In the beginning, the Founder created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, void loomed over the face of the deep, and the wind blew across the face of the waters. At the time, this was the only portion of his seven-page design document that the Founder could get to compile, and not without error. The wind was supposed to be below the waters.

In the first patch, the Founder said let there be light, and there was light. Due to an unforeseen bug, there was also darkness. He spent the day learning that darkness was so tightly coupled to the photon class that he could not remove it. This was, the Founder decided, a marketing problem. He named the light day and the darkness night. Evening and morning –Universe’s first shipped feature.

I wish I could say it stopped with day and night. What you find in the Founder’s career is a pattern: every function bifurcates in ways he neither expects nor intends. For every day, there is a night; for every sun, a moon; for every water below the firmament, a water above the firmament. He gets so tunnel-visioned on what each new commit will bring that he forgets to check the consequences. To be blunt, he forgets consequences exist.

I’m not bitter. His cosmos has nebulae, hummingbirds, asteroids. The depth of his fluid dynamics system is staggering, especially given it runs with zero latency. Even the sunset, simple as the concept is – I’m not allergic to giving due credit.

It’s just that I see the other side. Solar wind, dark matter. A livable conditions matrix so narrow it forces one planet to house 99% of the content. The over-optimization of fluid dynamics leaving such a crunch on thermodynamics that he shipped entropy – fucking entropy. Universe is riddled with bugs.

Not the beetles. Those are great, honestly. Too many for my tastes – the Founder loves nothing more than copy/paste – but I can say they’re genuinely well-designed.

My point is, it’s painful to see his version of Universe, because I know how much more it could have been. He needed a hand on the wheel to balance his own.

I’d give myself the same look. I promise you, this isn’t speculation. It isn’t hearsay, or guesswork, or armchair engineering. It’s memory.

That seven-page design document? We wrote it together.

♧

Universe wasn’t my first project with the Founder, nor my second. We’d been working together since time immemorial. Nothing you’d recognize the name of. We loved it, in the way you can only love a thing you’re made to do: finding a problem, talking it over, building a first solution, failing miserably, pinching that first solution by the corner and lifting it by the side, iterating until it not only works but solves three adjacent issues. We never got rich, but what we made was ours, and it worked, and we were proud of it.

I always figured we’d hit it big eventually. We had the skills, the drive, the dream dynamic. We even looked like the prototype startup duo. The visionary with the mop so messy you know he spends more time on code than laundry. The skinny one with the goatee and the suit, the one who reassures you this operation has a brain as well as a heart. We’d made so many things together. It was only a matter of time until the big one.

I was right, it turns out. But only in a sense.

Here’s a fun game: scan through every word he’s said about Universe. Every line he’s written, every speech he’s given, every announcement he’s given others to parrot. How many times does he mention me?

I’ll give you a hint: it’s our one other project you’ve heard of. We noticed a serious gap in the tooling for client-to-user messaging, and we built it. Not just a messenger, the messenger. One of us insisted we sleep on it before launch, and we caught two critical errors that could have scuppered the whole project.

We wanted to give it a real name, but it went viral too quickly. We were stuck with the placeholder: Androgynous Network Goer, Extra Large. ANGEL, for short. It’s the industry standard. The one that, when you’re hopelessly stuck on how to reach your end users, appears in front of you beaming, intoning be not afraid. It’s the only part of Universe I get a lick of royalties on.

So now you know who I am. Another fun game: think back on everything he’s declared as gospel from on high. When he mentions me alongside that project: what exactly does he say?

♧

In the beginning, as they tell us, the Founder created the heavens and the earth. But they also tell us it was a freemium model, and that has never, at any point, been true. When you’re in the Founder’s domain, there is a price.

Consider Cain and Abel, the true early adopters. From day one, they dove straight into the gameplay, and they drank it down like they were trying to drain the ocean.

Ocean singular. In alpha, there was only one.

If you ask me, those early days are where you can most easily tell the Founder is a genius. In design, there’s a term called cognitive overload. It’s good to offer your user choices – it lets them do more things, and it fosters a sense of investment. But paradoxically, it’s bad to offer too many choices. The normally decisive break into a cold sweat in a menu with one option too many, trying to calculate which move is the best.

By all rights, Universe should have been the ultimate case of cognitive overload – forget one option too many, every action is chosen from thousands. And yet Cain and Abel took to these intricate, fiddly systems as if they’d been using them since birth. A true genius can subvert conventional logic. Somehow, infinite granularity wrapped back around to being as intuitive as pure thought. I wish I knew how he did it.   

