatnik Software’, after my final year computing project, the Beatnik 2000. The Beatnik 2000 was an automated music composer that made really bad jazz. It got a D. But that doesn’t matter.
After watching the premier of X-Men and meeting the cast- neither Patrick Stewart or Hugh Jackman turned up, sadly- we got the train home to Basingstoke. We told some of our friends about the ideas we’d had, but didn’t do anything with them for a while.
Some months later, after we’d got our results and wrapped up our University placements, some kids in the year below us managed to get in the local paper by holding a mock protest as The People’s Front for the Establishment of a Republic of Basingstoke. They’d lifted our idea AND got themselves in the Basingstoke Gazette! They hadn’t even invited us or given us credit, having passed off the whole thing as entirely their idea. Naturally we were livid, and if Facebook were around then we would totally have unfriended them.
Which brings us to today. NOT ONLY have you stolen the other idea we had in the year 2000 by calling yourselves Beatnik Games, you have failed to give us either credit or jobs, and then you have blatantly taunted us by offering free gamma keys to your game when there aren’t any left.
Here is a picture of a wounded deer that sums up my feelings
You might think that deer is not wounded, but that’s because all of it’s wounds are internal. Like mine.
Now, can I have a cocking Gamma key?
. More rage. After trying 4 times, then being informed I had tried too many times, I raged even harder! I quickly sent for a new password. Alas, the email was not instant. Even more rage built. So much so, that I gave up, and went an played TF2. Now, while much calmer, I decide to post hear in attempts to make earlier rage worth it.
THX A LOT 
