NEVERDIE's Hollywood Adventures. ( copyright 2007 all rights Reserved)
WARNING!
NC 17 This thread contains Foul language and Graphic sexual situations also some blasphemy and bizarre ideas about the nature of life itself. Please do not read it, if u may be offended
Thursday October 25th 2007
I got back last night from Los Angeles, primary reason for the visit was to attend E for All Expo and announce
the launch of the Massive multiplayer Online World Championships, I have a follow up call tomorrow with Spike TV to see what kind of coverage of the Event they can do. A key thing to come out of the show for me was a brainstorm session with some of the players and the idea to move the mmowc final from Miami to las vegas and host it in conjuncution with the CES trade show that mindark will be attending in january '08. It is one of the biggest gatherings of consumer and tech press in the world, so a definate opportunity to raise the profile of the event...
I was in LA with my Wife Cheri and my baby daughter Sheba, my son Taliesin also traveled by plane from Oregon, where he is staying with his grandparents to join us for the weekend. It was good to have my family together again if only for the weekend. Taliesin is going to stay in school through second grade in Oregon while i handle the logistics of moving my family from Miami to LA...
The plan was just to look around at a few apartments, so Cheri could get a feel for the westside and then make the move in january, But we found a great apartment in Santa Monica half a block from the beach with a heck of a Move In Deal " Two months free Rent!"
So we took it and moved in on the Spot... Ended up spending a week on the floor...
It was really exciting to be back in LA to feel the buzz of the entertainment business...Cheri lived most of the last 10 years in New York and she's been going stir crazy in Miami, so moving to LA is very important for her sanity too, shes finishing her debut album and she needs to start promoting it.
I've been in Miami too long, I feel like im living in a tropical cave. I need to put NEVERDIE to the test.
See how far I can go with him in the real world.
NEVERDIE was conceived in Los Angeles in 1999 before my son was born. I was playing Everquest at the time and i was convinced that the real cash trade in virtual items was going to be massive in the future... I was thinking of writing a script about it, when Jean Claude Van Damme got in touch with me through a producer friend of mine with whom we had both worked.
I had got alot of publicity for this crazy movie i had made called
Lucinda's Spell and Van Damme was thinking maybe he should try something more off beat.. Instead i pitched him a futuristic action movie called Roleplayer set in 2010 about a fictional character NEVERDIE who is like the indiana Jones of MMO's he plays all the real cash video games and makes millions, he's as famous as Tiger Woods and then this big company hires him to beta test a billion dollar virtual World and he picks a team of the best gamers in the world to go on a quest with him and they all get fucked up!
When i wrote it, the part of NEVERDIE was for Van Damme, in the script he was called Jean NEVERDIE Baptiste... I worked on the screenplay through until the Summer of 2000 and then things fell apart with Van Damme. After that i started working on it with my friend Tarwynn Tattersall she is married to a Very good friend of mine
David Tattersall who I made my first three short films with... David went on to become a huge Hollywood Director of photography. Among other things he shot The last Star Wars triology Episodes I, II and III... An agent got involved and so did another writer, but they really didnt get the whole conept of real cash gaming and the script lost its its focus and i lost interest in the script... i just didnt know what to do with it.
it was around that time that i first read about project Entropia in PC Gamer magazine, a tiny blurb about upcoming MMORPG'S, I can still see in my mind the Page and Project Entropia at the bottom of the list... I think the words "Built in Real cash Economy" is what did it!
I almost had a brain Seizure, it was exactly what i was looking for. I quickly looked it up online, it wasn't even in Beta yet, but there were forums and a whole bunch of socities were being formed ready to colonize calypso, it was kind of overwhelming coz im really a solo style player, like everyone else I signed up for Beta and I started to track the development of Project Entropia religiously after that......
When Entropia Finaly entered public beta and I created my account I decided to name my avatar Jon NEVERDIE Jacobs, I chose to use my real name becasue I felt like i was entering a new Reality not just a game and i decided to call myself NEVERDIE because in my mind that name belonged to ultimate Avatar...
I never expected what happened next.... I was just playing the game like everyone else, in fact as usual I was getting my ass kicked by the power gamers. They always seemed to manage to Power level while I just enjoyed being a jack of all trades an explorer and an adventurer, in EQ i was drawn to the shaman profession coz of the mix of abilities... I knew that held me back from advancing quickly so I never really expected NEVERDIE to become a Star in Entropia, the fact that I was the first player to complete a full set of Shadow Armor and that i was armed with a nifty PreGold Imp MK II and a Mod Fap didnt hurt, but i still wasnt hunting round the clock and i didnt have the expertise and knowledge of the Powergamers, players like Angel, Gem and Lady, but i was still a force to be reckoned with... No what really, really did it was something else, something unexpected... It was a little song I used to sing to my fiance Tina who loved playing as much as I... I would get out of bed in the morning and find her already at the computer out hunting and I would sing " My girls a
Gamer Chick, I really love her so... she always wants to play... She never ever says no..."
I liked the song alot and i was making a DJ movie at the time so i decided to record it when i was working on some other songs for the movie..
I had an idea that maybe it could be put on the juke boxes in Entropia and i could make some ped everytime it was played... I sent the track to mindark and they really liked it, but for some reason they didnt want to Monetize the jukeboxes, so i asked them to add it to the juke boxes anyway at no cost, i just wanted people to hear it.
It's hard to explain what it was like after the VU came along that added Gamer Chick to the jukeBoxes, but for a few weeks, whenever I TP'd to a town with a juke box, Avatars were dancing around them to Gamer Chick. word got around that it was NEVERDIE's song about Island Girl and Entropia had its first Pop Star...
Kinda funny I dont think an MMO had ever had a celebrity Pop icon before, who emerged from within the culture... Power gamers and PK'ers, but not Pop stars...
funny thing is in Real Life that same year Tina had her own hit record
"To the Club" recorded under the name Spankox,
it was a World Wide Smash Hit club anthem, unfortunately she didnt make any money from it either...
it was a tough year for both of us however, Tina was sick, the movie I was working on was dragging on and on. I even Blew all NEVERDIE's uber equipment on a botched attempt to buy Treasure Island to turn into a Nightclub to promote my movie HEY DJ!
then in Feb 05 Tina died and things looked pretty bleak........
That was almost three years ago. That was without doubt the most intense period of my life... And before I carry on with my story as it unfolds, before I take u to Hollywood with me as I start my battle again to make a NEVERDIE movie, I want to share with you the details of what happened after Tina died...
I documented that period of my life in the same way i am about to document "The adventures of NEVERDIE in Hollywood" and I'm going to post it here Coz we need to understand the past before we can truly set off into the future...