Written by John Scalzo  on November 15, 2007

Special: Never let the facts get in the way of a good story

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There's an old joke about arguments on the Internet that says even the victor in such a virtual slap fight ends up looking stupid. But then, I was always a bit slow on the uptake and a little fussin' and a feudin' is occasionally good fun. And my apparent rivalry with the blogger known as Surfer Girl is turning into a good time had by all.

For those that haven't become embroiled in this Surfer Girl nonsense (and I envy you), I'll give a quick recap. Surfer Girl is a purveyor of rumors known for her deep connections in the video game industry with nearly every company imaginable. On Wednesday, her site was supposedly hacked by a hacker who threatened to reveal all of her secrets to the Internet at large. Instead, Surfer Girl thwarted the hacker (by guessing the password he changed on her account) and regained control of her blog without a single secret spilled.



The implausibility of the story prompted many game journalists to further question Surfer Girl's credibility and I wrote an article detailing the problems with many of the rumors she has posted. I also challenged her to provide proof that any of the rumors she's provided had any truth to them. Instead, she decided to debunk my debunking.

And now, I will debunk her debunking of my debunking...

First Surfer Girl tells me I got the date wrong on when her blog was started. I claim June 29th, she claims June 13th. Except the June 13th post on her blog is just quotes from several game sites detailing their love for her. Unless she was able to copy and paste these quotes before they were written, it is not the first real post to her blog.

She then claims that her scoop on Brutal Legend was real because "it would be impossible to deduce that [Caroline Esmurdoc] works for Double Fine by merely looking at the whois information, let alone her position." Impossible you say? Actually, her name and position within Double Fine have appeared on Tim Schafer's Wikipedia entry since at least January 2007. Five months before she published her scoop.

She then claims that I jumped the gun in celebrating when her blog was hacked because the hacker could reveal her secrets saying "The idea I wouldn't use the blog email address to contact people is a foreign one, eh?" But I did not claim her blog email had secrets to spill, the hacker did.

She then chastises me for questioning her claim that the hacker guessed her password because I opined that the password the hacker guessed was only seven characters when Blogspot requires an eight character password. She replies "+R@/!$1 is eight characters, though." She is correct of course, as I believed the back slash and the forward slash were a capital V. But the fact remains, that password is considered a strong password by any password checker and the odds that someone guessed it must be in the billions. I stand by my belief that the hacking stunt was a hoax.

Surfer Girl also correctly points out that my article contained a typo concerning Heavy Rain. She is correct in that it was announced at E3 2006, not E3 2005 as I wrote. I apologize for my error. But the fact remains that E3 2006 was 18 months ago and unless the Heavy Rain demo appeared full form on the first day of E3 2006, some development had to be going on before that. Some development would push the total development time to two years.

Surfer Girl also questioned my belief that Activision had mentioned Gun II as being "on hold" and that High Moon Studios had ever talked about Darkwatch 2. Let's take these one at a time.

Executives at Activision couldn't stop talking about Gun before it was released. CEO Bobby Kotick was particularly enamored with the game. They even talked about making a whole series of Gun games and believed the game could be a yearly franchise, like Neversoft's other big hitter, Tony Hawk. That all changed when the game was released to middling reviews and lackluster sales. But in February 2006, an Activision conference call revealed that Gun II wasn't in development at the moment, but that it could be revived someday. That sure sounds like "on hold" to me.

And typing "Darkwatch 2" into Google will produce dozens of links where executives from High Moon discuss the fact they've been working on concepts for the game. Some of these news articles go all the way back to 2005, just months after the original game was released.

Moving on, Surfer Girl then accuses me of being a hypocrite because Gaming Target posted a news article about her initial rumor report on Resistance 2. One, I did not write that article. Two, I did not believe it then. But three, it was mildly newsworthy and another of our news writers wrote an article about it. BFD.

Surfer Girl also did not take kindly to my crack about her belief that Street Fighter IV would be 2D or 3D. She responds back "Find out what 2.5D means." I know exactly what 2.5D means. It's marketing speak for a 2D game that uses 3D polygons to create most or all of the elements in the game. If she meant 2.5D, why didn't she write 2.5D? I stand by my original joke.

She also writes that she was not wrong about a Ghostbusters game being in development, only about the release date. Her original post on the matter stated that a Ghostbusters game would be coming to the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii in 2009. I pointed out that we knew a Ghostbusters game was coming after statements from Zootfly and Dan Aykroyd confirmed that in the beginning of the year. Telling me I'm wrong still doesn't change the fact that her scoop was common knowledge in the video game community.

Nearing the end, she accuses my desire for attention as the sole reason I wrote my original article. I would just like to say that my sole reason for writing the original article is because I don't believe Surfer Girl is being truthful with her rumor reporting. She also accuses me of "making it all up," to which I have to ask, making all of what up?

Her final dig at me is a shot at my reviewing history as in the past I gave a higher score to Hot Wheels: World Race than I did to Psychonauts. I stand by both reviews and I think Surfer Girl should look up the concept of subjective reviewing. Like most movie critics, I do not rate games on a linear scale. They are graded based on how well they perform the goals they set out to perform. And I believe Hot Wheels: World Race is better as a pickup-and-play kiddie racer than Psychonauts is as a platformer (especially on the PS2).

I will close with two old saying that I think are very applicable.

The first is because I believe Surfer Girl will reply to this and we'll have to go through it all again so "Around and around she goes, where she stops, nobody knows."

And the second is "Me thinks the lady doth protest too much." If Surfer Girl has the inside scoop on EVERYTHING, then why is she wasting her time with a guy like me? Maybe she likes the limelight. Me, I just enjoy a good slap fight.