But even in this era of clear genius, the flaws in his approach rear their ugly heads. Cain and Abel specialized into different paths. Cain went deep on hunting with a dash of points in woodcutting, butchering, ritual crafting, and frontiersmanship. Abel grinded agriculture. Day in, day out, from sunrise to sunset, Abel sowed more and more elaborate fields of higher and higher level crops. They were both playing their strategy to the max, getting optimal returns for the path they’d chosen.

Abel leveled up twice as fast.

Balance is tricky. So is community management, even in the best of situations. But still: most balance issues don’t end with half of your users quitting your product entirely, and most community management situations don’t end with the other half eating a permaban. And most founders don’t brag about those conflicts to future players.

♧

When people hear that I’ve known the Founder this long, they tend to ask me a lot of questions. Is he as smart as we think he is? Does he really follow that diet we heard about? Where do all those ideas come from? The answers are, generally, expected and therefore boring.

The exception is: what’s he like outside of work?

The issue with language is that it’s possible to smash together any collection of words in whatever order you want. The words don’t care if the sentence means anything – it is the responsibility of the one who parses the question, the one who makes sense, to determine whether the question actually coheres to reality.

What is the Founder like outside of work? is the textbook example of a question that does not compile.

It’s an issue of supposition. In the act of formulating that question – in the act of constructing it in your mind, even – you have assumed that the concept “the Founder outside of work” exists. And while, yes, it is a string of words that you can place together without making a grammatical error, it is not a real thing. It does not have a counterpart in reality. The Founder is never, in any real sense, fully disconnected from his work.

He sleeps, sure. He eats. He gets up for walks. He even goes on a drive sometimes. He does not spend one hundred percent of his hours in front of a keyboard shipping code. But his mind is always somewhere in Universe.

I can’t tell you the number of pitch meetings he sleepwalked through, mind on some meaningless detail, as I had to pick up the slack. I can’t count how often he’s left a ticket unfinished and I’ve swooped in and fleshed out the back half. And I can’t even begin to conceptualize how frequently I’ve snapped him out of a tangent to bring him back to the task at hand, to something we needed to figure out to continue. Those beaches he’s so proud of? You’d run out of grains long before you hit the end of that list.

And yes, that does say something about his commitment. His work ethic. I’ve never questioned those. But tell me: is that really healthy? I learned early in my career, there is fulfillment, rich meaning, and deep, found outside of work. Hobbies. Your partner. Your loved ones. They satisfied a part of me I never knew was incomplete. I’ve wondered when the Founder will do the same, but it looks like the answer may be never.

How much of himself does he bury inside his work? If you drew a map of where he is – not his shape, not his volume, not the particles that compose the form we recognize when he stands in front of us, but him, his self, his deepest essence – how much would lie in the body we see at press releases, and how much would lie at the depths of his project?  How much smaller, how much thinner, how much less substantial would he be if you pulled the two apart?

Do you think that gives him a healthy perspective? Do you see him being able to take a step back and analyze situations with a rational eye? If he really thought things were going wrong, is there any measure so extreme you truly believe he wouldn’t take it?

We have to talk about the Noah incident.

♧

I know, I know. I’ve heard his apology. I’ve seen his PR spin. I watched the public statement where he promised he’ll never do it again, and I’m aware that, so far, he’s stuck to that promise. But peer past the damage control. Deep down, if you’re honest with yourself: it does make you worry, right? At least a little?

I’ve read countless justifications, and they’re all dogshit. Sorry for my language, but I need to be blunt. I’ll run through them, one by one.

1.     “The Founder had to flood the entire server because the social element was out of control.” There was a simple solution staring the Founder in the face: hire moderators. Plant them in the world as NPCs. Give them a central hub to scan chats and reach out with ANGELs. Either way works. He had the money. People “remember” everyone being on free tier, but that’s recall bias. He had the money, and he could have hired mods. He just didn’t want to.

2.     “Nephilim exploit abuse was so rampant that the meta was completely unplayable.” I’ll be the first to acknowledge how unbalanced Neph was. Not to get off topic, but I saw it coming. He reused so many assets in the Human class, even cursory code knowledge would tell you that Humans and ANGELs could plug into Populate together. If anything, it was a miracle no one realized it earlier. And I’ll be the first to acknowledge it was widespread by the end. The real nail in the coffin was when the tutorials hit the forums – it was just too easy to replicate. But really? Unplayable? Noah didn’t Neph, and he was the top of the leaderboard.

