Dave Perry still got some up his sleeve

[vimes]

The guy is the result of a takedown between a truck of Awesomeness and bus full of Extract of Retard.

Let's reminisce for a sec: Perry lead the greatest platformers ever at Virgin Games, then founded Shiny and gave birth to the beloved Earthworm Jim saga and MDK. All of a sudden, he blows Wild 9 and more surprisingly Messiah, which features a genius gameplay concept. The guy seems dead but the unexpected Sacrifice is released and its a bloody masterpiece. A few years later, he's entrusted the Matrix license by the Wachowski siblings and makes a mess out of it. To make it worse, he begins to put his nose in the MMO sector, the most dangerous genre since WoW began to roam the internet.

Nobody thinks he's gonna make it out of it.

...

And now, he just brought collaborative development and outsourcing to the extremeby opening the development of its upcoming MMO to 100 freakin' 000 people. It's like Eclipse for video games : this might not work, some might say it's completedly retarded...but to me, it's a stroke of genius.

[Nachimir]

A crowdsourced MMO is going to be interesting to watch. He's also building a eBay style site for game dev investments, which is genius.

The map mentioned in that article is here. It was meant to launch at GDC but alas, doesn't seem to work at all. We've tried it in all browsers in Linux, OS-X and Windows, and all it does most of the time is either lock up or tell us searches return no results. Anyone else had any luck with it? (Edit: Today, for the first time, the signup page actually worked for me. It displays results, but is slooooow).

(Pity, it's also a very good idea. At work a month ago we decided to make a database of UK games companies and mash it up with google maps, then we found this. So we're rooting for it and poised to contribute...).

I still can't get over the unbeliveably catalogue-esque self promotion portraits on his site, or that he was responsible for MDK. Your metaphor is a good one, though consensus seems to be that he's one of the good guys.