I've been getting some pushback lately from folks making assumptions about my state of mind or my intent. That's not surprising, really, all anyone knows is my forum tag and my wizard profile pic. Still, there are a few things that I'd like to share in order to avoid such confusion in the future.

I'm 56 years old. I doubt I'm the oldest person in these forums, but I'm certainly in that neighborhood. My two sons are 28 and 29, probably about the same age as the average forum user here at City of Titans. This is important because there are many assumptions folks make about the gaming industry that just aren't true. I know. I've been here since Pong, and before that I owned the top spot at half the arcade games in town. I've been active online since the days of TCP/IP and dial up BBS connections so slow I had to wait four or five seconds between typing in letters or the packets would get lost along the way and all that would be left would be gibberish.

I moved to Tokyo with my brand new Japanese wife right after I left the U.S. Army. That would be in February 1985, long before Nintendo rewrote entertainment history with the Famicom and Super Mario. In those days, "Made in Japan" was just beginning to be something associated with quality. Not even ten years earlier no one in the US would even consider buying a Sony product because getting any kind of warranty service was a gamble with worse odds than Keno. A lot has changed since then, as everyone knows.

I first became familiar with NC Soft products with the Japan Closed Beta for Lineage II. My Japanese subscription pushed me to the head of the line for Closed Beta keys for the US release. In those days regionalism had not yet become a problem with online games. Soon I had both an American and a Japanese subscription to Lineage II. I got an email with a Game Key for the Closed Beta of City of Heroes. I went and joined their forum and participated in a few discussions. Then I wrote them back thanking them for the opportunity and suggesting they pass it on to someone else because I had no means to reserve or purchase a copy of the game client. I got a nice letter back asking if the postal address I used at PlayNC was my real address. I assured them it was. Two weeks later I received an air freight box with Lineage II and CoH tee shirts, a Lineage II Coca Cola can from Korea, and a copy of City of Heroes.

In those days NC Soft had some of the best customer service in the world. I know that's hard to believe now.

Day One of the first Closed Beta of City of Heroes (there were two, as I recall, though I don't remember why). I'm in Atlas Park right around an hour after the server went live. I get my first Skulls mission. I still don't know where the PTA station is or which gate (if any) leads to some zone called, "Galaxy City". I'm standing in front of Ms. Liberty trying to figure this all out when a new character pops into existence and immediately sends me a Team Invite. I tried to dismiss it and accidentally accepted it. Next thing I know I have the star, I'm the team leader, two more people have joined the team, I'm level 5, they're all level 2, I'm trying to figure out how to use Team Chat, and they're all asking where the next mission is.

So I scream out in Broadcast, "Go! Hunt! Kill Skulls!"

Two or three days later the "kill skuls" graffiti shows up, the forum is buzzing with condescension, and I'm still trying to figure out why my level 10 hero can't survive more than two minutes inside the Hollows.

ESRB, CERO, and all the rest are partly my fault. I was one of the tens of thousand who wrote letters to Congress suggesting an age standard be applied to video games, especially online games. I had no idea the monster we were unleashing on the world. I had two ten year-old sons who loved video games. The problem was, walking into a video game store in Tokyo was no better than walking into a porn shop. Easily two-thirds of the boxes featured naked or semi-naked women with promises of seduction and pleasure hiding inside the box. SoE was just getting warmed up, Japanese versions of PC games were being shipped to the US by the tens of thousands and most of those games weren't simple side-scrolling adventure games. Many of the first top-selling Japanese games in America were anime-style dating sims and some of those sims were more graphic than XXX-rated American porn.

American video game makers pushed the early version of what became the ESRB rating system not as a way to preserve the innocence of young children, but as a way to stop the flood of dating sims being bought up by teenage boys. Other countries soon followed suit, including Japan who under pressure from American Customs Enforcement, created CERO.

It was Issue 3 before I became a regular in City of Heroes, but City of Villains is what really started my obsession. By then it was already becoming clear that NC Soft Korea was not fond of American players. As Lineage II blossomed to tens of millions in Korea for a short while NC Soft considered closing down their American servers altogether and abandoning the American market entirely. Three times my PlayNC account was locked out on accusations of "farming", not because I had rich characters (I didn't) but simply because I was accessing from Asia for a few months, then back to America for a few months, then back to Asia. Every time I moved from one country to the other my account got locked until I sent them copies of my drivers license, original box labels, and passport. That got to be very annoying very quickly.

Unknown to most people in the US is something that was headline news over here in Asia. During the time that Paragon Studios and NC Soft were debating the future of the CoH franchise NC Soft was being sued in Korea by two different subsidiary partner companies that were trying to achieve a hostile takeover of the company. NC Soft Korea was spending millions maintaining Paragon Studios, money that they needed to fight off these two hostile takeovers. Even though CoH was profitable, the cost structure represented a far higher figure than the profit, making it highly beneficial for them to close down Paragon Studios and use that money for lawyers in Korea. The reason they did not sell the franchise is because none of the cash offers would have been enough to make a meaningful dent in their legal fees. Additionally, Asian companies in general never sell intellectual property rights. They steal them, ignore them, corner them, or hoard them, but they never sell them.

So next time I throw out a sentence that some of you don't understand and don't agree with, please don't assume my opinion is based on some form of bigotry or ignorance. I've been following this industry for a very long time and I've spent decades trapped in this weird space between two different legal systems, two different player communities, two different markets, and two radically different cultures.

More often not, I know what I'm talking about from firsthand experience.