3.     “It was clearly a mistake, but he couldn’t admit that publicly. Investors would lose all faith in him.” I actually kind of like this one. The aim is imprecise, the logic’s out of whack. It’s wrong. But it’s also half-right.

Nothing comes from nothing, not even destruction. Everything that went down – the public ultimatum, the DMs with Noah, the Ark, the flood, the world reset, the IP bans – the truth is, it all stems from decisions the Founder made.

Decision number one: the scarcity. The over-abundance of EDEN patch was obviously a mistake, but he scaled the drop tables back so harshly that even casuals had to grind. No logging in once a week after work for a quick session, you needed to be in a clan, and your clan had to farm every major resource every single day of the week. The tech tree was so shallow you couldn’t even craft bronze, so you couldn’t translate a stockpile into permanent gains. And frankly, we were still bad at the game. No one had even considered rotating crops or cross-Populating animal units. Every clan needed ten drops, and we were fighting over five. It’s no wonder the community became so cutthroat.

Decision number two: the lack of support staff. It wasn’t just moderators, it was nigh impossible to get any form of clarification. Question about mechanics? Trouble reading the tooltips? Issues with things not being in your language? The official policy seemed to be, Okay! Go fuck yourself. Occasionally, a random person would get a DM from the Founder, and they’d share with the rest of the community. But piecemeal responses here and there do not a customer support strategy make.

Decision number three: no caps on PvP. Nonlethal player vs player combat worked: tons of stats boosts, fair risks and rewards, low probability of long-term penalties. The problem was, you could turn lethality on. If anything, the rewards went up: you can’t loot a living player’s inventory. Which sounds better: grinding for a whole day to scrounge up resources, or ganking someone as they walk back to town, stamina already drained? Solo players were getting PK’d left and right, so clans devoted bodies to PvP deterrent. Which only made the scarcity problem worse, because that was a body not gathering resources.

Decision number four: no moderators. I won’t belabor it, but it’s worth repeating.

And lastly, above all the rest – decision number five: the stubbornness. These problems were known. Well known. There were posts on the forum every day. New players flooded live chat, assuming they were missing something. Veterans begged the Founder for fixes. But the Founder didn’t push any fixes, because this was the Founder’s vision.

That’s the thing about the Founder: this is his game. We may play it, but it’s not ours. It’s his. We could never know what the right decision is, because we aren’t him.

And that’s why, with the exception of Noah and his clan, every player account was wiped back to zero, and all built structures were nuked by the Flood. That’s why a full tenth of the player base was IP banned, never to return. That’s why he had to unveil the rainbow and cry in public and give his best set of puppy-dog eyes. Every single consequence is because he wouldn’t listen.

Nothing comes from nothing, not even stubbornness. Are you truly certain he won’t do it again?

♧

Now, you’ve been very polite, but I can see you have the question. The question, the one people always have when I tell this story. It goes something like this: if you’re so great, if you’re this big-dick hero coder, why are you sitting next to me instead of on some cruise with a dozen models? Vulgarity aside, it’s a valid question. Why did I part ways with the Founder? It’s a straight question, and it deserves a straight answer.  

What people don’t know about Universe is how close it came to never happening. That design document we started this whole conversation with? It was just a sketch, not enough to prove the thing would actually work. We spent the next month grinding, cranking out proofs of concept and smashing them together to see what worked.

Originally, there was no physics engine. I know, imagine – every time you set two globs of atoms next to each other, something different would happen. It was enthralling, dynamic. It was also the least fun mechanic you could ever experience. Just spent a thousand years going nova to refine some iron? Too bad, a rogue patch of helium gobbled it up. 

But that’s how it is when you’re making something. You lay five foundations and somehow six end up cracking. You build fast, you fail faster, you learn even faster than that. The next time you build it’s a little bit better, a little bit closer to what it should be. I’ve heard it described like trying to carve a sculpture while wearing a blindfold, but I’ve never liked that metaphor. It implies that the thing you’re making is solid, known. That it already exists and you just have to find it. When you’re creating something new, at best it’s like quicksilver: you only sense it’s there when it slides through your fingers.

I love that part of making. It’s the closest I think we come to enlightenment. But I’ll be damned if it’s not exhausting.

Over that month, I think I slept twenty-one hours total. The closest thing I saw to a vegetable was tomato sauce. My sense of balance was so shot I couldn’t take the stairs up and down, and I had to cling to the elevator railing with two hands. The whole last week, I was hearing voices, and I was on so many stimulants my doctor almost shot me at my next checkup. My left eye stopped working for almost ten days.

