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The article, as threatened. Also, special thanks to Remi for inspiring me to replay CMI this weekend. Man, what a game.

This issue (#45, June 1992) promises a "Giant US Gold poster", so that's most likely it:

It could be a reference to ABBA. An easy one to make with a musical scale and four notes. His feelings on the group is pure speculation on your part. And this is where you enter A Beautiful Mind territory.

Everyone is being respectful towards you because we all like and respect you. Your knowledge on LucasArts stuff is wonderful, and I'm sure I'm not alone in enjoying perusing your website over the years. I happily say thanks for all that cool stuff that you've collected and shared over the years. It's great. It seems no matter how anyone reacts to your theory however, it's always taken as "proof" that the theory is true. No matter what. I think it's normal for anyone presenting a theory to say (and genuinely believe) that they could be wrong. I think that might be a good place for you to get to internally. Maybe, just maybe, this isn't true... It's a fun distraction, and interesting thought experiment, but maybe there isn't any truth to it. I'll just say that I'm not convinced by your theory. I think the most daring and unusual thing LucasArts ever tried to do was launch a TV show, a comic book, and a NES game all at the same time. And that project (Defenders of Dynatron City) was pretty dull.

This is an insane post.

People don't behave according to how they should in your mind. You're not God. You can't base entire theories on how you think people behave in every situation and take every deviation of that as proof that something nefarious is going on.

I’ve written a few posts in here saying the theory is bullshit - because it is - but deleted them because just saying that alone didn’t seem like it would be enough. I thought just saying “this is BS” would be less helpful than what I ultimately did say. But apparently I was wrong, as you only quoted the last sentence of my reply to try and throw it back at me, but didn’t engage with any of the substance of the post. Multiple people have already said in this thread what I would have said myself: Game development (and making commercial entertainment in general) is a messy process. I’ve never been on a project that was guided precisely by some master hand, aiming to reach a long agreed on goal. That’s just not how it has ever worked. As you make something, the act of making changes it. Your goals change. You learn and refine what the strengths of tour project are as you make it. Anyone who chases the same perfect goal from beginning to end without adjusting as they go will make a bad game, film, whatever. This applies at the studio level too: Different teams are not ideological entities but are closer to porous buckets in the loose shape of the games they are working on, with different team members pouring from one bucket to another as the different games need different resources over the course of their development. If there is a master hand at work here it is only management trying their damndest to keep things held together enough to ship, to make sure games have enough people on them at the right time to literally be content complete, get QA, etc. The idea that there is some big philosophy from the top down is almost impossible to imagine, since all the work that actually goes into what makes the games what they are happens bottom up, from the hands and minds of the people making the games. Marketing and PR messaging sent out to the fans and investors tries it’s best to tell the story of designers’ visions and to map the games along some meaningful trajectory or company goal, but that is the work that is truly reactionary - responding to the games the teams are creating (through some combination of initial goals, re-assessed goals, technical and financial limitations and of course the makeup of the people on the team itself) and trying to craft a message of meaning and intent behind it. That my posting in here to tell you you’re wrong somehow “confirms” anything to you other than you being wrong, should be evidence enough to people reading this thread that it is in fact a conspiracy theory.