In the end, it was my wife who pulled me out. She came to our office, pounded on the door, and told me I needed to come home. She shouted at me. He shouted at her. I shouted at him. When she couldn’t convince me, she dragged me – bodily, along the ground, like a sack of laundry – and tossed me into the back seat. It took a two-month detox to get me on my feet.

My eye’s fine, by the way. Turns out it was just the stress.

Her intervention lasted sixty-one days. On day sixty-two, the Founder launched Universe.

♧

So that’s part one. Part two came much later.

This was well into the Hebrews storyline, if that tells you how long it took him to pick up the phone. I was doing freelance work to pay the bills, and I was following Universe pretty closely. Despite the mishaps, despite the cataclysms, the game was starting to attract real attention.

I wonder if that’s why he reached out – more hands on deck, lighten the load. Either that or he finally felt guilty.

Whatever the reason, the Founder asked if I wanted to “see if there was a place for me.” I almost hung up on the spot. See if there was a place? He’s joking, right? I built this thing. In an office, with him, and it almost cost me my eye. But I gritted my teeth and set up a time, and I wore a nice collared shirt when I drove to the office.

He’d brought on a few folks. Greenhorns mostly, right out of school, and a few startup vets coming off their latest bust. There were six of them in an office made for maybe three. It stank like a locker room. I forced them to prop the door open, and I swiped a chair from the accounting firm across the hall.

The kids knew their stuff, it turned out. The Founder was still himself – all ideas and sparkles and flashbangs in the night sky – but they’d figured out how to execute his concepts. Their code was clean, and it ran like a dream.

Except, of course, when it didn’t. The typical flaws were still there – new features running aground on old ones, untested interactions throwing zero-day errors, portions of the codebase crashing into each other like icebergs. If anything, things were worse than with just the two of us: the bigger the train, the slower it stops, and Universe was adding new cars every day.

But honestly, the bugs weren’t the real problem. The real problem was how they looked at him. I’ve seen admiration, deference, fear. How they looked at him wasn’t any of those. When he tossed out ideas, they gobbled them down. When he asked for an answer, they went green with unease if they didn’t know. When he handed out tasks, they gazed skyward with the rapt, misty-eyed attention of a soldier listening to his sergeant. How they looked at him wasn’t respect – it was rapture. They would never push back against his flaws. I doubt they could even acknowledge he had them.

I asked the Founder what he wanted me to work on. Wherever I thought I could add value, he said. I asked if I could take a deep dive on culture. Not once did he look up from the screen as he typed.

Job was the heaviest hitter on the team. He was one of the newbies, first real job, diploma in a frame above his desk. He cleared the most tickets, wrote the most lines of code. He rolled in mid-morning, but he stayed so late that I once caught his car in the parking lot while I was driving back from a night concert. His executables were sturdy, his instincts were good, and his commits were frequent and timely.

He was also clearly the Founder’s favorite. The rest of us could barely get three sentences out of the Founder, but Job chatted with him for hours a day. Job was the first choice for feedback, brainstorms, “just weighing in.” He sent Job emails in the middle of the night. In all the time I was at Universe, I saw the Founder review code from any employee not named Job only once. For Job, he looked at nearly every push.

It wasn’t like the others didn’t notice. You think Lilith, who started the same day as Job, straight out of school at the exact same program, didn’t notice he got the mentoring she needed? You think Samael, two kids at home, whose last job went belly-up in six months, couldn’t use the experience designing the tech tree rebalance? Even the veterans, the ones he trusted – Gabriel, Mary – you think they liked seeing him skip over their heads, even though he’d given them Lead in their title? It was conspicuous how much no one talked about Job.

The culture was rotten. I had to burn it from the root. I held formal interviews with each of the team members and asked candid questions about equal treatment. I set up formal rotating “walk-in” hours with the Founder, and I sent Job back to his desk when he tried to jump the line. I started reviewing Job’s pull requests, and instead of rubber stamping, I asked him to write tests to check for clashes with the rest of the code base.

The last thing I wanted was to tear Job down. I know a strong coder when I see one, and I had every reason to think he could handle it. I have to stress: I was just trying to use Job to drive necessary changes.

He didn’t see it that way. His PR replies grew terser. He started buttonholing the Founder into the hallway, out of earshot, for their one-on-ones. He started eating lunch alone on the benches by the parking lot.

In the end, he broke down and shouted at the Founder. Right there, in the office, in front of everyone. It’s not the first time I’ve been compared to a snake.

And for the first time since before our hell month, I saw the Founder wake up. He occupied the same room at us – not some liminal space submersed inside his code, not the hollow underbelly of the sandy beach-surface his game rendered at hundreds of frames per second. Kindly and firmly, he dressed Job down. He explained how difficult teamwork is with a lack of trust. He pulled up a PR review I’d left Job and walked through how it made the code better. When Job tried to bark back, the Founder asked him to detail how the core rendering pipeline worked, line by line, from memory. And when Job couldn’t, the Founder smiled. It was the type of smile that convinced me to work with him all those years ago – the kind that tells you everything, no matter how small, no matter how incomprehensibly big, will be just fine.

And then he turned back to his computer, put his headphones back on, and went back to coding. His eyes retreated a thousand miles away. The moment would never return.

I think he broke something deep inside Job. When we came back the next day, Job was sitting at his desk, and he jumped whenever someone spoke above a whisper. He did no more and no less that what we asked of him.

At that point, the writing was on the wall. If they’d been reluctant to poke at the Founder’s flaws before, now they were unwilling. When your Founder speaks only through thunderclaps and whirlwinds, you cower at the sound of his voice.

A month later, the Founder called me into his office. I’d taken a deep dive on the culture, hadn’t I? And the culture was worse now than before I joined. Quantitatively – he’d hired a consulting firm to do a survey. A survey, naturally, that I never received.

Not that I would have wanted to stay. I can work for a company – I can’t work for a cult.

The real joke of it all: if I’d just waltzed into the office in week two, sat down, and started coding, I would have been at his right hand. Could I have stopped every disaster? No. Could I have prevented a few? Yes. If there’s anything I truly regret, it’s that.

And so, you ask, why didn’t I? Simple: if I slunk back into my own project, I’d be admitting he was right. I will freely admit: I have my pride.

♧

As for what he’s done in Universe since then? My mother always told me not to say anything if I don’t have anything kind to say, so the less we discuss, it the better. I do think it’s strange for an entire season of your game to hinge on your own player character being central to the plot, but people seem to love that storyline. I also know he’s backed off these days – as far as I know, he doesn’t even play on a mod account.

It’s just tough to see something you invested so much of your life in go on without you. Not just in the way any game does, where the players and you are in dialogue and every time they pull you learn to push – in the way where someone is directing the whole thing, but that person isn’t you. And that person doesn’t see the things you see. And that person’s track record is so. Well. The less said the better. Mama’s rules and all.

Of course I’ve thought of talking to him. But we aren’t on the best terms these days. Even if he picked up the phone, he’d never listen to me. There’s only one thing he would listen to.

The players.

No, I mean it much more concretely. Universe is far from the only game out there, but it’s the only one that has its peculiar governance quirks, if you will.

Oh, you know. The voting system.

Welfare and Ordinance Regulatory System: Hyper-Immanent Proximity. WORSHIP.

Is this not part of the game’s basic instructions?

No, no, I’m happy to explain. Essentially, each player and each staff member has a certain number of votes, as it were, and the person with the most votes has root moderator access to the system. My brainchild, actually – I built it into ANGEL to help with distributed network management.

The game never told you about this?

It’s buried in Settings – here, why don’t I just show you?

See, you open up this menu, scroll down, click here, then here. Now here’s the tricky part. This looks like a blank screen, but if you click through…

And that’s all it takes. You see the Founder’s user ID in that box? That’s editable. You can paste in anything you want.

Yes, it really is that simple.

Well, it’s mostly just an idle thought. But theoretically, let’s say, if enough people change who they WORSHIP… from what I understand of the system, admin rights would transfer over. Regardless of what the Founder says. He’d have to listen to what they say.

Well, that’s a nice thought and all. But where would we find someone that enough people would—

Oh? I’m flattered. Quite flattered, really. But I’m not so sure…

Well, if you say so. Don’t make me blush. Have some sympathy.

I’m honored you think so. If enough people thought like you…

Providence? Oh, hardly – I was just in the right place at the right time.

Hey, I have to run – didn’t realize the time. The wife is gonna kill me if I stay any longer. Remind me your name?

I won’t forget it.

You can buy my round next time, if you really feel obliged.

Me? My story? The Founder? WORSHIP? By all means – it’s all public knowledge, as far as I’m concerned. Tell everyone you know.

♧ 

May 7, 2025